You seldom hear anything positive about suburban sprawl. Yet, the bulldozing of rural farmland to make way for homes, industry, and fast-food restaurants could be just what’s needed to spark school reform in one rural Mississippi community.

At least, that’s the intriguing theory that popped into my head after a week’s visit to Marshall County, just southeast of Memphis.

In my December article in ASBJ, “Can Poor, Rural Schools Reverse Their Fortunes?” school officials in Marshall County point to modest academic gains made in recent years. But the reality is that the lost-term performance of students in the county has been poor to mediocre for much of the past two decades.

Why is that? People offer a host of explanations: Widespread poverty among students. Low funding for the schools. An inability to recruit qualified teachers. Small-town politics.

Yet, as officials do their best to raise academic achievement, economic trends in the area hold the promise of bolstering their efforts. Suburban sprawl and economic development in adjacent DeSoto County, for example, has boosted tax revenues, and an influx of affluent, more educated residents has changed the political equation as far as expectations on the quality of public education.

The result: DeSoto County boasts 32 schools ranked as Level 4 or 5 (exemplary or superior) on Mississippi’s school accountability ranking system. That compares to the mostly Level 2 and 3 schools in poorer Marshall County, where development has yet to take hold.

They say money isn’t the answer to education. And I agree with that to an extent.

Still, it’s clear that economic development has made a difference in DeSoto County and other northern Mississippi communities. So I’ll be curious to see whether Marshall County undergoes a similar transformation when suburban sprawl reaches it.

Del Stover, Senior Editor