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BUILDING ON the strengths of their local or indigenous cultures marks many Challenge sites, both rural and urban. But another kind of "biculturalism" also shows up when rural school people must balance their home culture's need to sustain itself with the need to teach students to succeed no matter where they go after graduation. "We have to create more opportunities at home, and we have to prepare our kids to make intelligent career choices when they find themselves elsewhere," says Scott Barton, who leads an isolated school district in vast Schleicher County, Texas. The region's oil and agriculture businesses have collapsed in recent years; the county seat of Eldorado is 150 miles south of the nearest city, Abilene. With Rural Challenge support, beleaguered residents are meeting here to dream up ways they can thoughtfully sustain their community-hydroponics? emu processing? a polling business ?-without bringing in smokestacks or a boom-bust industrial economy. Against this reality, which is based on a culture of farming or manual labor, kinship, personal relationships, and geographic stability, places like Schleicher County must also balance a very different industrial or academic reality, based on large institutions, standardized success measures, abstract information, impersonal bureaucracies and communications systems, and geographical mobility. Schleicher County is proud of its record: its schools are strong and innovative, with high student scores on Texas achievement tests, stable leadership, and community support. But its bicultural mission to prepare students for success in two worlds shows up vividly here, echoing the biculturalism of people who honor an ethnic heritage while succeeding in the dominant culture.

Educators tend to base 'intentional communities' on nostalgic images: communities as places where people know and like one another or where people agree. But communities are not necessarily places where everyone thinks alike. In a community, people remain together despite their differences, whereas in society, people remain separate despite their common interests.... Rural sorts of education would be education for community-for remaining together despite our differences. Such schooling would, in our view, include thoughtful care for local places. Formal education would thus deal with the life of the mind attuned to this mission .... [and] be founded on a solid base of literacy-where reading, writing, and calculating are valued in themselves as meaningful endeavors." From Craig B. Howley and Aimee Howley, "The Power of Babble: Technology and Rural Education, " Phi Delta Kappan, October 1995.

POLICIES that affect rural schools-on the district, state, and national levels-often present the ultimate obstacle to change efforts, just as they do in urban systems. To survive and thrive, rural schools need a support system that will tailor its policies to their unique needs, such as small populations spread over long distances, or the scarcity of high-paying jobs. And school policies are not the only problem. Like their urban cousins, rural schools and communities often also need to reverse the political, social, and economic circumstances that sapped their strength to begin with. The Copper Basin of rural Tennessee looks like a moonscape today, for instance, from massive environmental damage wreaked by generations of copper mining. Since the mines closed in 1989, the economy has plummeted; but local, state, and federal agencies are working together to reclaim the land and stabilize the local community. The region's schools, with help from the Rural Challenge, play a key role in that effort, by creating curriculum that both builds on the local situation and develops students' abilities to contribute usefully to it.

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"When we sell ourselves, in the name of economic development, as ideally suited to the least attractive kinds of factory work because our people are willing to labor hard and at subsistence wages without complaining, what are we telling our children?" Paul Gruchow, in Grass Roots: The Universe of Home (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1995)

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Economic jolts such as plant closings have repercussions in both rural and urban communities, touching off a pattern of intergenerational poverty that digs in as those with money migrate. Then social and economic structures adapt in ways that accelerate downward mobility, such as attracting industries looking to exploit cheap labor or land. This pattern seized rural communities on the heels of the farm crisis, argues Osha Gray Davidson in his 1996 book Broken Heartland: The Rise of the Rural Ghetto (University of Iowa Press). And how a community reacts-by accepting the downward spiral or resisting it through community action-sends a powerful message to the children who will either stay or leave after graduation. School consolidation provides one example of how policy can aggravate this cycle of deterioration. But other common policies on school accreditation, on teacher certification, on curriculum standards, on testing, and more-can also harass or support a community attempting to educate its children in an authentic local context. Nebraska's "School at the Center" project stands out among Rural Challenge sites because it involves the entire state system in a comprehensive, long-term effort to support community-based education. Schools and communities from all over the state are working together to develop plans that include economic development (especially entrepreneurship), housing, community-based science, distance learning, and local heritage. In addition, they are piloting an alternative accreditation process for small, remote schools. They are analyzing how the state's curriculum frameworks fit with the kind of community-based work Rural Challenge schools are doing, and working with other large curricular initiatives such as that of the National Science Foundation. And with two state universities, they are revamping teacher education to suit the needs of rural places. Even with all this momentum, School at the Center people reflect soberly on the enormous task that faces anyone trying to change a whole system. At every level, they note, people must care enough to help with the job. Few communities have a clear idea of how to go about planning together. Getting those in power-the school superintendent or principal, the local economic development people, the cultural leaders-to share their power is not always easy. And finally, students themselves have little experience with taking real responsibility as citizens.

WHAT RURAL AND URBAN CHALLENGE SITES SHARE: All 12 urban Challenge sites - New York, Philadelphia, Boston, South Florida, Houston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chattanooga, Chelsea (MA), and West Baltimore-and the Rural Challenge, as well as the Challenge-supported arts initiatives, unite behind the following interdependent, mutually reinforcing goals: 1. To create small, more intimate learning communities. 2. To reorganize time in schools to support teaching, student learning, and collaborative work for teachers. 3. To reduce isolation for people within schools, between schools, and between schools and their communities. 4. To enhance learning and development for all students.

HOW WILL WE KNOW, years from now, whether the Rural Challenge vision did help create the powerful learning for which it aims? In a poignant article addressed to his fellow Native educators, Oscar Kawagley of the Alaska Federation of Natives asks them to assess the school change effort itself in a way that honors their cultural heritage rooted in long and patient observation, the spiritual wisdom of elders, and the balance among all aspects of life. Indeed, the Harvard University team charged with evaluating the Rural Challenge has designed its work to do just that. Using local research collaborators from the communities involved, they are collecting and analyzing not mere numbers but the stories of people -through photographs and films, student portfolios and exhibitions, observations, interviews, and documents. In the communities they study, they hope to leave behind people ready to continue the work of thoughtful research well after the five-year Challenge grant. In June 1997, when its first participants gather to swap stories and reflections in the Colorado mountains, the Rural Challenge will demonstrate how country people humanize the work of change in schools. Around the country, the rest of us will do well to put our fingers to the wind, and listen.

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COMING IN THE FALL '97 CJ: Looking at Learning by Looking at Kids How do we know if our efforts to improve student learning are working? How do we build the patience to look on school change as a long-term project, not a quick fix? Challenge sites offer new ways of thinking about 11 accountability" to center it around the heart of the matter: kids.

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