There Goes the Neighborhood: Rural School Consolidation at the Grass Roots in Early Twentieth-Century Iowa

by David R. Reynolds

Despite being the centerpiece of rural educational reform for most of the twentieth century, rural school consolidation has received remarkably little scholarly attention. The social history and geography of the movement, the widespread resistance it provoked, and the cultural landscapes its proponents sought to transform have remained largely unexplored. Now in There Goes the Neighborhood David Reynolds remedies this situation by examining the rural school consolidation movement in that most midwestern of midwestern states, Iowa. From 1912 to 1921, Iowa was the center of national attention as state and local education leaders attempted to implement a new model of rural education, intended to be emulated throughout the rest of the Midwest. As part of the Country Life movement-whose leaders sought to create a more modern future for farm families, an alternative form of rural community that combined the advantages of both city and country-the initially successful model collapsed in the early twenties, not to be revived until after World War II. Reynolds focuses on how and why rural school consolidation was so vigorously resisted in most of Iowa, why it failed in the twenties, and what its lasting consequences have been. Combining social and oral history, modern social theory, historical geography, and ethnography, There Goes the Neighborhood is the most authoritative analysis to date of the politics, geography, and social history of rural school consolidation in any state.

344 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Marvin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ask Iowans what they are most proud of about their state, and one of the most common answers will be public education. Oddly, however, despite a widespread popular interest in the history of one-room country schools, professional historians have given little attention to the history of public education in Iowa. When they have, they have generally followed the model established by Clarence Aurner. Between 1914 and 1920 he wrote a thorough, 5-volume history of educational policy, oversight, and teacher training as well as histories of individual statewide educational institutions in Iowa. In the 1980s Keach Johnson and Carroll Engelhardt mined instructive details and insights from the official reports of the Iowa Department of Public Instruction, the proceedings of the Iowa State Teachers Association, and the writings of the state’s educational administrators for a series of articles that each wrote for the State Historical Society’s scholarly journal, the Annals of Iowa.
But, aside from some biographical work on women schoolteachers, historians paid little attention to how those policies actually played out in the field. Not, that is, until University of Iowa geographer David Reynolds published his book, There Goes the Neighborhood: Rural School Consolidation at the Grass Roots in Early Twentieth-Century Iowa, which won the State Historical Society of Iowa’s Benjamin Shambaugh Award, recognizing it as the most significant book on Iowa history published in 1999.
In the first half of There Goes the Neighborhood, Reynolds describes the context within which school consolidation took place in the early twentieth century. Here he describes the forces that were the impetus for school reform—and many other reform movements—in Iowa during the Progressive Era. Prominent among those forces was the branch of the Progressive movement most concerned about rural America, the Country Life Movement. Much of this discussion is pretty abstract and theoretical and may discourage some general readers of the book. But they should persevere (or skim), because the payoff comes in the second half of the book, where Reynolds zooms in on the movement to consolidate schools in one county, Delaware County, and eventually one rural community, the Buck Creek neighborhood in rural Delaware County.
There the story of school consolidation becomes more complicated—and more dynamic—than the usual straightforward story of educational reform yielding steady progress. Buck Creek was a virtual battleground between the forces promoting school reform and consolidation and those who saw the benefits of preserving traditional values in that rural community—or group of communities. The main characters in this drama include a group of Roman Catholic farmers in this predominantly Protestant neighborhood, the Ku Klux Klan, and, perhaps most importantly, a dynamic Methodist minister imbued with the values of the Country Life Movement and the Social Gospel, the religious form of the Progressive movement.
There are no clear heroes and villains in Reynolds’s telling; this is not a story of enlightened reformers being resisted by ignorant rubes. Reynolds is sensitive to the religious, ethnic, and class differences that contribute to the dynamic character of this rural neighborhood. Differences that could be accommodated in the decentralized schools of the community were heightened when reformers proposed consolidation in a central location with preference given to a particular set of values. Debates about school consolidation, Reynolds concludes, are about much more than simply the quality of rural schools; they go to the heart of our understanding of the nature of the communities we live in. As such, There Goes the Neighborhood is a rewarding book not only for those who are interested in the history of education, but for those who care about our schools and communities today and into the future. Here his work joins that of people such as Wayne Fuller and Paul Theobald, who have argued that the country schools of the past were not the dismal failures educational reformers have portrayed them as, but instead were the carriers of values that we can continue to learn from as we debate how to reform the schools of today.