Chapter 7: The Political Economy of Rural Appalachian School Achievement

The contemporary use of student achievement as a tool to advance education reform provides ample reason why rural Appalachians might be said to be ambivalent about formal schooling (Woodrum, 2004). This chapter (a) connects the history of the Appalachian “resource curse” (Douglas & Walker, 2013) to the early phase of the region’s industrialized schooling, (b) suggests how “high modernism” (Scott, 1998) underwrote Appalachian achievement deficiency, with particular reference to West Virginia, and (c) plots the issues for the policy future of Appalachian schooling in a neoliberal context, including some unpopular realism about alternatives.

Mass schooling is historically a key institution for reorganizing society and for legitimating the related ideology—in previous regimes, the related ideology was nationalism and the ideal of the nation-state itself (e.g., Blacker, 2013; Cremin, 1980; Hobsbawm, 1992; Weber, 1976); in particular the liberal democracies created by the revolution in France and the war for colonial independence in British North America. Those regimes understood that it was essential to school the public to its hoped-for role as citizens (Cremin, 1980; Weber, 1976). But so had Frederick the Great in Prussia. It was a different, Enlightening era.