Cross-sector school-community partnerships have recently garnered attention for their potential to improve outcomes across multiple child- and family-serving organizations. Despite the central role of schools in rural communities, partnerships in these settings have largely been overlooked in the literature. This structured review examines the…

For this comprehensive literature review, we begin by framing our study with a scholarship review of the theorizing of place-based leadership and rural administrators. We then synthesize research on the practice and experiences of district administrators, including superintendents, school boards, and other ancillary leaders. We identify multiple…

Although the number of multilingual (ML) students continues to rise nationally, little scholarly attention has been paid to the education of "rural" ML students and families. There is critical need to better understand who rural ML students are and how to align their linguistic knowledge and strengths with appropriate instructional…

The purpose of this article is to help education practitioners and researchers understand that research about rural education is complicated not only by issues of defining "rural," but also by the often dramatic ways that rural schools differ from each other. We briefly address issues in defining rural and describe rural classification…

Despite the significant proportions of rural Americans, schools, and public school students situated in the geographic peripheries of an increasingly urbanizing country, rural education in the United States has consistently occupied both scholarly and policy peripheries. This is to the detriment of rural America, especially to the extent that…

School consolidation in rural districts has been ongoing since the 1800s. Although many district personnel tout economic inefficiency as a reason for consolidation to occur, micropolitics among school board members, parents, and the business community often drive the consolidation process. This article presents a qualitative case study of Webster…