The rural economy has performed badly during the 1980s. While the recession of the early 1980s was responsible for much of the trouble, the slow rural recovery demonstrates the fundamental hurdles facing the rural economy. Central among these are economic disadvantages, including remote locations isolating rural producers from their markets, low…

This book is a memoir of one-room school life in 1929. In his day, Cratis D. Williams (1911-85) was America's foremost scholar on the Appalachian experience. This book is the story of his first teaching assignment at age 18 in a one-room K-8 school on Caines Creek in Lawrence County, Kentucky. Williams details his classroom practices and…

Faced with mandated reforms of the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990, a mountain community grappled with the challenges of coupling top-down state mandates with bottom-up advocacy and engagement. A year of participant observation revealed six interrelated and paradoxical themes that emerged as these Appalachians created local ownership of…

This paper summarizes arguments surrounding the closing of Hisel School in Jackson County, Kentucky, in an effort to analyze the debate on rural education in Appalachia and how it relates to school-community relationships. Events surrounding closure of the school are summarized, including a two-year period in which a school community volunteer…