Economic Underdevelopment and Its Effects on Formal Schooling in Southern Appalachia

Abstract

The theoretically powerful relationships between education and economic development have of late completely transformed public discourse on educational practice and educational policy. Following in the wake of human capital and modernization theories, which were fully articulated in the 1960s and 1970s, recent calls to “make schools excellent” increasingly and explicitly argue that school improvements and enhanced educational outcomes produce worker skills and individual character traits responsible for economic growth and social progress. Yet, there also exist powerful counterarguments and examples, both domestically and internationally, which challenge beliefs that educational improvements independently cause or precede economic and social development. The following article seeks to briefly overview the ‘‘education brings about social and economic development” debate. Following this, a case study is presented which attempts to concretize the contextual difficulties of “school improvement” efforts in one East Tennessee school district. Both the school district and the county in which it exists have been economically “underdeveloped” throughout the twentieth century.