Published in 1995 this book provides an account of a detailed research project focusing on a rural school in West Virginia. Researched from several social science perspectives the book strives to capture intersections between biography and history in a particular public school – Burnsville High and Middle school in Braxton County - that has been influenced by social, political, and economic forces, eventually leading to its closure. The author also discusses how the example of this school can be applied within the framework of American public education and Western culture itself. Based on research from unstructured interviews, oral histories, historical records, and intermittent fieldwork that took place between 1989 and 1992, the book provides an in-depth look at a specific school, offering a basis for discussing rural schools in general. It challenges the idea that bigger schools are better and more efficient schools in terms of the individual, the social life of the school, and the surrounding community, and considers the lack of scholarly accounts available on the issues, controversies, and social dynamics that surround these vital community matters.

Throughout the twentieth century, local control of school districts was one of the most contentious issues in American politics. As state and federal regulation attempted to standardize public schools, conservatives defended local prerogative as a bulwark of democratic values. Yet their commitment to those values was shifting and selective. In The Fight for Local Control, Campbell F. Scribner demonstrates how, in the decades after World War II, suburban communities appropriated legacies of rural education to assert their political autonomy and in the process radically changed educational law. Scribner's account unfolds on the metropolitan fringe, where rapid suburbanization overlapped with the consolidation of thousands of small rural schools. Rural residents initially clashed with their new neighbors, but by the 1960s the groups had rallied to resist government oversight. What began as residual opposition to school consolidation would transform into campaigns against race-based busing, unionized teachers, tax equalization, and secular curriculum. In case after case, suburban conservatives carved out new rights for local autonomy, stifling equal educational opportunity. Yet Scribner also provides insight into why many conservatives have since abandoned localism for policies that stress school choice and federal accountability. In the 1970s, as new battles arose over unions, textbooks, and taxes, districts on the rural-suburban fringe became the first to assert individual choice in the form of school vouchers, religious exemptions, and a marketplace model of education. At the same time, they began to embrace tax limitation and standardized testing, policies that checked educational bureaucracy but bypassed local school boards. The effect, Scribner concludes, has been to reinforce inequalities between districts while weakening participatory government within them, keeping the worst aspects of local control in place while forfeiting its virtues.

Most historical and theoretical work on school administration choice has focused on the importance of race and class, with increased attention to gender during the past two decades. Rarely has geography been a consideration and, when it appears at all, it is used only to distinguish the unique conditions of urban school settings. The Social Construction of Educational Leadership: Southern Appalachian Ceilings addresses decisions about who is chosen to lead public schools, and how they do it. Using their research on senior-level public school leaders in the southern mountains of North Carolina as a representative case study, the authors construct an argument for a reconsideration of the role of place - both in decisions about who becomes a school leader, and in how those leaders behave professionally. The authors describe the changes in a leadership system grounded in race, class, geographic, and gender preferences that dating back to colonial systems of deference, describing the pattern of those changes, and exploring their implications for school leadership, and the preparation of prospective leaders in the region and elsewhere.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A poignant study of how a group of poor white urban youth find respite from poverty, violence, and racism in a local community center.

Juan Carlos Tedesco, a prominent Argentinean sociologist argues that qualitative studies of education in Latin America represent a major challenge to current research. Latin American qualitative researchers are producing interpretive studies that focus on the realities of current developmental and educational reforms. Indigenous communities, women, students, and teachers are given voice in these studies, which represent the state of Latin American ethnographic, qualitative, and participatory research. This is the first book in English to offer a state-of-the-art collection of educational qualitative research studies in Latin America. The first three chapters present an overview of qualitative research, while the remaining seven chapters provide studies that explore various aspects of education from public schools to informal educational programs.

A Handbook to Appalachia provides a clear, concise first step toward understanding the expanding field of Appalachian studies, from the history of the area to its sometimes conflicted image, from its music and folklore to its outstanding literature. Also includes information on African Americans, Asheville, (North Carolina), ballads, baskets, bluegrass music, blues music, Cherokee Indians, Cincinnati (Ohio), Churches, Civil War, coal, cultural diversity, death, folk culture, food, Georgia, health, immigration, industry, Irish, Kentucky, Midwest, migration, Melungeons, Native Americans, North Carolina, out-migration, politics, population, poverty, Radford University, schools, Scotch-Irish, Scotland, South Carolina, storytelling, strip mining, Tennessee, Ulster Scots, Virginia, West Virginia, Women, etc.