Alan J. DeYoung

The Status of American Rural Education Research: An Integrated Review and Commentary

The history of American education has been primarily an urban history. School reform movements of the mid-19th century were targeted at the particular problems brought on by the Industrial Revolution. Early 20th-century school administrators, and later progressive educators, defined the majority of America’s educational problems in terms of school-based occupational and community living skills that city dwellers needed in modern America. Finally, school reforms of the 1950s–80s have been targeted primarily at such concerns as the plight of minorities in inner cities, national defense needs, and now occupational skills necessary to compete internationally. Such reforms have had the net effect of continuing the century-long bias of much educational policy, scholarship, and research toward urban-based issues and concerns. On the other hand, a variety of research and policy initiatives have emerged in rural America, typically sponsored by state departments of education in primarily rural regions of the country and by numerous grass-roots organizations. Similarly, there has begun to emerge an interesting yet diverse literature on issues and problems in rural education. Themes such as education for economic development, problems with achieving educational equity in rural America, issues in appropriate school size, the role of the school in community life, problems with the training and rewarding of professional staff in rural schools, and so forth have begun to draw serious attention from a new wave of rural education researchers. The purpose of the following literature review is to elaborate on historical and contemporary reasons why scholarship on rural education has been relatively underdeveloped in this country, to briefly survey current initiatives in emerging rural education scholarship, and to speculate on the possibilities and dilemmas this field faces in its future evolution.

Problems and trends in education in Central Asia since 1990: the case of general secondary education in Kyrgyzstan

The means and ends of education of virtually all schools and schooling in the Soviet Republics of Central Asia were creations of the USSR. After independence, the republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have each faced a myriad of issues and problems which either previously occupied the attention of former Soviet educators, were themselves created by the Soviet model of schooling, or have resulted from economic and political difficulties of the ‘transition’ period. In this paper, I first contend with the Soviet historical backdrop and its powerful legacy. I then turn to an analysis of a variety of post-independence educational problems in Central Asia, followed by a more specific focus on the Kyrgyz Republic.

Economic Underdevelopment and Its Effects on Formal Schooling in Southern Appalachia

The theoretically powerful relationships between education and economic development have of late completely transformed public discourse on educational practice and educational policy. Following in the wake of human capital and modernization theories, which were fully articulated in the 1960s and 1970s, recent calls to “make schools excellent” increasingly and explicitly argue that school improvements and enhanced educational outcomes produce worker skills and individual character traits responsible for economic growth and social progress. Yet, there also exist powerful counterarguments and examples, both domestically and internationally, which challenge beliefs that educational improvements independently cause or precede economic and social development. The following article seeks to briefly overview the ‘‘education brings about social and economic development” debate. Following this, a case study is presented which attempts to concretize the contextual difficulties of “school improvement” efforts in one East Tennessee school district. Both the school district and the county in which it exists have been economically “underdeveloped” throughout the twentieth century.

Embracing globalization: university experiences among youth in contemporary Kyrgyzstan

Kyrgyz government policy following independence called for the improvement and expansion of higher education as an important strategy to successfully enter the international market economy. Young people were to become a resource for economic growth and prosperity. However, even though the number of higher education institutions and enrolment levels have dramatically increased, the quality of secondary education, as well as the demand for professional and skilled labour, have decreased. These factors pose challenges for the organization of higher education and the quality of universities. Today, eager, but often unskilled, youth find themselves in university settings where many become disenchanted with formal instruction and seek other activities, purposes and futures This article describes and discusses these dynamics witnessed as part of a larger case study on universities and university reform in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, between 2007–09.

The Disappearance of "Social Capital" in Rural America: Are All Rural Children "at Risk?".

Throughout the twentieth century, continuous waves of school reform in America proceeded under the assumption that the science of teaching and learning, under the control of teachers and administrators and removed from the control of parents and communities, would singlehandedly lead to increasingly better learner outcomes. Furthermore, this belief in the quintessential power of professional technique even now pervades the professional discourse on improving the education for “at risk” youths. Yet, in the last decade, James Coleman (among others) demonstrated the powerful effect that local communities can have for improving educational outcomes, when such communities have been enabled to provide the “social capita!” necessary for so doing. Unfortunately, as many cities and metropolitan areas have begun to discover and utilize stable and progressive community resources for the benefit of their schools and their children, we continue to witness declining economies and unstable communities in rural America. If future schooling outcomes in the U.S. are to be enhanced by renewed partnerships between schools and communities, many if not most students in rural and declining communities will continue to be at risk. The following paper briefly traces this conceptual argument, and illustrates how the erosion of “social capital” has adversely affected children and schools in a West Virginia school system.

Ownership of Education Reforms in the Kyrgyz Republic: kto v dome hozyain?.

An important subset of issues involved in describing the process of educational globalization emerges when considering the reception, response and/or rejection of international proposals, ideologies and agents by indigenous national and regional educators. This case study describes and discusses how foreign/Western education proposals and policies were solicited and then responded to by educators in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, now an independent country, between 2001 and 2004. It also discusses the pivotal role of one key figure in the process, the former minister of education in Kyrgyzstan, now responsible for a large World Bank project to improve rural education in that country. A powerful figure both in her own nation and in the eyes of foreign sponsors, both American and European, her biography continues to illustrate both possibilities and tensions between the former education system and international hopes and designs for school reform in the Kyrgyz Republic.

Educational "Excellence" versus Teacher "Professionalism": Towards Some Conceptual Clarity.

The educational literature of the last several years is replete with both continuing calls for educational “excellence” reforms and for enhancing and upgrading the teaching “profession.” Importantly, both types of calls rely on the contribution of science. The educational research-and-development community continues to push for and believe in the notion that educational innovation is based on scientific advances in understanding child development and school functioning. Similarly, many teachers and teacher educators continually call for increased classroom autonomy and social status among teachers, based upon the supposedly scientific nature of their professional training. This paper takes issue with both of these points, arguing that the origin and success of most educationally innovative policies have as their origin the changing political, economic, and social forces visible in the country during the history of American education. Relatedly, since the science of teaching and learning takes a back seat in issues of school policy, teachers cannot and will not be able to convince the public and those in authority in the school that their insights and practices derive from any privileged understanding of the “real” needs of children. Arguing that teachers should, in fact, have more input into policy decisions in education, the paper concludes with a review and discussion of various strategies currently visible for improving the autonomy and control of classroom educators.

Creating and contesting meanings of place and community in the Ylay Talaa Valley of Kyrgyzstan

Formal schooling was virtually non-existent before the Soviet power in nomadic Kyrgyzstan, as communal life and learning was organized informally at the household and clan level. During the Soviet period, however, educational success became an avenue to a new form of upward social and geographical mobility, and the school provided new and prestigious positions for local teachers and administrators. This paper explores how the externally imposed Soviet collectivization policies reshaped the understandings and meanings of place and community during the twentieth century, a reshaping that centrally involved redefining education and the importance of ‘the school’. In the post-Soviet period, the utility of secondary and higher education in local and national labour markets has diminished, as has the power and prestige of educators. Yet the appeal of education lingers on. The authors seek to document these claims using oral histories, ethnographic interviews and participant observations in the Ylay Talaa Valley of the Kyrgyz Republic.

Courses in the social foundations of education: the students' view

Across North America students in B.Ed. programs are offered courses dealing with the historical, philosophical and sociological foundations of education. In this study prospective teachers in B.Ed. programs at two large universities were surveyed to determine their perceptions of the social foundations component of their training.

Higher Education in Tajikistan: Institutional Landscape and Key Policy Developments

Higher education in Tajikistan has undergone substantial changes over the past 25 years as a result of both its internal crises and those social and economic transition challenges seen throughout the Newly Independent States (NIS). HEIs in the country have also shown eagerness to change and grow as they move toward world education space. In this chapter, we examine the evolution of the Tajik system of higher education from the Soviet time through independence (1991–2015) in terms of growth, emerging landscape and diversification, and key policy developments and issues. We analyze these changes in the context of relevant economic, social and political factors, and rely on a comparative analysis in understanding the commonalities and differences in higher educational landscapes between Tajikistan and others in the NIS. Institutional diversity has occurred in the country along several dimensions. Among these is a geometric expansion of the number of HEIs: Those transformed from preexisting Soviet institutes as well as the establishment of many new ones. This has been fueled partly by the mass creation of new programs that reflect the needs of an emerging knowledge-based economy but also the result of parental craving for higher education for their children—regardless of market demands. Specific features of the massification of higher education in Tajikistan are further explained by internationalization according to the Bologna Process and other globalization agendas; the establishment of international HEIs under bilateral government agreements (with Russia), and significantly increasing HEI programs and enrolments in far-flung regions of the country—especially in programs related to industry and technology. Our analyses are based on a variety of official statistical sources; educational laws, institutional documents and reports published by international organizations; accounts from the English-language press; and open-ended interviews conducted by the authors in Tajikistan between 2011 and 2014.