When U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan talks about using merit pay to attract the best teachers to the classroom, he probably doesn't have in mind a place like Richmond County, North Carolina. In this rural community where the unemployment rate is nearly 14 percent and there's no movie theater for miles around, school administrators say…

In rural parts of the nation, such as McCool Junction, Nebraska, schools are taking creative steps to lure new students to local schools in their quests to keep those schools open and their communities intact. Elsewhere, towns and school districts in Kansas are giving away plots of land for home sites. Districts in Kansas are drawing new students…

Built in the early 1900s for African-American children, "Rosenwald Schools" are disappearing from the landscape. This article discusses preservation efforts of some of the more than 5,300 Rosenwald schools and other buildings that were built from 1913 to 1932, in rural areas of 15 states. The idea for the schools was conceived by the black…

This report contains several articles that focus on the new digital divide, which is no longer just one wide gap between those with and those without computers, but is instead a series of divides that create inequities for different reasons. The first article explains how certain types of students are not getting the high-tech experiences they…