Treating struggling public faculties with a “one-size-suits-all” method tends to assist rural schools least of all, in line with a brand new report from the Arkansas Policy Program (APP).
Adam Williams ’19, an global family members essential and psychology minor who graduated from Hendrix magna cum laude, spent tons of his senior 12 months gaining knowledge of the Earle School District inside the Arkansas Delta and developing a case study that leads readers to recall the a couple of challenges rural faculties face at the path to beautiful transformation. The result is that this APP record, Learning from Earle: Determining Best Practices for Rural Education Policy. Issued by way of the Arkansas Policy Project at Hendrix College in collaboration with forwarding Arkansas and with support from the Rural Community Alliance, Learning from Earle highlights the need to don’t forget the one of a kind attributes of schools in need of development.
The most, not unusual college turnaround strategies paintings are satisfactory for faculties in city settings—especially tricky in Arkansas, which has a better percentage of its college students in rural schools than all however a handful of different states. Already beneath-resourced schools seldom benefit from firing staff, last down wholly, or pursuing charter-based strategies because these options fail to address the inherent demanding situations of a declining rural populace.
After outlining why different approaches are not going to paintings in an area like Earle, Williams concludes that the tactic with the best promise for achievement in rural districts like it’s miles the “community faculty” model. This strategy makes a specialty of bringing down the walls between colleges and the encircling community to beautify services supplied with the aid of network-primarily based corporations to support education within the district.
“Just as the schools are bolstered by means of the offerings—from health care to afterschool care to laptop get right of entry to—presented via community businesses, there may be a mutual gain as school development offers stronger first-class of existence in the community,” said Dr. Jay Barth, who cautioned Williams in his research.
“The fulfillment of this model in Earle and any rural vicinity calls for an ongoing commitment from the network and its college,” Williams stated. “Both must buy into reform to overcome the constrained resources these regions face and create a thriving community faculty.”
About Hendrix College
A non-public liberal arts college in Conway, Arkansas, Hendrix College continually earns a reputation as one of the united states of america’s leading liberal arts establishments and is featured in Colleges That Change Lives: forty Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges. Its academic quality and rigor, innovation, and price have mounted Hendrix as a fixture in numerous college publications, lists, and rankings.
