Providing students access to effective teachers is a challenge that school districts all over the nation face. Students from high poverty environments and rural settings have less access than their counterparts to effective teachers at disproportionate rates. This disproportionality may present as an insurmountable barrier for some youth in…

Small rural schools often struggle to facilitate true professional learning communities (PLCs) when there is one teacher per grade level in the building. The district selected for this study contained four elementary schools with one teacher per grade level and a combined middle and high school to collect perception data. Utilizing a concurrent…

The purpose of this study was to identify ways a Global Schools Initiative in rural schools, especially in northwestern North Carolina, supported students, teachers, and the greater community. The study reviewed the factors that facilitated this initiative and looked at the impact the initiative had on students, teachers, and the community. I…

Performance-based funding (PBF) models intend to increase efficiency and productivity of the institution, thereby influencing organizational change. This change may be structural, programmatic, or procedural, and it may affect institutional practice and/or policy. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to understand the organizational…

With the demands on schools to prepare its students to be globally competitive in the 21st century, schools are forced to examine new ways to meet those demands. One of the new reform ideas is that of restructuring traditional high schools into small schools within schools. Through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the North Carolina…

Basic needs of children and youth which cannot be provided by small rural schools could be realized by combining the resources and pupils of a number of local districts. Four types of organization are presented as possibilities for providing cooperative educational services: (1) autonomous districts with line functions; (2) semi-autonomous…

This series of newspaper articles evaluates North Carolina's schools and establishes a relationship between the state's rural poverty and low student achievement levels. Test scores in 1988 are consistently low in all but four of the poorest rural counties. Small schools are disappearing from rural areas. Large schools can offer students more…

The 1965 status of secondary education in 11 southern states is analyzed in terms of school size, personnel, professional qualifications, and working conditions. Financial data relate per pupil expenditures in both rural and urban schools in each state. Information is provided concerning curriculum trends, innovations, and progressive school…