Our only hope

Little attention is paid to rural education (Kannapel & DeYoung), overshadowed by a focus on urban schools. Yet one feature of rural education appears well-documented, though often misunderstood: a close relationship shared by school and community (Hanifan, 1916; Tyack, 1974; Walker, 1993). This study seeks a contextual, current, authentic understanding of the roles that public schools play in rural communities. This study uses ethnographic portraits (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 1983) to describe and analyze these roles in two rural Arkansas communities, focusing specifically on questions of race and community both within and across site. Extensive interview and observational data form the basis of these portraits--one of Delight, a district in the state's hilly timberlands with one K-12 school that serves a handful of small towns, some all-white, some all-African-American; and the other of Earle, a district laying in the rich Delta floodplains, a town of about 3,000 residents, about three-quarters African-American, and three schools, with an entirely African-American student body. Together, these portraits suggest that rural schools can play contradictory roles: they can construct boundaries between black and white residents, continuing old racialized divisions, or they can unite residents across racial lines, creating a bridging social capital (Putnam, 2000) that pushes the community towards integration--a role that counters many common assumptions about the stratifying function of public schooling (Anyon, 1981; Collins, 1971; Duncan, 2001). These schools also help to define the community itself--creating a new cross-racial community with relationships and a shared sense of belonging (Sarason, 1974), or re-creating a black community through a shared narrative, a common past and future (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1996). Yet these roles are endangered, these communities believe, for these schools are increasingly influenced by the state (Graham, 2005); the state threatens to appropriate--or even close--these institutions. And then, these communities fear, they might disappear, too. Examining how the state's educational policies and their implementation interact with these roles, this study informs a more context-specific and intentional policymaking and suggests lessons for leaders and practitioners, both rural and urban, concerned with building a meaningful, equity-oriented community-school relationship.