The Golden Rule

A few years ago I interviewed a husband and wife from a rural community in eastern Colorado. At the end of the interview I asked them if there was anything they wanted to add that they hadn't gotten to talk about. Their response was "tell them not to mess with our school." They being the state legislature and the Colorado Department of Education.

For many people it's hard to understand the feeling of ownership that rural people often feel toward their school and the desire not to have their school messed with. This feeling is a result of people investing tremendous time and energy in the school. Often times rural schools have been attended by multiple generations of the same family. This is not a common experience for most people.

The problem with this sentiment is the Golden Rural: whoever has the gold makes the rules. Put more succinctly and more accurately, whoever has the gold rules.

State governments have had to take on a greater share of public school funding in order to make the funding formulas more equitable. As states have provided increasing proportions of school budgets, they have also increased the expectations for schools.

States face the same issue. The federal government can't force them to implement the provisions of No Child Left Behind, but if a state wants federal money it has to implement provisions of the law.

Although we might like to believe otherwise, it's a good thing that state and federal governments have expectations for how public funds are expended. The public should not only expect accountability for how public schools use resources, they should demand it. This mean that state legislatures are going to be messing with rural schools for a long time to come.