Research Blog

I finished my annotated bibliography last night. One of the interesting sources I found was on the New Project website, which gave me some background information about why larger schools were started, and the smaller schools were closed. It actually had to do with Russia launching Sputnik into space, which I thought was really interesting. The educators and government here believed that we needed to compete with Russia and the only way to do that was "educationally," and they believed that a quality education could only come from larger school districts. The government, both locally and nationally, began closing the one-room school houses that made up 70% of the nation's school system and between 1940 and 1990, the number of schools decreased from 200,000 to 62,000. The number of schools with more than 1,000 students has doubled in the last ten years and most schools have considerably more than that with about 2,000 to 3,000 and up to 5,000. Some educators now, though, are beginning to believe that smaller schools really do provide a better education because they are better able to give individual attention to students, and studies have shown that small schools have lower dropout rates, discipline problems, and violence. That's about as far as I got in reading the article, but I skimmed through it and most of the information seems to be really good.

Another article I found, from the Rapid City Journal, said that Senator Tim Johnson was trying to pass a bill to provide bonuses to teachers who teach in small and isolated school districts. Most of these schools are so far removed that the schools have a difficult time retaining the teachers. This article was a little dated, from 2005, but I still thought the information was pretty good.

I plan on spending most of my weekend doing additional research and beginning to work on an outline and notecards. I also have to remember to set up a phone interview with Mr. Leighton next week.