As a result of a previous study made to determine what it was like to teach in inner-city schools of America, a complementary study was conducted which focused on the problems of teaching the rural disadvantaged. Together they provided a data base which identified prominent educational problems characteristic of impoverished urban and rural settings. As opposed to random sampling, an extreme group sampling procedure was adopted to specify problems peculiar to the least affluent rural teaching context. These rural, disadvantaged schools were identified first by county and then by the most disadvantaged elementary schools within these counties. The principal instrument used was the Teacher Problem Inventory (TPI) used for the first study and expanded by rural school teachers to include a few specific problems. The expanded TPI was administered to 354 teachers. The responses were then classified on the basis of frequency or severity scales. Only those significant items weighted in the direction of the often or serious categories were reported. Comparisons of the data from both studies were made which show great similarities and notable differences, which are further depicted with tables. (CM)