The Rise of the Un-Consolidated School District
The Indiana School Consolidation Act of 1959 was designed to improve education by setting a minimum size for a school district at no less than 1,000 students and no less than $5,000 spent per student. The result was a wave of school consolidations, reducing the number of districts from 966 to 402. It also resulted in a wave of new construction to accommodate students bussed in from afar.
May I suggest, though, that one of the lingering side effects of COVID-19 will be a reversal of this consolidation. In many ways it’s already underway.
When we closed all of our schools and sent our students home for “e-learning”, adults arguably learned more than our students did. One of the things we learned was that you can’t take content designed to be delivered in the highly structured environment of a school building and deliver it unchanged through the completely unstructured vehicle of a web conference to a kitchen table. We also learned that the words instead of wires we’ve run in service of rural broadband have failed families in our small communities, not unlike how the words that maintained the levies in New Orleans crumbled with Katrina.
Perhaps the biggest thing we learned is that day care is a major function of modern education. The ability to send our children off to be managed by others for a few hours every weekday as a public service has enabled millions to go to work, volunteer in their community, or just tend to everyday life. When that was suddenly removed, all parents got a job back they thought they had outsourced to the local school district, as well as a new-found appreciation for our teachers.
This naturally drove some parents to solve the problem by hiring people to come into their homes and help manage e-learning for them. Some gathered multiple families in their homes to share the cost, and new startups like Crossroads Learning Pods popped up to offer this home-based education management as a service.
But I think this will continue long after COVID-19 is in the rearview mirror. What we are witnessing is really a back to the future moment: the return of the “school marm” and the one-room schoolhouse. Before school consolidation, local residents in a community would pool their resources to build a schoolhouse and hire a teacher to teach their children. Multiple ages and grade levels learned together in the same room, working independently or in groups, with older children helping teach the younger ones. Far from just a scene in a Little House on the Prairie book, this is now happening again, live, in homes across America.
In a way, it’s enabling parents who might wish to home school their children to finally do so, with the benefit of a standard curriculum delivered electronically.
It’s also enabling schools to redefine their “walls”. If you are running a private school or charter school, especially a faith-based one, pay attention: you are no longer limited by the size of your building or geographical distances. You could now deploy learning pods in unused buildings, churches or homes hundreds of miles away from your home school. Apartment complex owners could designate unused apartments as classrooms. Resort hotels could offer vacation packages that included learning space and time weaved into the fun.
It might also redefine the purpose of these gigantic mega school buildings we built in the 1960s, many of which are in desperate need of renovation. While you probably don’t want to run a chemistry lab in your kitchen, do we really need hallways full of stale classrooms to teach English or math? What if we, as a matter of policy, taught these classes remotely all the time in small collaborative groups, and then sent our children to the building only for the unique labs, equipment or gyms they need and don’t have at home? We would probably not need those big school buildings anymore, and perhaps could start to see them as co-working spaces for education.
We might also be able to address our desperate teacher shortage by sharing the skills of our most engaging and talented teachers to a much wider audience and shift the nurturing of learning to the home or the pod. We might even be able to redefine the role of teacher, intentionally bringing in leaders in business and industry to teach, while remote teachers — and the students themselves — help each other learn.
Not since school consolidation 50 years ago has there been such pressure, such need, and such opportunity for change in education. Let’s go there, right now.
