There Goes the Neighborhood

In There Goes the Neighborhood, David R. Reynolds examines Iowa's experience with the educational reform inspired by the Country Life Movement.Between 1912 and 1921, Iowa's educational leadership attempted to develop a new model for rural schools, which they hoped would serve as a model for other midwestem states.In spite of high hopes, the plan largely failed, and rural school consolidation in Iowa would not become a widespread accomplishment untu the 1950s.In the years before World War I, rural school consolidation was one of the most contentious issues in Iowa's countryside.School reformers argued that bigger was befter, and that consolidated schools could more efficiently serve the needs of the state's children.Rural residents, however, often argued that school consolidation was bad for neighborhoods, and that small rural schools could meet the needs of their children as well as, or befter than, larger schools.These philosophical differences were complicated by economic realities that often made consolidated schools appear to be a far-too-expensive luxury.Changes in the law, as well as the post-World War I agricultural depression, halted the movement toward consolidation by 1921, and it would not resume untu the post-World War n period.The story that Reynolds has wriften, however, is far more complicated than the foregoing would suggest.With the example of the Buck Creek neighborhood, the author beautifully illustrates the complex nature of local fighting over school consolidation.Buck Creek, in Delaware Covmty, was a purely rural neighborhood, and the site of one of the most hotly contested school consolidation fights in early twentiethcentury Iowa.In that community, a reforming Methodist preacher took up the banner of school consolidation and converted his flock to his cause, much to the distress of the area's Irish Catholic farmers.In Buck Creek, the fight over consolidation was not one pitting farmers against the nonfarm population, but rather one of farmer against farmer, with the division forming along ethnic and religious lines.The fighting in Buck Creek took on a parficularly sinister tone when the Ku Klux Klan became involved in the struggle.Although the secret nature of the organizafion makes it difficult to know the exact dimensions of Klan membership in Buck Creek, Reynolds estimates that almost all of the members of the local Methodist Brotherhood David R. Reynolds, recognizing There Goes the Neighborhood: Rural School Consolidation at the Grass Roots in

Consolidation (business · Economic history · Economics · Geography · Political science · Diverse Education Studies and Reforms · Finance · History · Indigenous and Place-Based Education · School Choice and Performance