Perhaps the most maligned group of people in the United States, atheists and other nonbelievers (e.g., agnostics and freethinkers) reside everywhere and are employed in every field. Disclosure of nonbelief generally imposes costs, such as alienation from family and associates or even loss of employment. As a result, nonbelievers often disguise…

Arguments for consolidation, which merges schools or districts and centralizes their management, rest primarily on two presumed benefits: (1) fiscal efficiency and (2) higher educational quality. The extent of consolidation varies across states due to their considerable differences in history, geography, population density, and politics. Because…

This case study focuses on a four-district collaborative that shared services for more than 15 years in an effort to retain rural schools and thereby to preserve community identity. With population losses in the four districts and suburbanization in the largest, the collaborative made extensive use of distance education in addition to itinerant…

"Going Further" presents a roadmap to the works of the ACCLAIM (Appalachian Collaborative Center for Learning, Assessment, and Instruction in Mathematics) Research Initiative, the research effort of one the Centers for Learning and Teaching (CLTs) created with a grant (2001-2005) from the National Science Foundation. The Center began…

The teaching of mathematics, which arguably is so abstract as to transcend place and community and even culture (according at least to a Platonic view of mathematics), will seem to some observers particularly ill-suited to instruction in place- or community- or culture-based approaches. Nevertheless, current thinking in mathematics education,…

This article presents a case study of egalitarian educational practices evident in a rural school that served a large proportion (40%) of Amish students. The Amish are a pacifist Christian sect widely misunderstood as quaint and even backward; their traditional work is small-scale farming. In 1972 the Amish wrested the national right--via a US…

This article presents three rural schools with different leadership strategies and educational practices. Pseudonyms are used in place of the schools' real identities for confidentiality. Although rural schools do not seem to value best practice in ways that researchers and policymakers might recognize, neither do they set out to repudiate the…

This paper draws on data from a case study of a rural school located in an Amish community to offer a description of and then to theorize about the manifestation of egalitarianism in schools and communities. In particular, it explores two theoretical perspectives on egalitarianism, one primarily cultural in focus and the other primarily…