Rural Education

Definition Issues

First, the term rural, which is monolithic neither as a taxonomical classification nor as a political economy, encompasses many political ecologies and arenas [Page 715]within one classification. The issues facing rural schools in states with high percentages of private ownership of lands and with an evenly dispersed population in southeastern or midwestern states may be very different from those facing western states.

In the West, a high percentage of land is publicly owned, effectively taking it off the tax rolls. Also, there may be a higher geographical isolation for rural schools and communities in the West based on geography, hydrology, the scarcity of arable soils and water resources, and geologic barriers, such as mountain ranges, deserts, and canyons. Rural schools in communities where populations are “bedroom communities,” that is, “rural” communities within reasonable driving or commuting distances of larger metropolitan areas available for employment and purchasing, may be very different from rural small communities that are principal county seats as well as employment and merchant centers for other more rural and isolated communities and dispersed populations.

Until the mid-1960s or earlier, many political scientists suggested that rural areas had disproportionately great political power and political representation because of the U.S. system of regional representation. As rural populations declined, with many people migrating to urban settings, rural districts tended to keep the same number of elected representatives. In the early 1960s, many urban legislative districts had over 1,000 times the number of residents as did equally represented rural districts.

In the recent past, then, the majority of the U.S. population lived in either rural or urban settings. However, this has changed drastically, and the majority of the U.S. population currently lives in suburban settings, neither rural nor urban. This has had a great impact on the law and policy of rural political representation as well as the funding of rural schools and, parenthetically, the policies affecting strictly urban schools and school systems.

Comparative Disadvantage

Regardless of whether it is intended, many federal and state laws and programs tend to advantage suburban/urban over rural schools. For example, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) (2002) provides some key rights to students in failing schools. These rights include, at different levels of school failure or non-compliance with provisions for “adequate yearly progress,” having highly qualified teachers; the right to have private tutors; and, ultimately, the right to attend another public or private school.

In many rural communities, no such tutoring or alternate school resources exist. Moreover, rural public schools and districts often do not have high enough populations of teacher candidates and students in schools to allow all teachers to be “highly qualified” under the NCLB's mandates. It is very common, often essential, that teachers in rural schools teach several different subjects, subjects in which they may not have undergraduate majors or teaching certificates. Yet insofar as such schools and systems must employ teachers who are able to teach a number of subjects and levels, rural schools will continually be noncom-pliant because they will lack an appropriate percentage of “highly qualified” teachers as defined by NCLB.

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