Reference no: EM133459693

Assignment:

Little School, Big Problem

Taken directly from Strike, Kenneth A.; Haller, Emil J.; Soltis, Jonas F. The Ethics of School Administration, 3rd Edition (Professional Ethics in Education Series), Teachers College Press. (2014-05-23).

In Fred Hastings's professional opinion, the North Creek School District was simply too small. Perhaps the time had come for him to act on that judgment and annex the district to Esterville. Hastings was the commissioner of education for the state of Columbia. As commissioner, he was responsible to the state board of education for the effective and efficient operation of all of the schools in the state. He considered the North Creek School District to be neither effective nor efficient. The school system had a total K- 12 enrollment of only 254 pupils. Last year its graduating class had consisted of 15 students.

Further, its enrollment had been declining for a decade. If present trends continued, it could be below 200 in five years. With those kinds of numbers, it simply could not offer an adequate educational program- at least not without levying astronomical taxes on its residents. And the people of North Creek could barely afford their current modest school taxes, much less astronomical ones. Esterville, on the other hand, was a moderate-sized town only 15 miles to the west of North Creek. Esterville School District enrolled something over 3,000 students and offered, as nearly as Hastings could tell, an entirely adequate education to its pupils. Further, Esterville's school-aged population had also been in decline, and so it had plenty of room in its elementary and secondary schools to absorb North Creek's students. In fact, the Esterville Board of Education had recently indicated its willingness to annex its Lilliputian neighbor.

The road connecting the two districts was a good one, so it would be easy to bus North Creek's pupils into the larger town for their education. There were a lot of very good reasons to do just that. Because North Creek was so small, it was unable to offer many of the courses that were routinely offered to pupils in other districts in Columbia. For example, French was the only foreign language that the school system offered, and it provided only two years of that. Last year two of its second-year French students had requested another year of that language. Obviously the district couldn't afford to pay a teacher to instruct a class of only two students, and so the students went without. However, Esterville offered four years of French (and four of German).

If North Creek were annexed to Esterville, students who wanted advanced levels of a foreign language would be able to take them. The same situation obtained in most of the other academic and vocational subjects- calculus, computer programming, and farm mechanics were just a few of the courses that would be available to North Creek students if they were bused to the neighboring district. Nor was a deficient curriculum the only problem faced by the district. For example, because there were so few teachers, each one had to cover all aspects of his or her subject. Thus, North Creek's two science teachers taught general science, earth science, biology, chemistry, and physics. Needless to say, they were not well qualified in all of these. Perhaps because of these sorts of problems, the district's students scored relatively poorly on standardized tests designed to measure advanced levels of subject-matter knowledge. However, if they weren't exactly the best physics and foreign language students in the state, they certainly weren't the worst. More importantly perhaps, they were well above the state means on tests of basic skills.

Scheduling problems were severe in the high school. This was because many courses could only be offered every other year. If students missed taking a course in the normal year, or if they failed a course and had to take it over, the chances were very good that they would have to wait two years and that it wouldn't fit into their program. High-quality faculty were hard to recruit and retain in North Creek. Many teachers were unwilling to live and work in the "boonies." This recruiting problem was made worse by the relative poverty of the district; its salaries were among the lowest in Columbia. These problems, and many others, would be substantially alleviated if North Creek was annexed to Esterville, making a single larger district.

It was within Hastings's authority, as commissioner of education, to force such a consolidation if, in his judgment as a professional educator, such an action was the appropriate remedy for the district's deficiencies. The problem was that neither the students nor the residents of North Creek thought that their schools were particularly deficient. More precisely, while they admitted to many of the problems just noted, they claimed that little schools such as theirs had many virtues, and that these virtues offset their deficiencies.

For example, they pointed out that because their schools were so small, virtually all students participated in numerous extracurricular activities. These activities gave them a chance to develop new skills and leadership abilities. Everyone who wanted to play basketball made North Creek's team, and everyone who wanted to write had a place on the school's paper and yearbook. If forced to go to Esterville, many of those opportunities would disappear. Further, because North Creek's classes were small, teachers got to know students well and could better meet individual needs. Individualization was further abetted by the fact that teachers, parents, and students met each other frequently outside of school in stores, churches , and social events.

North Creek students did not suffer from the anomie so prevalent among their counterparts in larger schools. Serious discipline problems were almost nonexistent. Finally, North Creek School was the center of the community. It served as a site for social and athletic events and was a source of community pride. Indeed, just the year before the district's marching band had won the state championship in its division and come home to the village's equivalent of a ticker-tape parade. This sort of unity of school and community would vanish if students were bused to Esterville. Residents were very possessive of their school. They were adamantly opposed to any attempt to merge it with its larger neighbor. Hastings recognized that small size had certain advantages and that these might be lost if North Creek was merged with Esterville. But the fact remained that because of the inevitable curricular deficiencies of small schools, North Creek's students were getting a lower-quality education than other students in the state.

It was Hastings's job to insure that equality of educational opportunity existed in Columbia. And whatever else that phrase might mean, it certainly meant that some children in the state ought not to receive a substandard education merely because they happened to have been born in a small rural village- or merely because they and their parents happened to be satisfied with the school there.

Read Little School, Big Problem. Assume the facts of the case are correct, in particular that North Creek students are unable to take many courses that students elsewhere in Columbia can take. Is that a denial of equality of educational opportunity? Why? Consider the following issues:

• Suppose there is a very wealthy district that offers its students seven different foreign languages, including Urdu. Are the other students in Columbia denied equality of opportunity because they cannot take Urdu?
• In part, the impending conflict between Commissioner Hastings and the people of North Creek has to do with differing conceptions of student need. The commissioner thinks that students need the better teachers and richer course offerings that would be available to them in Esterville. The people, on the other hand, think that students need the more intimate surroundings of a small school. Who is entitled to decide such questions?

What would your solution to the problem posed in Little School, Big Problem be?