The Road to Columbine.(government control over small schools)(Brief Article)

As the school bells ring in another fall, let us recall those benighted days before the 2,000-student high school, with its Olympic-sized swimming pool, gleaming array of computers, and anonymous enrollees falling through gilded cracks.

Variety, local accents, and grassroots involvement marked the old American educational system. By the late nineteenth century, though, the Expert Class was hawking "consolidation"--abolishing tiny district academies and herding children into centralized schools. As the Nebraska superintendent of public instruction remarked in 1873, "Parents are often very poor judges of what a school should be."

The centralization of schools was bitterly resisted at the local level: The stakes were nothing less than community pride and autonomy. "The conversion of the people through propaganda is essential to successful consolidation," U.S. Bureau of Education chairwoman Adelaide S. Baylor said in 1923. So urban papers were filled with horror stories of forlorn young `uns, mis-educated in one-room shacks, learning that the world is flat and dental hygiene is the devil's trade.

But researchers found little difference between the achievements of students in one-room schools and those in consolidated education factories, so by the 1950s, the consolidators came up with a new rationale: rural schools were a threat to national defense.

The high priest of Cold War consolidation was James B. Conant, the chemist and Harvard University president who had been a major in the Army's Chemical Warfare Service during the First World War and a Manhattan Project administrator during the Second. Mustard gas, the atom bomb ... consolidation was the logical next step in the career of Conant the Barbarian. With a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, he produced a series of scowling, widely publicized reports on American education.

The first order of business, Conant demanded, must be "the elimination of the small high school." He declared that no graduating class of fewer than 100 students ought to be tolerated. Defenders of small schools were "still living in imagination in a world which knew neither nuclear weapons nor Soviet imperialism." The "struggle between the free nations and Communism" creates "a special national interest which ought to affect educational planning." The fewer the schools and the more uniform the curricula, ...