What Works in Rural Districts? We Don't Know Much But Need To
Image courtesy of EB Pilgrim from Pixabay
Education in Rural Missouri
By: Amy Shelton
One in five K-12 students in Missouri attends a district that is considered rural. Rural districts spend more time and money on transportation and trail only the state’s large, urban districts in the percentage of students in poverty. Yet, most conversations around education policy and reform center on urban schools. In addition, there is a lack of research for rural district leaders to draw upon regarding what works well in rural contexts. This blog takes a big picture look at Missouri’s rural and other districts, education in rural Missouri, and the need for further research on rural education in light of the requirements of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).
Missouri’s Rural Districts
As noted in a recent report by the Rural School and Community Trust, rural students may be easily overlooked since most are in states where they make up less than 25 percent of all public school students. This is true in Missouri as well, where 70 percent of Missouri’s 516 traditional school districts are rural but these districts serve only 21 percent of traditional public school students in the state.
Missouri’s rural districts differ greatly from its town, suburb, and city districts. Two hundred and fifty-four rural districts (70 percent) have only one or two schools, yet the average rural district covers 139 square miles.
Sources: DESE enrollment data (2017-2018) from PRiME; urbanicity, number of teachers, number of schools (2016-2017) from Common Core of Data; district size data from DESE.
Over half of the students served by Missouri’s rural districts qualify for free or reduced-price lunch (FRL). The most recent KIDS COUNT data snapshot showed that while the percentage of kids living in concentrated poverty (where 30 percent or more of families are in poverty) in Missouri has decreased slightly, the number and percent of kids outside of metropolitan areas living in high-poverty areas increased (from 26,000 kids to 29,000 kids). In addition, high rates of food insecurity are more common in Missouri’s rural counties. Almost all rural students are white.
Sources: Urbanicity from Common Core of Data; DESE demographic data (2017-2018) from PRiME; weighted percentages calculated by author.
Education for Rural Students
Rural school districts in Missouri may enjoy certain advantages, particularly if schools have small class sizes. Nationally, the Rural School and Community Trust notes that rural students score slightly better than their non-rural peers on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Locally, a greater percentage of rural districts are meeting or exceeding state expectations in ELA and math growth on state assessments.
However, rural students nationwide continue to have lower college enrollment and attainment rates than their urban and suburban peers, though the gap has narrowed somewhat in recent decades. In Missouri, only two and a half percent of rural high school juniors and seniors pass at least one AP exam, compared with a national average of nine and a half percent for rural students and 19 percent for all public high school students. Missouri is above average, however, in the percent of rural students in dual enrollment, with female students being much more likely than male students to participate.
The report “Why Rural Matters” lists Missouri as one of the top 10 states in which educational policy is most unfavorable to rural students when considering factors such as state spending in rural districts, transportation costs, and rural teacher salaries. According to the report, Missouri has the fifth-lowest adjusted rural teacher salary in the nation. In addition, nearly a quarter of Missouri districts will experience revenue cuts due to the recent lapse of the federal Secure Rural Schools Act. In an effort to save money and help with teacher recruitment and retention, 61 districts in Missouri have now moved to four-day school weeks. Almost all of these are rural districts.
Rural School Improvement Under ESSA
There is a lack of research about what works well in rural contexts. This matters greatly under the ESSA accountability requirement that districts implement “evidence-based interventions” in schools needing improvement. ESSA requires states to identify the lowest-performing five percent of Title I schools in the state and then use Title I funding for interventions in those schools. The interventions selected must have been studied elsewhere and be supported by evidence that is strong, moderate, or promising according to ESSA definitions.
In order to claim that an intervention is supported by strong evidence, an experimental study of that intervention must have been conducted with a student population and in a setting (such as urban or rural) similar to the school where it will be implemented. Harvard recently launched a rural education research center to help rural districts choose interventions for their low-performing schools, but as yet most pre-vetted evidence-based strategies have not been tested in rural settings. A policy brief in the journal Rural Educator noted that “Programs with ‘strong’ evidence may fail to translate into the intended outcomes for students in rural contexts.”
The Center on Education Policy (CEP), a public school advocacy research group, interviewed district leaders to learn how they are responding to ESSA’s evidence requirements. The leaders of the rural district profiled in the study reported that they did not have subscriptions to peer-reviewed journals and lacked the staff capacity and training to use research databases to identify and select evidence-based strategies. Most of the state’s pre-approved interventions had not been tested in rural settings.
Conclusion
Leaders of Missouri’s rural districts operate in a different context than leaders of other types of districts. In Missouri, rural districts serve large geographic areas and have high percentages of white students and students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Rural districts face unique financial and teacher recruitment challenges. In addition, rural schools identified under ESSA’s school improvement program face constraints when selecting interventions because many educational interventions have not been studied in rural contexts and thus are not supported by strong evidence. Conducting research in rural settings should be a high priority in states like Missouri, in which such a high percentage of districts are rural. Education policy conversations at the state level must also give careful consideration to the unique context and challenges of rural districts and schools to ensure that all students in Missouri have access to a high-quality education.