Contingency in the Local Provision of Public Education

Abstract

This paper examines the relationships between education spending and measures of wealth, absentee land ownership, and educational attainment in central and southern Appalachia. Drawing on advances in realist theory and methodology the paper develops a conceptual model and evaluates it using both extensive and intensive research strategies. The empirical analyses combine an extensive expansion‐method model of an 80‐county area with an intensive case study of a single county. In the extensive model, education spending is hypothesized a function of local wealth as contingently modified by varying levels of absentee land ownership and educational attainment. High levels of absentee land ownership have the effect of decreasing the degree to which a particular level of wealth translates into a particular level of education spending. Conversely, high levels of educational attainment have the effect of increasing the degree to which a particular level of wealth translates into education spending. The extensive model demonstrates that the wealth‐spending relationship is translated in a locally contingent fashion. In the case study, the contextual nature of these relationships is described in a single community, and the interactions of complex social processes are detailed. In addition to contributing to the literature on the geography of education spending in particular and the geography of social programs in general, the research demonstrates the utility of integrating extensive and intensive research methodologies employed through a realist theoretical framework.