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Education Next
To
Improve Rural Schools, Focus on Their Strengths
By Michael Q. McShane and Andy Smarick
04/08/2019
A consistent criticism of education reform is that much of the agenda
has been based on what some call a “deficit mindset.” That is,
reformers saw individuals, institutions, and communities as broken and
in need of fixing (or worse, saving), not as individuals, institutions,
and communities with culture, history, and potential that could be
cultivated and built upon. As education reform enters rural schools, it
can learn from this mistake and not make it again.
Most rural schools and the communities that they serve are not broken.
These communities are often home to deep wells of social capital,
tradition, and values that educators can build upon to improve schools.
In fact, survey data from rural communities shows higher levels of
social cohesion, stronger beliefs in community safety, and stronger
opinions that people in the community look out for each other. Rural
communities also see the largest percentage of two-parent families
raising children (and those families are more likely to read to their
children regularly). When it comes to National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP) reading scores, rural 8th-grade students
outperform their counterparts in towns and urban communities
That said, rural schools have problems. They struggle to recruit and
retain high-quality teachers and leaders. This problem becomes
particularly acute when state- and Washington-driven turnaround
strategies hinge on replacing large amounts of staff, or when
teacher-quality policies prioritize firing low-performing teachers.
Where will hard-to-staff schools find replacements? Rural schools also
struggle to offer diverse courses for their students. Rural schools lag
behind all others when it comes to offering AP classes, foreign
language classes, and other dual-enrollment classes.
Rural communities have problems, as well. We suspect that many
education reformers are unaware that, for more than 50 years, the
poverty rate in non-metropolitan areas has exceeded the poverty rate of
metropolitan areas. Rural communities have higher rates of idleness
(individuals neither working nor attending school), particularly for
younger people. Forty-five percent of rural 18- to 24-year-olds without
a high school diploma are idle. This demographic is particularly at
risk for substance abuse, the effects of which have been tearing rural
communities apart for some years now.
Something should be done. This is not because city-dwelling education
reformers know more about what is best for rural students than their
own families and communities, but because uniting urban and rural
communities is better for our polity than dividing them. Finding
educational reforms that work for both rural and urban communities (or
at least don’t help one at the expense of the other) is a worthy
pursuit.
There are two primary areas where these policies are important:
improving the pipeline of teachers and leaders into rural schools and
broadening the options available to rural school students.
Getting Great Teachers into Rural Classrooms
There are many ways in which the challenges facing urban and suburban
schools are similar to those facing rural schools. Every school is
looking for great teachers and leaders, trying to find a curriculum
that is rigorous and appropriate, and working under budget constraints
to maximize offerings. But there are distinct challenges that rural
schools face, and they are worth thinking about.
The last decade has seen a tremendous amount of effort put into
teacher-effectiveness reform. Most of these have been “demand side”
reforms, focusing on how schools and districts attract, retain, and
evaluate their teachers. One high-profile part of this reform agenda
has been identifying minimally effective teachers and removing them
from the classroom. This strategy does not fit so well in labor markets
that struggle to attract many teachers. If a school cannot find a
better teacher to replace the one that it is letting go, it will be
worse off. Research from the School Improvement Grant program
highlighted the particular struggles of rural schools in finding
effective teachers. In fact, some of the potential school turnaround
plans that required an overhaul of the school’s faculty had to be taken
off the table, because the schools could not find alternative teachers.
So what can rural schools, and the policymakers who oversee them, do
about this? Four things:
First, rural schools can heavily recruit their own graduates to come
back to teach. Nationwide, most teachers end up working close to where
they grew up. Whereas a prospective teacher in a denser urban community
might have scads of schools within a few miles of her childhood home, a
rural teacher has far fewer options. While this presents challenges for
both rural schools (with a limited supply of prospective teachers) and
prospective teachers (with a limited number of possible employers),
there are great social-capital and social-cohesion advantages
associated with a school’s employing a significant number of its own
graduates.
Second, as Daniel Player and Aliza Husain of the University of Virginia
have outlined, states and rural districts can create programs to help
paraprofessionals become full-fledged and certified teachers. This can
increase the supply of teachers and staff with knowledge of the school
and connections to the community.
Third, when drafting school turnaround programs or identifying
strategies for improving chronically low-performing schools, state and
federal policymakers must remember the wide variety of labor market
conditions that different schools face. Incentivizing or requiring
schools to replace large numbers of their staff is not a viable
solution in many rural areas. Flexibility must be built into these
programs to take this fact into account.
Finally, states can rework their funding formulae to help rural schools
offer better wages for their staff. In many states, legislatures have
made the protection of agricultural land a policy priority and written
property-assessment rules that, as a result, inadvertently make raising
local funds more difficult. It is often assessed at a lower rate than
residential or commercial property and thus generates less revenue for
local school districts. Even if rural districts vote to raise their
property tax rates, the base can be too small to generate the revenue
schools believe they need. There are important tradeoffs to be made
when it comes to changing property assessment rates, but hamstringing
communities based on the industries in their geographic catchment areas
deserves reconsideration.
Offering Real Choices for Rural Students
Deindustrialization and lack of economic opportunity breeds a vicious
cycle for rural communities. There are fewer good jobs for young people
in rural areas, or the good jobs that exist require middle-skills
training they don’t have. As a result, employable young people often
move to cities with better opportunities, draining the local labor
market and decreasing the number of talented potential employees
available to the businesses (and schools) that remain. Fewer businesses
are eager to move in and existing businesses close, further
exacerbating the problem. This then hurts the tax base for schools and
makes it to recruit great teachers and leaders.
Preparing students for a changing workforce is important, so schools
need to be able to offer a wide variety of potential courses, from
advanced math and science to career and technical education. Rural
schools often struggle to run this gamut due to limited manpower,
resources, and demand. It’s tough to justify hiring an AP Physics
teacher for a class of two or building an entire woodshop for a single
student interested in carpentry.
Students need choices, but school-choice advocates should look at how
funding flexibility can improve what schools are already doing rather
than centering their arguments on closing schools, replacing schools,
or starting new schools. Efficiency-minded approaches based on school
consolidation and closure have been applied to rural communities for
some time now and have, understandably, generated resistance and
resentment.
One potential solution is course access. Course-access programs allow
students to take two or three courses per day from outside providers
instead of their public school. If a student wishes to take calculus,
for example, but her school only offers math up to Algebra II, she can
go to the library to take an online Calculus I course offered by a
university or other provider when her classmates head to math class.
Rather than pushing schools to invest in costly technical education
facilities, states can certify courses in carpentry, welding, or a host
of other skills offered at community colleges or at trade unions’
apprenticeship centers. Students can take the one-sixth or one-seventh
of their funding that would otherwise pay for an in-school class to
these outside providers. They would then get credit for the class, just
like if it were offered within the four walls of their school. This
approach can combine the best of school choice without sacrificing the
cohesion of the school community or the operations of an existing
school.
There is also, as Juliet Squire of Bellwether Education Partners
persuasively argues, potential for charter schooling in rural
communities, though this potential differs from that in urban
communities. (In fact, there are already some 800 rural charter schools
across the country.) Charter schools can help solve two problems that
rural schools have: compliance burdens and specialization. This can, in
turn, stave off calls for closure or consolidation.
A rural district-run school could choose to convert to charter status.
Numerous states around the country have language in their
charter-school laws that allow for existing public schools to become
charter schools. When district schools convert to charter schools, they
are often freed from the state or district regulations and compliance
decrees that sap the time of their generally smaller staffs.
Charter-school regulations are written with independently operated
schools in mind; traditional public school regulations often aren’t.
Whereas larger urban and suburban districts have the central-office
staff to comply with state requirements, rural schools are often
stretched too thin to do so. Chartering could solve this problem and
allow the school to be more nimble, agile, and student-focused.
Chartering can also help create smaller, specialized schools in rural
school districts. If districts want to target particular populations,
such as English-language learners, students interested in jobs in a
particular local industry, or students who are suffering from substance
abuse or whose families are struggling with substance abuse, they could
use chartering to create tailored school environments. Schools would
then have fewer burdensome compliance mandates to address and more
freedom to recruit staff and offer nontraditional calendars or
schedules. They could also access federal funds for charter schools to
help provide their offerings.
The Path(s) Forward
Given that most statistical definitions simply define rural as whatever
is left after we have classified everything else, rural communities and
the schools that serve them are vastly different from one another. Some
rural areas are affluent, some are incredibly poor. Some are flat
farmland, other are rugged mountains. Any category that groups a
town in the thick forests of Vermont with towns in the cotton fields of
Mississippi and the high desert of New Mexico and the chaparral of
California leaves out as much as it explains. Demographically, rural
schools vary widely as well, with rural schools that are predominately
white, rural schools that are predominately black, rural schools that
are predominately Hispanic, and rural schools that are predominately
Native American. When it comes to performance, there is more variation
within rural schools than between rural schools and other locales.
Rural schools in the Northeast and Midwest, for instance, outperform
their urban counterparts, while rural schools in the South and West lag
behind (Figure 2).
If we want these schools to perform better in the future, education
reformers will have to put a finer point on their analysis than
statisticians. What rural schools do share are families’ pride in their
schools and trust in those running them, and the widespread belief that
these schools are linchpins of their communities. Reforms built on this
understanding have promise. Likewise, reforms that are seen as efforts
to villainize schools, undermine social cohesion, or force schools to
compete for limited resources will almost certainly be met with
resistance.
There is no single policy that will help all rural schools, given the
incredible variation in the needs of these schools. Some schools are
thriving and need help to get even better. Some have fallen far behind
and need substantial support to get their heads above water. Within a
given state or region, let alone the entire country, different schools
will have different needs with respect to staffing, infrastructure, and
more, and they will need bespoke solutions. One size will not fit all.
Rural schools also have a strong foundation upon which school
improvement can be built. Cohesive communities built on strong families
provide schools with ample social resources to educate children.
Policy, whether school funding, teacher recruitment and assignment, or
school choice, needs to build on this foundation, and policymakers need
to understand where there are unmet needs and then tailor solutions to
individual communities.
Eduation Next
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