Rural Education Myths

I was in the ruralish education biz for almost my entire teaching career, and one small thing that wears on you is that policy discussions almost always ignore rural needs and realities.

The current Trusk administration buzz saw looks to continue that tradition. Take the privatization of the United States Postal Service-- there are plenty of private delivery services right now, and they mostly won't deliver to our most rural areas (they hand those packages off to the USPS). 

School "choice" policies are built on assumption of a relatively large, dense market. Meanwhile, Catholic private schools in my county have closed because they couldn't get enough students to enroll, and there are no private options springing up in their place. Like rural delivery, it's a market private operators don't want to enter because it's too hard to make money serving it. \

If, for instance, Title I funds turn into block grants and those turn into vouchers, rural areas will take a double hit-- a loss of needed Title I funds for the public school and no options for any sort of private vouchery options (this is where folks pop up to chirp "Oh, but you could start a micro-school" because everyone enjoyed that so much during the pandemic and also it works great in places with sub-optimal wi-fi connections). 

So many people don't get small towns and rural areas (e.g. every movie and tv show depiction of a small town), and that includes people who create policy. 

There's a nice piece in The Conversation by Sheneka Williams, Darren DuBose, and Kimberly Clarida, three Michigan State University rural education researchers, in which they distill much of their research into three important but unrecognized truths about rural education.

Rural communities are becoming more diverse.

The three researchers are talking mostly about race, and that is on point-- rural areas are not all white any more. There are increasingly people of color in these communities.

From 2010 to 2020, over 2 million white people left rural communities, while more than 2 million people of color took their place. The number of rural people who identified as multiracial doubled to nearly 4 million over the same period, and all rural communities except those in Arizona saw an increase in their Latino population.

That tracks. So does a point made by rural Missouri blogger Jess Piper, who points out that most rural people are not farmers. Politicians often calculate that if they address some sort of farm policy, then you've done your bit for the rural vote. 

But the typical rural family is not some redneck farmer. Rural areas include a broad range of human beings engaged in a broad range of human endeavors. Though I will say there's one things that rural areas mostly don't have-- super-rich people. I've always maintained that's one of the many, many reasons that trickle down economics fails; there's nobody here in my region to trickle down on the rest of us. And my region provides a sort of laboratory of that, because 150-ish years ago we became the center of the oil industry. We were loaded with rich folks, and to this day we live amongst the many benefits that their wealth brought to town (though some of those gifts have become troublesome white elephants). Then that ended, and we're all quite aware of the money that isn't here and what we aren't able to get done. Sooner or later, if you want stuff, somebody with money has to invest it, spend it on your community. It's not strictly a rural problem-- read Andre Perry's Know Your Price to see how it happens for certain urban communities. 

But I digress. Point is, folks working from a stereotypical picture of who lives in rural communities and what the need (or don't) is working from the wrong script, so they'll get the wrong answers.

Rural educators know how to succeed.

Rural schools lack resources, but rural teachers are expert at working around that lack (which is not to say they couldn't be even better with the resources). The three writers also show this as essentially an extension of the previous point--because folks in high places don't really understand the nature of rural communities, the cultural capital of rural areas is ignored.

One glaring example is that rural communities are rarely represented in teaching materials and curricula, which frequently ignore their local knowledge, traditions and values. This creates a gap in students’ ability to see themselves in jobs and positions outside of their personal contexts. And it hampers teachers’ ability to leverage student strengths when teachers are unprepared to connect with their backgrounds.

There are teachers in rural schools who are prepared to connect--they are the teachers who grew up in those same communities. But they are very much in a Do It Yourself situation. 

The researchers also make the point that policy makers favor things like closure and consolidation of schools. Pennsylvania is a perfect example. In the 1960's, the state had a huge number of small borough and township school districts, and the state pushed consolidation (yes, our current 500 districts is considerably fewer than previously). That left many smaller communities with one school; that school often served as a community hub, and a major source of property value and tax base in that community. When the last fifteen years of further consolidation and closure came along, those single schools were closed, delivering a hammer blow both culturally and financially. There are plenty of factors that created the pressures behind these moves, but at no point did policy makers stand up for rural schools and communities and try to hold back this wave that has hollowed out many rural communities.

Rural educators know how to tap into local resources, knowing that little support is coming from the state or federal government. But policy makers rarely make an attempt to tap those resources.

Rural students are high achievers

The trio notes that students in rural schools score higher on math and reading tests than urban students, and rural students have a higher graduation rate. 

What rural students lack is the extras that non-rural students enjoy. From summer programs to enrichment programs to personal SAT coaches, nonrural students have opportunities that rural students do not. Rural students end up with lower going-to-college numbers. 

There's no earthly reason to imagine that rural students are any less capable than their nonrural counterparts. None. 

It is a myth that rural schools are filled with farm kids who aren't all that bright being taught by teachers who are less-than. It is not a myth that rural schools are under-represented and simply -- I can't say ignored, because to ignore something you have to see it and deliberately look past it. Rural education is more commonly invisible to folks in the policy world. 

I expect that problem is likely to be even worse under the current regime. Guttung funding as a prelude to privatization will be a double slam for rural districts. Those districts will see a loss of funding and will have limited ability to replace those funds by raising local taxes. At the same time, they are not attractive markets for any high quality education-flavored businesses; those communities are more likely to end up with a "school" aisle in their local Dollar General. Rural students deserve better.