Home, Family, and Community: Ingredients in the Rural Education Equation.

Rural communities have precisely the qualities for which the critics of american schools are now looking, Ms. Herzog and Mr. Pittman point out. As educators, we need to recognize these strengths, take advantage of them, and build the preparation of rural educators around them. JONATHAN KOZOL spoke to an audience of education students at our rural university while Savage Inequalities was being passionately debated around the country.(1) He was exciting and inspiring and appealed to the ideals of our students. One graduate student, referring to the rural schools she had experienced both as a student and as a teacher, said with some relief, I'm glad our schools aren't that bad. We don't have any of those problems. Her comment reflected a commonly held belief that rural schools are in good condition, especially in contrast to schools in urban where racism, violence, financial problems, and general decay are prevalent images. But is she correct? Are rural schools really in good condition? Like their urban counterparts, schools in rural face financial inequalities, but they also have problems that are uniquely rural. A comprehensive report on rural schools found high rates of poverty and low levels of educational attainment. It found that rural schools were staffed by younger, less well-educated faculty members and administrators who earn lower salaries and benefits than their metropolitan counterparts. The report documents persistent problems related to rural school finance, teacher compensation and quality, facilities, curriculum, and student achievement.(2) Rural communities are said to be suffering from a bitter harvest, with the well-educated emigrating to metropolitan for better jobs.(3) Rural schools have image problems that stem from long-standing negative attitudes toward country people. These problems stand in stark contrast to our student's naive reaction to Kozol. However, she was correct in some respects. Rural schools and communities have strengths that should be part of the prescription for remedying problems and directing changes in rural education. In order to develop an image of the shape of reform in rural education, it is necessary to understand the problems as well as the strengths of rural social and educational communities. The Problems What is rural? One problem facing rural education is the lack of a definitive understanding of the meaning of rural.(4) The word is often defined from an outsider's and urban perspective, in much the same way that the dominant culture has traditionally spoken for minority groups. The U.S. government's term for a rural area is non-metropolitan. What does nonmetropolitan mean? An area without skyscrapers and interstate junctions? The Census Bureau defines rural as communities with fewer than 2,500 inhabitants or fewer than 1,000 inhabitants per square mile. Imagine the silliness of placing New York City or Chicago in a category defined as nonrural with more than 2,500 or as areas without barns. The pervasiveness of the urban perspective seems to have contributed to a weak identity among our students: they often appear apologetic for being from the country. Attitudes toward ruralness. Another basic problem that students of rural education must face is the preponderance of negative attitudes toward rural people and places. As Toni Haas argues, modern American society does not value ruralness, prejudices against rural people and places are strong.(5) Our students seem to have internalized those prejudices, and they exhibit an inferiority complex about their origins. Although the term rural conjures up rich images, many of those images are based on negative stereotypes. Consider one rural image with roots in antiquity, the country bumpkin - the healthy, naive, slow-witted, unsophisticated, ignorant, ultraconservative, penniless soul from beyond the outer fringes of the interstate. …