Recruitment and retention concerns for teachers, particularly in rural school districts and in science, fill the daily news and research literature. The shortage of STEM workers is also another concern as well. Then why do nationally recognized secondary science teachers remain in rural schools with lower salaries, increased responsibilities…

High-achieving students in economically disadvantaged, rural schools lack access to advanced coursework necessary to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) educational and employment goals at the highest levels, contributing to the excellence gap. Out-of-school STEM programming offers one pathway to students' talent…

School moves during adolescence predict lower peer integration and higher exposure to delinquent peers. Yet mobility and peer problems have several common correlates, so differences in movers' and non-movers' social adjustment may be due to selection rather than causal effects of school moves. Drawing on survey and social network data from a…

Since 2012, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation has supported educational enrichment in rural areas by awarding over $3.3 million in grants to six outstanding organizations operating in Iowa, Indiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. In this report, the authors combine the experiences of these organizations with findings from the…

The purpose of this report is to describe what the authors learned from studying eight teacher career advancement initiatives implemented across a variety of contexts, including urban, suburban, and rural districts; high poverty and affluent districts; and in schools/districts both with and without strong union presence. They describe key…

Researchers agree that a needs assessment is a critical first step in designing a full-service school, but the large task of orchestrating the necessary community collaboration for such projects has occupied most of the literature to date. This study examines the process of planning and implementing a needs assessment for a rural school serving…

Case studies of Authentic Intellectual Work (AIW) in the Iowa project included four high schools that have been practicing this professional development model for the last five years. The schools, AHST Secondary School, Cedar Falls High School, Spencer High and Middle Schools and Valley High School were visited in April, 2011. The visits included…

A qualitative case study highlighting one rural Iowa elementary school provided insight into the issue of small schools without library programs as they are preparing to meet the Iowa reinstatement of the requirement for school library programs. The site was purposefully chosen because it has been operating without a school library program or…

In the face of declining enrollments, many Iowa rural school districts have begun sharing superintendents. In 1988-89, 88 districts shared 44 superintendents; 42 of these participated in structured interviews for this study. All participants were male. Interviewees indicated that most school boards had undertaken the new arrangement because the…

Interviews with 42 of Iowa's 44 shared superintendents examined school district motives for sharing superintendents, the need to redefine the superintendent's role, superintendents' personal motivations, sources of frustration, community relations, and factors leading to success or failure of the sharing agreement. Contains 20 references. (SV)

In Iowa, shared superintendency originated in the 1980s as a response to the agricultural recession of the 1980s which had tightened Iowa's public school finance. Iowa lost 80,000 people through out-migration and about 10,000 fewer births occurred, while the school student population decreased by 181,670 during this same period. While nearly every…

Students, faculty, administration, and community members of three Iowa rural school districts were interviewed to identify educational issues in their communities. The results of the Iowa investigation are compared with the results of the Claremont Graduate School investigation published in "Voices from the inside: A report on schooling from…