|
 |
Education Dive
Report: Many rural districts face education 'emergency'
The ninth edition of “Why Rural Matters” includes measures of college readiness and a focus on the needs of young children.
Linda Jacobson
Nov. 7, 2019
Mississippi may have shown the most improvement in this year’s National
Assessment of Educational Progress, but in the state’s rural areas, one
in four students lives in poverty, the graduation rate is below the
national average, and few students enter college with Advanced
Placement credit.
That’s why it ranks as the top “high-priority” state in “Why Rural
Matters,” a report released Thursday by the Rural School and Community
Trust, the College Board and AASA/The School Superintendents
Association.
North Carolina and Alabama are tied for second in terms of having the
greatest needs among students in rural areas, followed by Oklahoma,
South Dakota, West Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana and
Florida. The population of students attending rural schools in many of
these states, including Georgia and West Virginia, has increased in
recent years.
“While some rural schools and places thrive, others continue to face
nothing less than an emergency in the education and well-being of
children,” the authors of the report write.
In the most recent NAEP math and reading results, students in rural
districts slightly outperform those in non-rural areas, but within many
of those states, there are large gaps in performance between poor and
non-poor students in rural areas.
Nearly one in five students in the U.S. — about 9.3 million — attend a
rural school, and many districts have high rates of poverty and student
mobility. States in the West — Nevada, Arizona, Washington, Colorado
and Idaho — have the highest student mobility rates in rural areas.
Overall, the report is intended to draw policymakers’ attention to
issues facing rural districts. “Many rural students are largely
invisible to state policymakers because they live in states where
education policy is dominated by highly visible urban problems,” the
authors write.
Indicators of college readiness
While past reports have focused primarily on NAEP scores as a measure
of how well students in rural schools are faring, this ninth edition of
the report adds an emphasis on college readiness. The authors find
juniors and seniors in rural areas are more likely than students
nationally to participate in dual enrollment programs for college
credit. The data was drawn from the U.S. Department of Education’s
Civil Rights Data Collection.
The researchers found, however, if a state-ranked well on the
percentage of juniors and seniors passing at least one AP exam, they
were less likely to rank well on students’ access to dual enrollment
programs, “suggesting that schools may tend to promote one over the
other.” The data also shows the lower the poverty rate in a rural
district, the more likely students are to pass AP exams.
|
|
|
|
