Rural Education Matters

One of the most talked about issues of the upcoming presidential campaign is that of education. However, what most people are hearing about is the state of urban schools. Not much has been said about rural schools, until now.

The Rural School and Community Trust recently released a report, Why Rural Matters: The Need for Every State to Take Action on Rural Education. According to this report, one-fourth of US schoolchildren go to schools in rural areas or small towns of less than 25,000. Fourteen percent go to school in even smaller places with fewer than 2,500 people. However, the students, teachers and schools in these areas go largely unnoticed in the debates about the future of education. This is mostly because of the wide dispersion of rural people, making them nearly invisible.

There are current realities in rural areas making it necessary to discuss the issue of rural education and its future.

• More people are moving to rural areas, if they can make a living there.

• Rural America is fairly diverse, especially among the young. Minorities constituted 17 percent of all rural residents in 1997. Well over one-third of the rural population of each of the four minority groups was under age 18 in 1997, compared with only one-fourth of the rural white population.

• Rural America is poorer than urban America as a whole and nearly as poor as central cities. Of the 250 poorest counties in America, 244 are rural. Poverty is especially prevalent among rural minorities.

• Some of the country’s most urban states are also its most rural. Only one in ten New Jerseyites lives in a rural place, but that’s more rural people than there are in Maine, where more than half the population lives in small places. A higher percentage of Pennsylvanians live in rural places than Kansans. And more rural Americans live in New York than in Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming combined.

Schools throughout rural America tend to be numerous and small, both by necessity and community preference. While they have many of the same needs as other schools, they also face some problems that are different, creating challenges for policymakers. Among these special problems:

• Recruitment and retention of rural teachers, principals and administrators is strained by professional isolation and chronically lower salaries than larger schools in larger places.

• Long bus rides take away children’s time for study, play and family, while high transportation costs whittle away at funds for instruction.

• Teachers are expected to teach both in and out of the field in which they are certified.

• High per-pupil costs contrast low levels of discretionary spending.

• Distance and sparsity make these schools last to be connected to the digital world that might help solve the curricular problems associated with distance and sparsity.

The results of this study showed the status of education and attitudes about education in each of the 50 states. It showed a cluster of states where rural education is crucial to the states’ education performance and where the need for attention is urgent. These states are located in the Mississippi Delta (Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi), in the heart of Appalachia (Kentucky and West Virginia), and in the core of the Northern Plains (North Dakota and South Dakota).

A key point of this study is that children deserve good schools. There is room for improvement in all states.

According to this report, these states are chronically depressed, suffer from outmigration and are deeply distressed by changes in the global economy. Six of these seven states rank in the top ten for rural student poverty. Declining student enrollment is a problem in these states as is low teacher salaries; rural adults have low levels of educational attainment.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are eight states, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Hawaii. Despite the urban character of most of these states, they are home to over 6.6 million rural people. Rural poverty and minority rates, however, are low in these states; they are more likely to be plagued by growth and sprawl, than by declining population and decreasing enrollments.

And there are many states in between. However, a key point of this study is that children deserve good schools. There is room for improvement in all states.

By Melissa Levy, Digest Managing Editor

For more information, email the Rural School and Community Trust at info@ruraledu.org or find them on the web at www.ruraledu.org. Find Organizations Concerned About Rural Education at (202)-822-7638 or on the web at www.ruralschools.org.

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