Addressing Community Issues Through Alternative Media
Introduction
Central Appalachia, specifically the communities that lie on either side of the Kentucky-Virginia border, is one of the most depressed places in rural America. Anti-poverty efforts have poured money into the region for the past 40 years but have largely missed many of the hollows and coal camps that have been the region’s economic lifeline for nearly a hundred years. Nine decades of coal mining, including the strip mining of the past 35 years, have severely scarred the land. The land that remains untouched by mining is spectacularly beautiful, a cruel contrast to the environmental devastation all around.
An article entitled “Places Called Hope, Places Called Hopeless”, which appeared in the June 2000 issue of American Demographics, mapped the country by how likely people were to agree with the sentiment that their communities offered no options for them. Responses from the Appalachian region showed a great deal of despair and hopelessness. Today, one miner can produce the same amount of coal that it took a hundred miners to produce two generations ago. Transfer payments are the principal economic engine and the school system is the largest employer in the majority of counties. The schools are almost all Title I eligible. Unemployment runs high but the official rates do not begin to reflect the vast numbers of folks who long ago gave up looking for work in the public sector. Hope is in short supply and people are leaving the region more rapidly than they have since the last coal boom ended in the mid-1970s.
The role of public education as major employer is often at odds with academic goals. Kinship connections sometimes trump qualifications when personnel decisions are made and the need to buy locally can result in higher payments for services. The reform efforts that produced the 1990 Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) removed some of the economic conflict from the process and made strides toward funding equity across the state. However, subsequent legislative action blunted that landmark work to some extent. The assessments envisioned in KERA have been altered to lean heavily on testing, turning away from alternative, portfolio-based assessments.
Virginia came later to reform work and focused its efforts on accountability through the Standards of Learning (SOLs). These high stakes tests drive the curriculum in much the same way that the Kentucky core content tests do on that side of the border. Both states also use non-academic data as part of their assessments.
Administrators point out that the pressures of high stakes testing and the demands of more detailed accountability make their jobs harder and take teacher time away from instruction. The striking rate of turnover in principalships supports those feelings. Teachers wonder when they became the enemy and the outsider in the community.
This study focuses on the use of community media in schools enrolling high numbers of vulnerable youths in nine Kentucky and five Virginia counties and the engagement of higher education institutions in that process.
Marty Newell is vice president of the Center for Rural Strategies.
