Giving Compass' Take:

• Frederick Hess at Education Next discusses the kinds of educational reforms that may hold promise for different communities with different dynamics, geographies, and challenges - specifically rural America. 

• How does rural America vary so differently from larger cities in the US? What role do donors and philanthropy play in school choice for these areas?

• Here's the case for creating a rural philanthropic network. 

A few weeks back I penned an essay for the American Mind in which I offered a few thoughts on education and the future of post-Trump Republicanism. In it, I observed that school choice is a trickier issue for Republicans than many realize, because it leaves many small town denizens and suburbanites cold:

Locally, high school teams are sources of pride and anchors of routine. Geographic school communities can make it easier for children to make friends who live nearby and for parents to know their neighbors. What school choice advocates see as an attack on bureaucracy and the administrative state . . . is experienced in many . . . locales as an attack on their community and the educators they like.

If this is true, and I think it is, one inevitably asks what a rural school improvement agenda should look like. That’s a place where both Republicans and Democrats have floundered in recent years. That’s what helps to make so provocative a response to my piece from UPenn’s Adam Kirk Edgerton. Adam, a 2019 National Academy of Education Dissertation Fellow, sent this along in response to my American Mindmusings, and I thought it worth sharing:

I’ve grown weary of urban solutions to rural problems. Within the field of education policy, many reforms—such as charter schools, vouchers, and increased accountability—have sought to reform a public education system perceived to be antiquated and resistant to change. But, even if choice-based solutions are well-designed for improving urban schooling, they’re bad bets for improving rural schools because these reforms depend upon having enough students, teachers, and schools to form a marketplace of ideas. Meanwhile, accountability reforms depend upon quantification, which devalues the type of home-grown evidence of teacher quality that thrives in tight-knit communities.

Read the full article about school choices for rural America by Frederick Hess at Education Next.