This paper provides a summary of the analysis of school enumeration returns in Ohio from 1925 through 1939, prior to state-wide school consolidation, in 26 counties. Data suggests that a wide range of students with disabilities were accommodated and included in the public-school system. The paper discusses legislation, medical, and clinical…

Many urban districts use a portfolio management model, hoping to promote school choice and improve school performance. This model requires school closure, which has predominantly impacted lower income families. In 2013, Chicago Public Schools relocated Granger Elementary into one of 48 schools it closed, placing its middle-class parents in the…

Since 1958, the New York State Education Department has officially promoted the policy of consolidating small, rural schools. This policy is delineated in the Master Plan for School Reorganization, and while the centralization of most one-room rural schools has been successful, the state has been less successful in the consolidation of smaller,…

Facing a declining K-12 student population and rising education costs, Vermont lawmakers approved Act 46 in 2015. This legislation has the potential to consolidate school districts that have fewer than 900 students. The law aims to significantly reduce the number of districts in the state by using tax incentives as a carrot and forced…

Small schools and their communities contribute to an important, though threatened, knowledge base. The threat adheres in underlying technologies (conceptual and material) that propel the capitalistic world towards the rationalization of all aspects of human activity. In education, this appears in the consolidation of small schools and ever larger…

This paper examines the situating of rural communities in the United States within the neoliberal global context. It will focus on Henri Lefebvre's concept of abstract space, as well as additional theories on the ways space is produced and understood. The paper will use these theories to create an understanding of the ways rural communities are…

Based on research involving 177 primary and secondary schools spread over thirty-eight counties in six provinces (including one autonomous region), this article explores and analyzes four modes used in rural school consolidation in China. These four modes are: complete amalgamation, annexation, crossover, and centralization-decentralization.

Over the past decade, multiple states have implemented a form of regional school district consolidation referred to as multi-district unions. Their organizational structure enables districts to retain individual school boards within regional local education agencies, all of which are overseen by a superintendent and a central board. However, no…

Boundary lines have long served as a mechanism to divide people, determining the quality of available resources, and ultimately, educational opportunity. In recent years, new school district boundaries have proliferated as local communities attempt to secede from larger school districts. In this study of Memphis-Shelby County, Tennessee, we extend…

This qualitative case study is focused on one high-performing urban elementary school that worked to address inequities within the school and community for two decades partly through dual language education. This neighborhood public school has been one of the district's highest-performers for the prior 15 years, was one of the first schools in the…

This essay provides an overview of the huelga schools established in Houston, Texas, in 1970. For 2 years, from 1970 to 1972, the Mexican American community opposed the Houston Independent School District's plan to integrate the schools by pairing so-called White Mexican Americans with African American students. While they protested this decision,…

Two separate school districts--a city one and a county one--operated independently in Durham, North Carolina, until the early 1990s. The two districts merged relatively late compared to other North Carolina cities, such as Raleigh and Charlotte. In Durham, residents in both the county and city systems vehemently opposed the merger until the county…

New Brunswick High School, which had been racially integrated for decades, became majority-minority (and soon, all minority) in the 1970s, after years of legal wrangling led hundreds of its students to depart for a new, nearly all-white high school in the adjacent suburb of North Brunswick. White suburbanites invoked "local control" to…

This paper presents a case study of the microeconomy of a typical underdeveloped village in southwest China and the role of elementary education in the village economy. The paper begins with a brief review of relevant theories on the economics of education and the current social conditions and state of education in the village under study, and…

At least as early as the nineteenth century, the two most related approaches to societal improvement have been restructuring and systemic reform. For education, that has meant school closures as well as consolidation of schools and school districts. Although there exists a substantive literature on educational reform there appears to be little…