The Rural Education Finance Center (REFC), a program of the Rural Trust, is dedicated to improving educational opportunity for rural children by reducing inequities in state school finance systems, strengthening the fiscal practices of rural schools, and ensuring the adequacy of funding to rural schools.
 
Although more than one-quarter of U.S. schoolchildren go to schools in rural areas or small towns of fewer than 25,000 people, these schools remain largely invisible in the debate over school funding because they are small, serve sparsely populated areas, and are widely dispersed.
 
Rural areas are fiscally squeezed between three forces: An inadequate local tax base from which to build and support schools, resistance to paying local property taxes, and a state policy environment in which rural schools are often perceived as a burden on wealthier areas.