Lucknow Farms

Jamie Oliver Takes on America's Unhealthy Diet in Huntington, West Virginia

Jamie Oliver, a celebrity television chef in the UK, is filming his "Naked Chef" cooking show in Huntington, West Virginia. For some time, he has been producing shows in England that address healthful cooking, changing institutional cooking, as in school cafeterias, and healthy lifestyles. He has chosen Huntington, because he wants to address the issues of food and obesity in the US. The Huntington metro region has a reputation for the high rate of overweight and obesity in its population. Despite the unhappy prospect that such attention will give the region a hard-to-shake negative labor of "Fat City", Oliver's show could do much good by focusing on healthy food and diet. The show is in production, but I am optimistic that it will include local, organic produce and local, clean, lean meats in its repertoire of recipes. If this attention helps West Virginia's governmental food buying bureaucracies, as in schools, welfare programs, and institutional living, to shift from the cheap federal commodities, which encourage over-eating of fatty, unhealthy comfort foods, to local, healthy produce and clean meats, Oliver will have done the region an enormous service.

Rural Public Schools Are Better Than Other Public Schools

Progressive Farmer discusses a study by the National Center for Educational Statistics on student performance in different schools. NCES has recently changed its classification of schools by locale. It now has four major categories of schools--urban, suburban, town, and rural.(Before 2006, NCES used three categories--central city, urban fringe, rural.) The NCES reports that rural school students are "testing better in science, math and reading skills than urban students. They particularly excel in science, surpassing even suburban students" (Natalee Singleton, "Rural Students Have the Answers," The Progressive Farmer, September 2007, p.8. The original report by NCES is here.)  Singleton is modest, though accurate here. Rural school performance is generally only slightly below that of suburban schools; this is an extraordinary achievement.

Rural parents who are under pressure to consolidate rural schools into towns should use such statistics to support the educational viability of rural schools. School consolidation is usually justified in terms of the educational benefit to students of larger, central schools. Large consolidated schools have more resources that students need, so the rationale goes. In few subjects, however, are such resources needed. I agree that it is possible to argue that, at the secondary level for AP classes in physics, chemistry, and biology, bigger enrollment schools can provide expensive laboratories and sophisticated equipment for experiments that small rural schools cannot. It is also possible that this argument is overplayed. Most of the work in those sciences can be taught well and effectively with a minimum of equipment. Rural schools have the advantage for biology of field observation not available to urban and suburban schools. In addition, the bruited advantages of consolidated schools are lost by the large amount of time students must spend on buses, which is time they cannot study or participate in sports.

Consolidation of schools has always been largely driven by factors other than pedagogy and learning. It is driven mostly by an industrial ideology that claims that centralized administration is the best way to organize bureaucratic organizations. But this ideology is wrong from the outset. Education suffers when learning is put into the context of bureaucratic organization and perceived as an industrial enterprise.

In the past generation, it has been argued that consolidated, large schools are necessary to provide a learning environment of student diversity, that is, racial and ethnic mix. The major argument against such reasoning is that Brown v Board of Education did not, as the Supreme Court has recently ruled, establish racial identification or skin color as a scheme of classification for school boards to create school district lines or artificial school enrollments; indeed, of course, the 1954 decision sought to prohibit such classification. We should not be afraid that having small rural schools would lead to another era of racial classification, with rural black children attending underfunded, de facto segregated schools, while white students attend modern, well-equipped, de facto segregated suburban schools. Surely we are capable of devising arrangements that would avoid this situation. If diversity is so important to school administrators, let them institute reverse busing, where white students from suburbs would be bussed, likely against their will, with rides of 1 to 3 hours each way, out to small, rural schools that might have a majority of black, Hispanic, or Asian students. Such a policy would of course be greatly resisted by suburban families and would, thereby, tear the veil of hypocrisy off the diversity ideology.

The most important relationship in schools is student to teacher. The central empirical finding on the learning environment is that student teacher ratios less than about 13 students to 1 teacher produce greater learning than higher student teacher ratios. Above 13 to 1, learning suffers and it matters little whether the ratio is 35 to 1 or 25 to 1. This low ratio is why expensive, private schools have better achievement by their students, because private schools seldom have classroom ratios higher than 13 to 1, and often less than 10 to 1. Rural schools, being smaller, have lower ratios; this is why their students perform better. Other factors, such as greater parental involvement, support this ratio, but without it they cannot substitute for it in boosting student performance.

Even small rural schools of one or two rooms, where a teacher might have 30 students in three or four grades in one room, can offer smaller student-teacher ratios. The teachers in such schools divide up the students into grade and interest levels, which brings the ratio down. Teaching assistants, such as educated rural parents and professionals, such as ministers, could assist the small school teachers with tutoring, setting up laboratories, and grading. Their assistance would make little difference in the large urban or suburban school, but in the small, rural school, it would greatly help the children with special needs. The notion that the "one room school" is not as good as the consolidated, centralized school is simply not true--or, perhaps more accurately one would say, does not have to be true. Given a reasonable budget and good teachers, rural schools can do well by their students.

Rural society needs small, rural schools as a core institution. Without schools, families will hesitate to live in rural areas. With schools, rural society and culture becomes alive and vital. Rural families must fight for schools. They must resist the false accounting measures that state legislatures use to destroy their schools.

Use Tax Vouchers to Restore Rural Social Life

I have argued, as have many people, that closing small country schools destroys a major foundation of country life. The large context for such cultural destruction is the state mandated centralized education. The mandate, which covers everything from minimum class size and racial balance to curriculum and standards to school cafeteria food, accompanies state tax funding of local education.

Two instruments must be created to counteract the pernicious effects of school centralization. The first instrument is to change state educational codes to separate out our country public schools, giving them a special set of guidelines they can meet. They should be freed from the county or city-based school district boards. Country schools could be conceived something like California's charter schools, which are quite successful.

The second instrument is tax vouchers. Rural families should be given vouchers for their tax dollars to spend on their education. They should be permitted to pool vouchers to fund public country schools or to attend private schools.

When country schools are preserved, other rural institutions can flourish. If educational vouchers would work, why not tax vouchers to support country medical clinics and visiting nurse programs, and food and clothing cooperatives associated with low-cost retailers such as Wal-Mart, for instance?

We need to recognize that state-mandated centralization of services is a significant force causing the deterioration of country social life. It makes sense to return decision power to rural families to invest in country institutions they see as crucial to their way of living.

Necessary Reading

• The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy News
• Hobby Farm
• Progressive Farmer