According to the National Center for Education Statistics (2021), more than half of all public-school districts and nearly one-third of all public-school students attend rural schools in the U.S. This study identifies characteristics of the physical environment of rural schools, considers how the physical environment of rural schools compares to…

There is much alarm about the current teacher shortage resulting from the pandemic and its aftermath. But teacher shortages have long been a perennial issue in K-12 education. Researchers Richard Ingersoll and Henry Tran analyzed data from the National Center of Education Statistics to compare rural schools to urban and suburban schools to…

Across the United States, students attending rural school districts can face different obstacles than their urban counterparts, particularly rural students from households living below the federal poverty level. But how rural districts are defined can vary by federal, state, and local entity and can sometimes not capture the difficulties specific…

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in six different types of rural area and their schools in different parts of Sweden, this article identifies how rural schools relate to the local place and discusses some of the educational implications from this. Recurrent references to the local community were present in some schools and people there explicitly…

The lion's share of writing about education improvement for the past two decades has focused on improving urban schools. Given the yawning gaps between the low-income and minority students that populate those schools and their suburban counterparts, this makes a great deal of sense. Unfortunately, this focus has neglected the tens of millions of…

Using repeated cross-sectional nationally representative data, we demonstrate how the teacher labor markets for rural contexts are different from those in urban-suburban areas. We also show that teacher attrition is not uniform across various rural settings. In particular, novice teachers in rural schools in sparsely populated states are more…

This paper summarizes themes of rural teaching and rural students' experiences of initial teacher education programs based on focus group data of 25 Canadian northern rural and Indigenous teachers and early childhood educators. Inductive analyses of focus group data identified themes related to living and teaching in northern rural communities. A…

In this article the focus is on the relationship between rural location and education outcomes, a field that has not received enough attention either by educational authorities or by educational researchers. Main goals are to argue for an increased focus on rural education and for the need for contextualisation of educational research in general.…

Fourteen percent of the nation's population lives in rural communities, and one in five K-12 students attends a rural school. This is a substantial portion of the population, but it's far too often overlooked by education analysts, advocates, and policymakers. Rural communities tend to face some persistent challenges, including higher rates of…

A fifth of US children live in rural areas with limited access to the informal learning opportunities available to their metropolitan counterparts. High-speed broadband internet access can be an important vehicle for delivering opportunities at home and outside of the classroom. In an attempt to explore what current data say about children's…

To support rural postsecondary students' college access and completion, researchers, policy makers, and educators need a more comprehensive understanding of their demographic characteristics and financial needs, especially compared to nonrural students. Previous rural-nonrural analyses have not disaggregated students by degree type (bachelor's,…

Based on a review of previous research, the paper describes the distinctive characteristics of rural areas and communities and the factors typically associated with shaping students' learning experience in rural contexts. Data from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015 and the Teaching and Learning International…

In 2008 it was agreed by the Australian Education Ministers that a national curriculum be implemented with the rationale that it would help to ensure high quality education for all young Australians (ACARA, 2012b). One reason for the shift to a standardised national curriculum is so that "School and curriculum authorities can collaborate to…

Overall, one in four rural children live in poverty, and of the 50 U.S. counties with the highest child-poverty rates, 48 are rural. Drug usage abounds. In the mid-2000s, rural 8th graders were 59 percent more likely than peers in large cities to use methamphetamines and 104 percent more likely to use any amphetamine, according to the National…

This article addresses the changes in the spatial distribution of elementary schools in Czechia in the second half of the 20th century and the consequences of these changes on the functioning of rural communities. The spatial distribution of elementary schools, the shape of their catchment areas, and the regional and local communities connected…