The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rural Education in the United States

Amy Price Azano, Karen Eppley, Catharine Biddle, Amy Price Azano, Karen Eppley, Catharine Biddle

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781350244290
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350172029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

This handbook begins with a foundational overview of rural education, examining the ways in which definitions, histories, policies, and demographic changes influence rural schools. This foundational approach includes how corporatization, population changes, poverty, and the role of data affect everyday learning in rural schools. In following sections, the contributors consider how school closures, charter schools, and district governance influence decision making in rural schooling, while also examining the influence of these structures on higher education attainment, rural school partnerships, and school leadership. They explore curriculum studies in rural education, including place-based and trauma-informed pedagogies, rural literacies, rural stereotype threat, and achievement. Finally, they engage with issues of identity and equity in rural schools by providing an overview of the literature related to diverse populations in rural places, including Indigenous, Black, and Latinx communities, and exceptional learners. Importantly, this handbook applies theoretical tools to rural classroom experiences, demonstrating the potential of work centered at the intersection of theory, rurality, and classroom practice. Each section concludes with a response by an international scholar, situating the topics covered within the broader global context.

Part I

Introduction

Foundations in Rural Education

The chapters in Part I provide a foundational overview of rural education, examining the various ways in which definitions, histories, and policies have shaped conceptions of rurality and how these topics continue to influence rural education. This foundational approach explores how corporatization, population changes, poverty, and the role of data affect everyday learning in rural schools, and how our subjectivities and positionalities affect our relationships with rural spaces and places.

These subjectivities, particularly as they relate to defining rural, have consequences for research and practice. Longhurst explores nuanced meanings of rurality in Chapter 1, Developing, Utilizing, and Critiquing Definitions of “Rural” in Rural Education Research. Longhurst asks what is meant by rural and discusses how we articulate, interrogate, and operationalize definitions of rurality in rural educational research. Longhurst provides a geographic and theoretical overview of rural definitions in the research literature, noting how and why definitions have been challenged and, also, how these definitions influence what constitutes a rural warrant or rural salience. Definitions have implications, particularly if they are simplified, exclusionary, or used as proxies for race, socioeconomic status, cultural identification, social class, or political preference. The chapter ends with a set of questions designed to enable researchers and consumers of rural research to interrogate rural, so they can better understand a study’s relevance to a particular rural context.

In Chapter 2, History and the Shape of Rural Educational Policy in the United States, Theobald explores cultural perceptions of what rural has meant and what it means to live in the rural United States, a country deeply impacted by its rural histories. Perceptions of rurality influence all manner of public policy, including education policy. As a case in point, the chapter documents the policy developments orchestrated by Ellwood Cubberley, one of the most impactful educational spokespersons at the turn of the twentieth century. Cubberley, who was the first to create a graduate curriculum for school administrators, argued for the modernization of rural schools through consolidation to solve the “rural school problem.” Theobald explores how Cubberley’s contributions informed cultural assumptions about rural life and provides a theoretical and historical grounding and discusses the interconnections between cultural perceptions and subsequent policy developments, concluding with some analysis of the relatively recent work on rural policy shortcomings.

To that end, Theobald’s chapter is followed by Brenner’s critique of federal policies claiming place neutrality in Chapter 3, Toward a Rural Critical Policy Analysis. This chapter builds from an historical framing and presents the utility of critical policy analysis to examine and critique key aspects of federal policies and their implications for rural contexts. Brenner explains that a framework for rural policy analysis must examine assumptions of place neutrality, distributive analysis, rural salience, and the policy’s proposed definition of rural. Moreover, Brenner discusses the critical work of recognizing how metrocentric policies position rural places as valuable only because of the resources they provide to urban centers and how this metrocentricity perpetuates rurality as deficient and peripheral. Her chapter concludes by discussing how a rural critical policy analysis can be a tool for asking: How is place significant in the moral implications for a particular policy or set of policies?

In yet another foundational influence in the social, political, and economic construction of rural education, Cervone examines the effects of corporate school reform in Chapter 4, Corporate Influences on Rural Schools. Cervone explains how the business sector of the United States has long attempted to transform public education into a private industry, under the guise that private industry is more innovative, efficient, and cost-effective than the overly bureaucratic and stifling public sector. Many of the promises of corporate reform have not been achieved, even by the arguably flawed measure of standardized test scores, as students in privately operated charter schools tend to score no better (or worse) than students in traditional public school districts. Cervone argues that privatization has not reduced bureaucracy as promised but that bureaucracy has transformed into an entirely new corporate bureaucracy—one no longer subject to public oversight and accountability. This chapter offers a discussion of how rural communities are ideally positioned to strengthen public education by making it more democratic, in part by developing and acting upon an understanding of the ways corporate logic and language have infiltrated education.

While these first several chapters provide a theoretical landscape for rural education, Schafft and Maselli explore the geographic and demographic landscape of rural places in Chapter 5, Shifting Population Dynamics and Implications for Rural Schools. Demographic shifts explored in this chapter include rural out-migration and depopulation, immigration, rural retirement migration, and rural gentrification. Out-migration has been a long-term existential issue for communities across the rural United States, having resulted in rural depopulation and, by extension, increased pressure for school closures and consolidations. Other rural places, especially high-amenity areas with full access to medical care, recreation, and shopping with close (enough) proximity to metropolitan areas, have become rural retirement destinations or have otherwise attracted in-migrants to rural communities. While this is often seen as a hopeful sign of rural development, it can come with its own unanticipated costs (e.g., rural gentrification), including new types of social exclusions and inequalities, which schools can abet or lessen, depending on their policies and practices.

At the same time, as Schafft and Maselli explain, the rural United States has become increasingly diverse with the in-migration of historically minoritized racial and ethnic populations accounting for over 80 percent of rural population growth between 2000 and 2010. These population changes can offer new opportunities for rural communities, and they also can challenge long-ingrained community identities. Schafft and Maselli’s discussion illuminates how all of these population shifts have significant and varied consequences for rural schools and communities as populations shrink, grow, or compositionally change, resulting in shifting academic and school staffing needs. They conclude with a brief discussion of implications for policy and practice, as well as the ways in which rural schools can play an integral role in rural development and the overall well-being of rural people and places.

While demographic and population shifts influence rural schools, so does rural poverty, as Tieken parses out in Chapter 6, Rural Poverty and Rural Schools. Using a spatial injustice framework, Tieken’s chapter provides an overview of statistics describing rural poverty, its causes, and its effects on individuals, communities, and rural schools. Tieken explores historical and contemporary factors of racial oppression and exclusion in rural places that have resulted in entrenched high-poverty rates for many rural communities of color. The chapter discusses how these issues are intertwined with rural economies, physical isolation, and weak infrastructures. Moreover, Tieken describes how poverty is associated with a variety of negative health, civic, and employment outcomes, particularly for children and adolescents. Given the influence of poverty in rural communities, the reliance on local property taxes for education funding is a profound challenge.

In light of the many complexities facing rural communities in terms of how definitions are operationalized, the persistent influence of history and corporatization on policy and practice, shifting populations, and the effects of poverty, it is important to consider the value and challenge of looking at data across domains to develop a more complete understanding of how schools function within rural communities. Sipple, Fiduccia, and LeBeau take up this topic as they explore in Chapter 7, The Why and How of Enhancing Data Use in Rural Education Research and Practice. They discuss the utility of linking student, school, and district data with other sources of data from health care, childcare, economic and community development, and other community-based data. The authors present a conceptual model of local school-community interactions and demonstrate how linking decisions about schooling to other systems in the local community can provide a broader and deeper understanding of the implications of policy implementation, especially with respect to community vitality.

The authors offer insights into the range of possible relevant sources of data to consider in rural education research, both to assist local education and community practice. Beyond identifying various sources of data and exploring the types of research and practice questions that it enables, they also offer advice on the mechanics and challenges of joining education data with noneducation data, providing several pertinent examples highlighting research questions, practice implications, and lessons learned. In conclusion, they share their experience in trying to democratize data to help local school and community leaders, emphasizing the importance of communicating directly with stakeholders from noneducation sectors.

Part I ends with Australian scholar White’s Responding Rurally: Perspectives and Insights from One Rural Place to Another. Like Longhurst, White begins her response to the chapters in Part I asking what “rural” means to and for the field of education. White examines Brenner’s discussion of place neutrality as it relates to policy and practice in an Australian context, arguing that places are indeed not neutral and that policy neutrality disadvantages rural students in the United States and students in Australia via processes of “policy borrowing.” Writing from her perspective in the Global South, White discusses implications for placeless education policy reforms, reflects on the role of data, and contemplates how this handbook serves as a signifier that rural educational scholarship has become increasingly relevant to the broader education research community. She explains that the United States and Australia are, in many ways, rural cousins and provides examples of the ways we are similar and unique. Importantly, she discusses the subjectivity of rural as a geographic and also an imagined space, drawing on Mackella’s iconic poem “My Country” as an example of that subjectivity. White also shares how rurality and place in Australia are shaped in terms of colonization and describes how, as it was for her cousins in North America (an issue explored in Part IV of this volume), colonization was cataclysmic for Australian First Peoples. White concludes by noting that this volume presents an opportunity to reflect on these foundational nuances in ways that will benefit the rural education research community, but also so that we, as readers, may better understand our own places.

1

Developing, Utilizing, and Critiquing Definitions of “Rural” in Rural Education Research

Jesse Moon Longhurst

Researchers in rural education face a set of questions that have long bedeviled the field. What do we mean by rural? How do we articulate, interrogate, and operationalize definitions of rurality, and how do we proceed when definitions conflict or contradict one another?

Most studies concerning rural education provide no definition of what makes their study settings rural (Thier & Beach, 2019; Thier et al., 2021), and those that do provide a definition rarely give context or justification for their choice. While no single definition could ever be appropriate for all endeavors, engaging with these important questions of rural context (Azano et al., 2019) is essential for rural researchers. Failure to do so could compromise both the quality and the utility of research. This chapter attempts to assist early-career scholars and those new to the rural education research space by untangling, clarifying, and describing some of the ways rural has been defined in rural education literature.

This chapter presents an overview of the most commonly used external quantitative (Bosak & Perlman, 1982) definitions that have been developed by governmental bodies in the United States. It also describes some ways in which those definitions have been problematized and provides some advice for researchers interested in employing such definition and categorization schemas. The chap...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction Unsettling Rurality: Mapping a Third Space
• Part I Introduction: Foundations in Rural Education
• Part II Introduction: Rural Schools and Communities
• Part III Introduction: Curriculum Studies in Rural Schools
• Part IV Introduction: Identity and Equity in Rural Schools
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright