Educational Reform Movement & Country Life Commission
In 1907 Theodore Roosevelt appointed the Country Life Commission to survey the rural population to determine what could be done to improve the conditions of rural life.

After 550,000 interviews and hearings in 30 locations, the Commission found inadequacies in highways, farm credit, communications, and particularly criticized rural schools. Criticisms cited hiring poorly trained teachers, lack of emphasis on continuing professional development, a failure to enforce attendance, and lack of professional supervision and evaluation.

The commission found that the size and scale of the typical rural school was too small, too informal, and too independent to be effective.  For many Country Life reformers, the one-room school house became the symbol of rural inefficiency and institutional poverty.

School consolidation became the hallmark of the Country Life movement. Grading, planning, curriculum standardization and the professionalism of teaching and supervision were envisioned as the advantages of a consolidated school system. In 1909 the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching proposed a standardization of the school day and the award of credits, a system which is still used in schools today.

The century long movement to consolidate small, rural schools has been motivated by several factors including economic theories of efficiency and economies of scale, notions of instructional effectiveness, and measures of school quality, the needs of business and industry, and school reform agendas.

Prior to 1970, researchers, policymakers and administrators encouraged rural school consolidation as a means to reduce cost and improve student opportunity and educational quality. But since 1970, a growing body of evidence suggests that advantages in cost and quality do not necessarily result from school consolidation.

Schools do not operate in isolation. In rural communities, schools serve an essential community development function. They are often the central meeting place, the location for recreational and cultural events, the polling place and the venue for public meetings. According to Rachel Tompkins, President of the rural School and Community Trust, “When the school closes, the population declines faster and local organizations lose their energy.” Recent rural studies have shown that communities with schools had higher housing values, better infrastructure, less poverty, fewer welfare recipients, and more jobs. Communities with schools also tended to report population gains.

Consolidation shifts control of schools from communities and citizens to state and professional administrators. Centralized decision-making lessens local control over budgets, standards, and curriculum and decreases citizen involvement. Low voter turnout in school-related elections and the lack of school board candidates is often an unanticipated outcome of consolidation.

While school consolidation may appear intuitively to increase both efficiency and quality of schooling, evidence suggests that this is probably not often the case. Consolidation may generate an unanticipated decrease in advantages enjoyed by smaller schools without proven improvements in economic efficiency or educational quality