Accommodating Amish Students in Public Schools: Teacher Perspectives on Educational Loss, Gain, and Compromise.

Picture gently sloping hills, narrow creeks winding through flat valleys, cattle grazing in small herds along fence lines, white-painted farmsteads in tight congregation, horse-drawn buggies rolling slowly on the roads, small signs advertising furniture, produce and other handicraft.This is what I see when I travel through the Creek Settlement, a large concentration of Amish 1 in a Midwestern state. 2 But these Amish residents in the Creek region aren't left alone to plow their fields in solitude.Besides buggies, one will encounter cars and buses filled with tourists coming to the area to purchase Amish-made items, to eat Amish-style food, and to encounter Amish people.The tourism center of Creek County knows this very well.Visit their website, and one is greeted by images of Amish people (or those in traditional Amish clothing) walking down a road, an older woman in typical Amish clothing making a quilt by hand, and a flashing headline that says: "Where slowing down is second nature." 3 1 Mark Dewalt, Amish Education in the United States and Canada, (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 8.The Amish are part of the Anabaptist Christian denomination with roots in sixteenth century Europe.Anabaptists today primarily exist in North America as the denominational affiliations of Mennonites, Amish, Brethren, Apostolic Christian Church, and Hutterites.Though my exploration of educational philosophies applies broadly to the congregations under the Anabaptist umbrella, for this study, I will reference mostly the Amish in the United States, specifically those groups who live in the Creek Settlement in the Midwest of the United States, the geographic and cultural region of my research.The Amish are typically the more conservative or traditional of the Anabaptist sects.According to educational researcher and Amish scholar, Mark Dewalt: "[The] key components of the Amish culture include the wearing of plain clothing, the use of Pennsylvania Dutch as the primary language of the home, travel by horse and buggy, the use of horses in the fields rather than tractors, the use of homes for worship services, the use of German Bibles, no modern electrical appliances, no participation in sports leagues, and the limit of formal education to the eighth grade.The Amish culture stresses kindness, humility, and the importance of the group rather than the self," Dewalt, 8. 2 "The Twelve Largest Amish Settlements, 2017," Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College.http://groups.etown.edu/amishstudies/statistics/twelve-largest-settlements-2017/.3 Citation removed to anonymize locations and names.This slowed-down county is the setting of a showdown between a school superintendent, the district school board, angry Amish families, and the state Department of Education.The story was relayed to me by one of the protagonists: "Bruce," the superintendent. 4 When he told me this story, he had already retired from the district job and had taken a position with a small private school in a nearby city.His former district, Willow Run Schools, is in the heart of "Amish Country," with some of the elementary schools enrolling nearly all Amish children.The story, in short: A few years ago, an Amish girl was taking a state-issued standardized test which gave her reading comprehension questions based on a sciencefiction story prompt.It was the tale of the "Omnichip," a computer chip implanted in the brains of children so that society could monitor and manage the behavior of citizens.This premise was familiar to me, as it sounded much like Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Burgeron" or Lois Lowry's The Giver -dystopic stories aimed at encouraging young readers to think critically about the role of citizens in relation to state control.The testtaking child of the story was very bothered by the content of "Omnichip," and at the end of the day relayed the story and prompt to her parents.The parents contacted the Superintendent with the concern that their daughter was required to read stories in school about governments implanting objects in the bodies of people, something that was, according to the Superintendent, inappropriately exploring futuristic science fiction when the purpose of the test was reading comprehension.The Superintendent agreed that the 4 Pseudonyms are used for the names of all study participants, schools, districts, towns, and other identifiers.

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