Tennessee’s public schools serve more rural students (over 330,000) than all but nine other states, and face some of the toughest rural socioeconomic challenges in the country, including high poverty rates and high rates of adult unemployment. Compounding these challenges, rural spending on instruction is among the nation’s lowest, and it is most likely low across the state, since revenue is fairly equally distributed among rural schools. Schools and districts are large, and graduation rates and scores on the National Assessment on Educational Progress are some of the worst in the nation. All of this ranks Tennessee seventh in the nation in need of rural education improvement and attention.