Small town school boards are made up of conscientious, hardworking, and caring citizens who face arduous economic challenges and difficult educational dilemmas. The changing economy of small towns has led to fewer professionals and business owners participating in boards of education, a rift between educators who are bureaucrats and board members…

This paper examines the degree to which high-school course offerings are unequally distributed across schools, paying attention to relationships between school size and the incidence of new course titles in various curriculum areas. The inquiry is based on the presumption that economies of scale play a role in educational opportunity. The study is…

This study examines variables that affect staff development in rural schools. It examines systematically delivered rural staff development intervention in 28 rural schools in five states representative of the Southwest--Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas. The study, involving 700 teachers, tests 18 hypotheses based largely on…

Rural elementary school teachers were interviewed to determine their knowledge of student prejudices and how they encouraged acceptance of differences; students were interviewed to determine what prejudices were held. Eight rural teachers and 53 first, third, and fifth grade students in a small northern Rocky Mountain community with no racial,…

This study examines the effects of recent statewide education reforms on small, rural schools in 13 Appalachian states. Education reform measures passed in the Appalachian states during 1982-1987 focused on improving schools through the following major approaches: (1) increased accountability through testing students and changing accreditation…

This analysis of employment patterns in the American South extends a 1985 report, "After the Factories: Changing Employment Patterns in the Rural South," which was based on the years between 1977-1982. The 1985 report included Texas, but this analysis includes only the 12 Southern Growth Policies Board (SGPB) member states. This new…

During the second year of a 3-year study involving 112 Iowa farm families, mothers of children aged 4 to 10 years old expressed expectations of independence, responsibility, and hard work from their children during home interviews. The importance of the parent-child relationship together with the lack of sufficient child-rearing research on rural…

The differential interest costs to rural governments associated with borrowing in the tax-exempt bond market is a function of the advantageous position of several large partially rural counties and the dominance of school district borrowing in rural communities, rather than a disadvantage of predominantly rural governments. This conclusion is the…

The report discusses a field study of the implementation of major requirements of P.L. 94-142, the Education For All Handicapped Children Act, by rural districts, and presents detailed case studies of five districts' responses. The first volume introduces the naturalistic model of inquiry, noting its philosophical underpinnings and basic…

Contributions of rural high schools to their local economic climate are both underestimated and undervalued. Functions that high schools can and should perform in rural economic development today include providing occupational training to meet immediate labor market needs, raising community educational attainment levels to meet long-term…

General transport requirements of the Priority Country Area Program (PCAP) field staff in the South-West and Central Priority Country Areas in Queensland, Australia, (exceeding 320,000 and 150,000 square kilometers respectively) for 1978-79 were evaluated, with emphasis on: duties of PCAP staff and their consequent transport needs; existing…

A survey directed to all teachers who graduated with a Diploma of Teaching from Nedlands College of Advanced Education (Western Australia) in 1976-1977 and who had completed at least one year of teaching incorporated four basic aims: (1) to ascertain the number of teachers who had students with different cultural backgrounds; (2) to identify the…

In recent years rural advocates have claimed that rural students do not get their "fair share" of the federal education dollar and that federal programs are sometimes poorly tailored to rural conditions. These claims of an anti-rural bias have led to a study of fiscal year 1977 federal funding patterns in the six sample states of…

Synthesizing previous research, statements, and special reports calling attention to the unique problems associated with rural education, this paper presents definitions, statistics, and recommendations applicable to rural education and to Montana. Among the topics presented are: a contemporary definition of rurality (nonmetropolitan is posited as…

Information gathered via literature review, interview, and personal observation was used to examine the effectiveness of animation rurale programs in Senegal and Niger, French West Africa. Identifiable animation rurale assumptions tested as applicable to Senegal and Niger were: nationwide development programs at the grass roots level can be…