Why Rural Matters 2005: News Conference Transcript


Last Updated: May 11, 2005
 

Transcript of virtual news conference for Why Rural Matters 2005

Featuring Rachel Tompkins, Ed.D., President, Rural School and Community Trust; Jerry Johnson, Ed.D., State and Regional Policy Studies Manager; and Marty Strange, Director of Policy Programs at the Rural Trust

Rachel Tompkins:
The Rural School and Community Trust is pleased to release Why Rural Matters 2005: The Facts about Rural Education in the 50 States. This is the third in our biannual series aimed at informing policymakers, planners, community leaders, and journalists. This report is unique. Nowhere else are available statistics combined to indicate the condition of rural education in each state. We rank the states on various criteria, and overall; both as a way of highlighting the common issues and indicating the diversity in the country. And we supplement the numbers with an essay analyzing and interpreting the numbers from our perspective, and for the first time, in this edition, we make some policy recommendations. Those of us who live or work in rural places are alternately saddened and angered by the level of ignorance about rural America, and the stereotypes and prejudices that are allowed to substitute for knowledge. Our personal feelings, however, pale beside the real harm done by lack of attention from policymakers, and the bad decisions that can be made from a lack of knowledge.

Who are we anyway? Well, the Rural School and Community Trust is a national nonprofit organization addressing the relationship between good schools and thriving rural communities. We work in some of the poorest, most challenging rural places. We involve young people in learning, link to their communities, we work at improving the quality of teaching and school leadership, we work with many who advocate for appropriate state educational policies, and we address the critical issue of funding for rural schools. Our work is funded by several national and regional foundations, by government grants and contracts from both state and federal agencies, by individual donors, and sales of services. This report was financed in part by the Walter Annenberg Foundation. The authors of the report, as Jason said, Jerry Johnson and Marty Strange will give you a more detailed briefing. I simply want to highlight a few key overall facts.

First, there are lots of children and lots of schools in small rural towns, almost 9 million children and over 25,000 schools. That's 19% of public school children and 30% of schools. While these numbers have declined since 2000, poverty and diversity in rural places have increased. Fully 37% of children received free and reduced price lunches. That's a lot higher than most non-rural places. Least understood, I think, is the diversity of rural places. The rural population in 3 states is less than 50% white: Alaska, Hawaii, and New Mexico. In another 8 states, at least one-third of rural students are minority: Arkansas, Mississippi, California, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Texas, and North Carolina. But within this minority group, there's great diversity also. Hawaii and Alaska have large populations of indigenous people. New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma have a combination of Native American and Hispanic. Southern states, especially Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina, have substantial African-American populations. And in California, a most diverse state, the rural minority population is largely Hispanic. We include for the first time in this edition facts about school finance, achievement, and school dropouts. Some states with high rural poverty and great challenges, like South Dakota, do well on these outcome measures. Some states that have much less rural poverty and challenges, like Ohio, do poorly on the outcomes. Ohio is particularly notable for noting next-to-last in expenditure per pupil on instruction in rural areas. More than anything, we hope this publication helps you have a realistic picture of rural education. The many small community-connected schools across the country are exemplars of the very best in public schooling. The rural places with great persistent poverty, like many places in my home state of West Virginia, continue to challenge all of us to make the investments necessary (inaudible) new generation of hopeful, humane, productive, and engaged citizens. And now Marty Strange, my colleague, the Director of Policy Programs at the Rural Trust and the Chairman of the Randolph, Vermont Chamber of Commerce, will give you an overview of this report.

Jason:
If I may just jump in very quickly, Rachel, for those reporters who joined the call after Rachel began her remarks, I just want to give you two quick bits of information. One, you are on mute until approximately 30 minutes after the hour, when you will then be given an opportunity to ask questions; and to indicate your desire to ask a question, just hit *1. And two, I want to point you to a website where all of this information can be found right now. There are a lot of facts and figures here, as Rachel indicated, and you can follow along by going to www.ruraledu.org/whyruralmatters, and follow along as Marty and Jerry give their presentations. Thanks, and Marty, take it over.

Marty Strange:
Thank you, Jason, and Rachel. Good afternoon, or good morning to those of you who are in those times zones that are still in morning. I want to begin with a small caution about this report. We used the latest data that we can get that's both universally available for all the states and reliable. We can't keep up with the very most recent developments. We know, especially in areas of public policy like school finance, that the framework is constantly changing within individual states, and it's very likely that some of the things that we refer to in this report have, since the data was gathered, have been changed by the states. And we hope, for the most part, they've been changed for the better, and we'll be happy if they are. The study is valuable because it provides a snapshot of rural education that illustrates its complexity and diversity. Rural is often mistaken as simple or uncomplicated or plain, and it's none of those things, and I hope that this report makes that clear. I want to focus on some of the policy outcomes that we describe here. We consider both direct student outcomes — primarily graduation rates and test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — and we consider structural factors, like school size and class size; matters that both influence student outcome, well-proven by research, and are within the control of policymakers. We consider all of those to be policy outcomes that we analyze.

When it comes to the direct outcomes — graduation rates, the range is from 50% in South Carolina, 50% of rural students graduate in 4 years; that's the lowest rate in the nation. Just over 90% of the rural students in Nebraska graduate in that same timeframe; that's the highest rate. In general, the Plains and the Midwest states have the high graduation rates, and the lowest graduation rates are in the Southeast, Southwest, and the far West. Somewhat similar patterns apply to NAEP test scores. The lowest rural NAEP test scores are located primarily in the Southwest, the far West, and the Southeast; and the states with the highest rural NAEP scores are mostly in the Northeast, followed by the northern Plains and the Great Lakes regions. When it comes to the policy indicators that are about structural factors, there's an almost endless way to make interesting observations, and we organized this report to encourage reporters and others to do exactly that, and I'm just going to — I'm going to cite one as a — by way of example. If you look at the indicators in the policy outcomes gauge that talk about the general fund revenue gap — that's the range in general fund revenues for rural school districts — and you look at expenditures for instruction in rural schools, you find a very interesting pattern. 9 of the 10 states that spend the least on instruction per rural student are also among the one-half of the states whose overall spending per student varies least among rural schools. In other words, these states tend to treat all their schools about the same when it comes to instructional spending: quite badly. By contrast, at the other end of the spectrum, 9 of the 10 states that spend the most on average on instruction in rural schools are also among the half of the states with the greatest disparity in spending among rural schools. In those cases, the high average spending rate probably, almost certainly, masks very great inequities and considerable inadequacy in the funding system for a lot of rural schools. And it's important, in reporting these data, to be sensitive to the reality — as is always the case in a rural situation looking at national data — averages tend to mask very wide variance within any indicator.

Despite the variations that we see, there's a lot of consistency in the findings of this report with the previous reports that we have done, and that's despite the fact that we have used many new indicators, and Jerry Johnson will talk more about that in a moment. But 3 regions always seem to come to the surface no matter what the indicators are that we look at: the Mississippi River Delta region — Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana; central Appalachia, primarily West Virginia and Tennessee and Kentucky; and the Southeast, usually excluding Florida, the band of states that are on the coast in the Southeast. So in many ways, this report affirms the focus of earlier reports on the problems and challenges of rural education in the South. No matter how you look at it, these states tend to come to the top. They face — they're very rural. They face the toughest challenges in rural education, and they tend to have policies that favor large schools, large districts, and large classes, none of which is particularly good for achievement, especially among lower-income students. In the previous report, I should point out, northern New England and the northern Plains appeared as high priority regions. They do not in this report, and the reason is very straightforward. We increased emphasis on poverty and residential mobility in this report, we reduced emphasis on declining enrollment as a measure of distress in rural areas, and we increased emphasis on policy outcomes. And for all of those reasons, northern New England and the northern Plains fall lower onto our set of indicators. For the same reasons, the Southwest — Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Oklahoma if you want to consider it in the Southwest — become more visible. There's more poverty, more mobility, worse outcomes. One of the things that we did in this report is to calculate the gap between a state's ranking on the policy outcomes gauge, and its ranking on the poverty and the challenges gauges. What we want to do is determine if the outcome rankings are better or worse than would be predicted by the level of poverty and other challenges that the schools in that state face, and we found 2 very interesting patterns. Among the worst policy outcomes relative to these challenges are rural states — or rural schools, I mean, in states that have large urban populations. 4 contiguous Northeastern states come to the surface immediately: Maryland, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio have very large rural populations, but they're demographically overwhelmed by much larger urban populations, and rural student achievement in these states, although not absolutely bad, is not strong given the relatively low barriers to achievement that the rural schools in these states face. These states are underachievers, and it's probably related to a consistent pattern of policy choices that are made. These states favor larger rural schools, larger rural districts, larger rural class sizes, higher transportation costs. As Rachel mentioned a moment ago, Ohio ranks second-lowest in rural per-pupil expenditure for instruction. I guess rural Ohioans can say, "Thank heavens for Mississippi," because that's the only one that ranks lower — or higher, I should say, on the low-level expenditure.

So it appears that these states have adopted kind of an urban, large-school model for their rural communities, and it is producing mediocrity in outcomes for students who ought to be doing better than they are. And I want to point out that although these 4 are largely urban states, nearly 1.3 million students attend their rural schools. That's about 15% of all U.S. rural students; but bear in mind, they constitute a very small minority of the students in these states, and as the report says, they're largely invisible, like the hidden country cousins. Now, contrasting that, there's a group of states where policy outcomes are very strong despite challenges and high levels of poverty. These are overachieving states. They're predominantly rural states, and they're primarily states that have small, independent rural school districts. They have small class sizes, they have governance systems that are decentralized, their rural test scores tend to be higher than would be predicted given poverty levels in those communities, and the rural graduation rates are among the highest in the nation. This includes a lot of states in the northern Plains and the West, but these rural schools are very much at risk due to an almost constant rant against their smallness. At the same time, many of the states are suffering depopulation and declining enrollment in the poorest rural regions. They're facing more educationally challenging rural populations every year. Some of them practice kind of an attrition by fiscal asphyxiation, if not forced consolidation of these schools. It's kind of an abandonment process. They're starving the geese that would lay golden eggs if they were properly fed. No Child Left Behind is a slogan we use a lot in American education these days; it has to mean that no place can be left behind, and a lot of these communities, their schools are being left behind.

We recommend a number of policy changes for states. The scale of schooling ought to be kept small. There's a large body of research that shows that smaller schools and districts are more effective, especially in dealing with low-income communities. States cannot invent too many ways to keep their schools small or to make them smaller. Poverty is a crucial factor. Most states provide some additional funding to schools based on poverty levels, but it's almost always too little, and it needs to be increased in most states. Same thing is true with respect to the growing diversity in rural areas. It creates unique challenges. In many cases, communities that have had basically no minority population in the past, or very little, now are facing the reality of having to deal with a richly diversified American society. It's good for those communities in the long run, but it does create immediate problems that the school system has to cope with. The facilities issues need to be addressed, and it can be addressed best by helping communities treat their facilities' needs holistically, not looking at the school as a separate facility but looking at it as part of a multiple-use facility that the community gets a lot of use out for many purposes. And then finally, I would want to say that the use of distance learning technology is increasing, and it's increasing to a considerable extent in the right way. We need to have the kind of two-way interactive television capability that allows small districts to congregate in clusters by which they can share both students and faculty in creative learning programs where everybody sees each other on the TV screen, and interacts with each other in an ordinary classroom setting. So those are the policy recommendations I want to highlight, and after Jerry completes a further description of the data in the report, I'll be happy to answer any questions.

Jason:
Thank you, Marty. Just another quick interjection by me. I want to let everybody know that in addition to all the materials that are already on the website, that www.ruraledu.org/whyruralmatters, a full transcript of this audio news conference will be available, and at that same URL, by Friday. So rest assured all these numbers are retrievable. All right, let's turn it over to Jerry, who's going to wrap it up, and then we'll get to questions.

Jerry Johnson:
Thanks, Jason. I'll remind you once again about the PowerPoint presentation that's on the website. My comments will follow that pretty closely if you want to follow it, or just use it to check facts later. I'm going to be throwing out a lot of numbers here. A few notes about the methodology that we used in the organization of the study. We used publicly available data, primarily from the National Center for Education Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. We used the National Center for Education Statistics definition of rural, which is "a school or district that's located in a community with fewer than 2,500 people." The report is organized as 22 separate statistical indicators that are themselves organized under 4 gauges: an importance gauge, a poverty gauge, a non-poverty challenges gauge, and a policy outcomes gauge. We rank the 50 states on each of the 22 individual indicators. We then take the rankings within each gauge and average them to compute 4 gauge rankings, and we then average the 4 gauge rankings to compute a rural education priority gauge. As Marty mentioned, we've used some new indicators this time around that we didn't use in previous reports. In fact, fewer than one-third of the indicators used in this report were used in previous versions. This is partly because there's nothing new to report on indicators based on information taken from the Census, but it's also because we want to look at rural education through many lenses in order to present a fuller portrait of its complexity. One particular change we made is, we've given poverty additional weight, made it its own gauge in this one, and attempted to capture the ways in which poverty influences schooling and achievement in a more complex way, recognizing that poverty is not only a strong influence; it's something that influences schooling at different levels and in different ways. So we've included indicators that measure not only student poverty, using free and reduced meal rate, but family income levels, community income levels, a measure of the property wealth that's available as a tax base for local communities. We've also added some new challenges — student mobility, the percentage of English language learners in the community, the percentage of adult high school graduates, and percentage of students receiving special education services — as challenges that make the work of schooling more difficult. Policy outcomes we've added — Marty referred to it — a revenue gap, which measures the range between extremely high-funded and extremely low-funded rural districts within a state. We've used a measure of organizational scale that is a composite measure of school and district size, and we report the median scale for each state.

Now I'd like to walk you through the 4 gauges one at a time and give you some information that came out of the analyses within each gauge. The importance gauge measures the relative and absolute importance of rural education as part of the state's overall educational system. Of the 12 states where rural education has the greatest importance, half are in the Great Plains or the Midwest. Others are in northern New England, central Appalachia, and the Southeast. More than half of all rural students attend school in just 13 states, including some of the nation's most populous and most urban states. I think Marty mentioned this. The states are Texas, Ohio, Michigan, New York, California, and Florida. Texas has the nation's largest rural student population, at over 530,000, just slightly less than the combined rural student population of Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. North Carolina and Alabama are the only 2 states to rank high in terms of the absolute size of the rural population and in proportional size of the rural population. We might consider that a measure of rural density. There are 13 states that have at least half of their schools in rural areas, and 14 other states, at least one-third of all schools are rural.

Next gauge we look at is the poverty gauge. The highest overall poverty rates in the nation are in the Southeast and the Mississippi Delta — Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama; the Great Plains — Oklahoma, North Dakota, and South Dakota; central Appalachia — Kentucky and West Virginia; and the Southwest — that's New Mexico and Arizona; and then also in Hawaii and Idaho. In 15 states, more than half of all female-headed households with preschool-age children live below the federal poverty line. That has clear policy implications for early childhood education programs. Property wealth is a measure of the tax base available for generating local revenue that we looked at, and property wealth ranges from less than $70,000 per pupil in 5 states — North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, New Mexico, and Arkansas — to more than $350,000 per pupil in 3 Northeastern states: Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey.

Looked at challenges. Five of the 13 states facing the greatest non-poverty challenges are in the Southeast — Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana; and 6 more in the West and the Southwest — New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, California, Hawaii, and Oklahoma. In 5 Southwestern and Western states — New Mexico, Arizona, California, Texas, and Nevada — over 6.5% of the student population is learning English. In New Mexico, 14.5% of the student population is learning English. Nearly one-third of all rural adults in Kentucky lack a high school diploma or GED, and in 10 other states, that figure is at least 25%. In Rhode Island, New Mexico, and Florida, nearly 1 in 5 rural students qualifies for special education services. 13 other states have 15% or higher student populations — special education student populations. 1 in 5 rural children has changed residences within a 15-month period in 4 states: Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, and Alaska. And 15 other states, all in the West and South, the figure is 15%.

A few notes about rural diversity. Rachel shared with you some information about the levels of diversity in rural areas in some states, but just some additional numbers behind that — following are some percentages of rural minority students in these states. In Hawaii, 77% of the students are non-white. In New Mexico, it's 71%. Alaska, it's 52%. Arizona, it's 50%. Mississippi, 45%. California, 44%. South Carolina, 42%. And as Marty mentioned, I would add that aggregate statistics like these, while useful, do not allow for comprehending the kinds of rapid changes that we're seeing in the demography of specific communities. Midwest and Great Plains states do not stand out when we consider state averages, as we've done here. There is some sizable current research indicating that these are areas where some of the most dramatic changes are taking place within specific communities, however.

We looked at policy outcomes. Rural student/teacher ratios range from just over 11 students per teacher in Wyoming to more than 20 students per teacher in California. Instructional expenditures range from just over $3,000 per pupil in Mississippi to more than $6,600 for rural students in New York and Alaska. Ohio's was mentioned as second; they spend $3,439 per pupil on instruction. The revenue gap that measures the range between districts receiving a lot of revenue, and then districts receiving very little revenue per pupil — 5 states have revenue gaps larger than $5,000 per pupil. The largest revenue gap is found in Oregon at $7,400 per pupil, separating the districts at the top from the districts at the bottom. Scale, organizational scale I mentioned, which is a composite of school and district size — the largest organizational scale in rural areas in the nation is found in North Carolina; the organizational scale there is 400 times larger than the organizational scale in the smallest — or the smallest organizational scale in the nation, which is in Montana. 400 times larger. 12 of the 13 states with the largest organizational scale are in the Southeast. These are states with large regional high schools and centralized, often countywide governance systems. The smallest organizational scale is found in the Great Plains and the Midwest.

That concludes my comments.

Jason:
Thank you very much, Jerry. Thanks to Rachel and Marty as well. So we're ready for questions. Again, the way you indicate that you want to ask a question is to hit *1. You get queued up. Eventually the operator will ask you who you are, and then we will announce your name. First question is from the Associated Press, Sarah Cook (phonetic).

Sarah Cook:
Hi, guys. I'm writing in Montana, actually, and I was hoping that someone could kind of elaborate on the results that we're seeing here. This is obviously one of the more rural states in the country, and it sounded like Montana's doing a pretty good job at rural education, but there are still some problems. Could anybody elaborate on that, please?

Marty Strange:
This is Marty. I'll discuss that a little bit. Montana is a state that has a number of problems, challenges that it has to deal with. It has — I think for — you know, the image of Montana nationally is kind of, you know, a Western cowboy image, but in fact, of course, as I'm sure you know, Montana is a state that has a very high percentage of — in its rural areas, a very high percentage of minority students, largely Native Americans. The rates of poverty are high. We rank Montana 14th nationally overall in the level of poverty in the rural areas. So it's dealing with some very serious challenges. Now, you're right when you say that Montana, on the whole, is doing pretty well. If you look at its test scores, they're right in the middle, which, given the level of poverty that they're dealing with, isn't bad. On the other hand, it's very clear that that average masks a great disparity within the state. Montana ranks 5th in the nation with the largest gap in its general fund revenue among rural schools, so that means that you've got a lot of rural schools there who are very poorly funded, and there's probably a close correlation between those schools and the schools that are serving the poorest areas in the state with the smallest property tax base. So — and of course, I — Montana is facing this issue in its court system because the courts there have taken on the question of whether the school funding system is constitutional, and has ruled that it isn't, and they're in a search for a legislative solution now that will remedy that unconstitutionality. So there are some real challenges in Montana. That's not to say that it's a state that doesn't do a lot of things right because it does do a lot of things right, but it's got some funding problems that need to be remedied if you're going to reach into those poorest populations and move them ahead.

Jason:
Okay, thank you, Marty. Next we have Allison Barker (phonetic), also from the Associated Press.

Allison Barker:
Hi. I'm talking from the other end of the spectrum here in West Virginia. You mentioned a little bit about consolidation, and West Virginia, it's usually recognized as having pretty equitable funding of its school systems. But in the state-specific data, you mentioned a little bit about transportation. Can you address consolidation and transportation costs?

Jerry Johnson:
Rachel, this is your home state. Do you want to…?

Rachel Tompkins:
Well, I'll say a couple things. I mean, Marty really can say more. Over the last decade, West Virginia has consolidated, what, a third of its schools? And the bus rides are extraordinary. For those who know the mountains of West Virginia, you don't judge it by how many miles it is; you judge it by how many turns there are to get from one place to another. So 17 miles can take you 45 minutes on a good day. So it's — as the consolidation movement in West Virginia has shifted to consolidating elementary schools, people just haven't been willing to put up with putting 6-year-olds on the bus for an hour and a half each way, and so that has — that, plus substantial effective organizing by a group called Challenge West Virginia, has kind of put the skids on doing more consolidation in the state.

Marty Strange:
Yeah, West Virginia — this is Marty — West Virginia is a case study in policy failure. The decision to respond to a Supreme Court decision there in the early 1980s, requiring overhaul of the funding system, was to close a lot of rural schools, and I believe over a 10-year period, they closed about 325 schools. West Virginia has now the 11th largest-scale set of schools and districts in the country. It spends the highest percentage of its education dollar on transportation costs of any state in the country. And it's dealing with an impoverished population, the lowest per capita rural income in the country, and the highest percentage of rural female-headed households who have preschool-age children living in poverty. So when you're driving school buses for an hour and a half a day up and down mountain roads and into hollers, and you're putting a kindergarten kid on a bus, that kid is going to be — most likely is going to be a child of poverty for whom the research is very clear. What that child needs is a small school close to home that will provide that child with the kind of nourishing relationships that will make that child want to learn, and they're not getting it. And if you look at West Virginia's test scores, they're 12th worst in the nation. So it's a case study in failed policy that is being, I think, gradually reversed as the political climate in the state changes.

Jason:
Thank you very much, Rachel and Marty.

Jerry Johnson:
If I could add something to that real quick, just a number — a figure that's not cited in the report, but that's relevant here, that I've done with another project. The increased level of spending necessary to provide transportation to those large schools in West Virginia robs schools of about $200 a kid, diverts it away from instruction and towards tuition. That's…

Rachel Tompkins:
Transportation.

Jerry Johnson:
Yeah, towards transportation. That's sizable.

Jason:
Thank you, Jerry. Okay, quick reminder: *1 for questions. Next we have Sarah Sparks (phonetic) from Ed Daily. Sarah?

Sarah Sparks:
Hello. I was just wondering — you spoke about distance learning and technology in rural schools as being an important factor. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more about that, particularly about what expansion you've seen and what infrastructure there is in rural schools to support that.

Jerry Johnson:
Marty, that's…

Marty Strange:
You want me to take that?

Jerry Johnson:
Probably that's yours, yeah.

Marty Strange:
Sure. Well, the infrastructure is improving rapidly, and in large part due to the pervasiveness in the use of the eRate program, the federal discount program that allows schools and libraries to invest in infrastructure in the schools. But there are many kinds of distance learning technology, and the kinds that are standardized and centralized and prepackaged and sent out to schools one-way from central sources are probably not the most attractive ways for kids to learn, and they're not the ways that rural students are going to be engaged in the work of learning. We have found that where two-way interactive television is used, so that everybody participating in a class can see and speak simultaneously with everybody else who's in the class, is the best way to go. And if you put clusters of smaller rural schools together — and they don't have to be geographically close together, but sometimes they are and sometimes they're not — but if you put them together in clusters that can share their faculty and share their students, so that you're getting the economies of scale without putting kids on buses and without moving teachers around physically, then you can get the kind of rich curriculum that you want in very small schools. And we've found that when that is the approach taken, that there's a lot more enthusiasm for the work and a lot higher probability that the students will participate and complete the course and do well in the academic work. But there's an awful lot of distance learning technology that's pretty bland, and is really just sort of large-volume discount sale technology that is not particularly attractive to people. It's viewed, by the way, by too many people, as just a cheap way out of providing instruction, and that's not what it should be. It should be a way to fabricate the advantages of large-scale in a small-scale environment.

Jason:
All right, thank you. One more time, *1 for a question. Next we have Brian Friel from the National Journal.

Brian Friel:
Hi. I'm looking at some of the results. For example, in the organizational scale, North Carolina comes out as having sort of huge systems, but they also end up as the highest-ranked Southern state on the NAEP scores. So can you — is something else going on in North Carolina that would give them good NAEP scores despite their large structure?

Marty Strange:
Well, North Carolina is a state that, of course, has been aggressive in the pursuit of standardized testing, and accountability and assessment systems. And I mean, there might be criticism that they're producing good test takers. We chose to use the NAEP test as a way to compare states, not because we think that the standardized test is or ought to be the only way to measure academic achievement — in fact, we — to the contrary, we favor multiple assessments that include standardized testing but include a lot of other approaches to assessment as well — but I think there's no question that North Carolina has proven that you can learn to take tests well, and that they're achieving that in the large-school system. If you look at the — if you — there are some other things that North Carolina is doing. It spends pretty high on instruction. They're well above the median in their expenditure for instruction. They have a student/teacher ratio — let me find it here — do you have the…?

Rachel Tompkins:
14. Right in the middle.

Marty Strange:
Yeah, it's not — the student/teacher ratio is smaller in scale than the organizational scale, is what I'm trying to say. They have put together big schools and districts, but not necessarily big classes, which is a — you know, a nod in the right direction. But what I wanted to say about North Carolina, if you look at the — I'm sorry, hang on just one minute, I got to get to the other page — if you look at their graduation rate, 6th-worst in the nation. A lot of times, what we see with big schools is high test scores, not because they're doing a good job meeting the needs of every kid, but because they're weeding out kids. And when you have high test scores but the 6th-worst graduation rate in the nation, it's not a hallmark of success. You may be doing something of value with the kids who are doing well on the tests; that's an independent issue. But when you only graduate 58.3% of the kids in 9th grade within 4 years, you're not getting the job done for a lot of kids.

Jason:
Okay, thank you very much. Next on the line is Dan from Connecticut.

Dan:
Yeah, hi. I'm with the Waterbury Republican American, and clearly Connecticut has done very well here. I'm just wondering, have you identified anything that needs to be improved, and do you credit mostly the income level and low student mobility for this success?

Marty Strange:
This is Marty. I don't know if I would credit it. I mean, I think — if you're implying that Connecticut isn't facing many challenges, we would agree with you. They're ranked 50th on the list of other challenges and 50th on the list of poverty challenges, so they're dealing from pretty high on the deck; and it's not a hallmark of great accomplishment, facing those odds, to say that you have good test scores and a good graduation rate, which they do. But it's also true that in a lot of environments where you have — where we have more urban settings in which rural kids are an afterthought, often, that you get a lot of alienation, and you don't get good performance. So Connecticut, I think, has got a right to say that it's doing the job it's supposed to be doing. I don't think it's heroic because the conditions they're dealing with are not — don't demand heroism, but I think they're doing a good job with what they've got to work with.

Dan:
And did you identify anything specifically that should be improved?

Jerry Johnson:
Revenue gap.

Marty Strange:
Yeah.

Rachel Tompkins:
Revenue gap's pretty big.

Marty Strange:
The revenue gap is pretty big. In other words, there's disparity in funding among Connecticut's rural schools.

Rachel Tompkins:
I think one of the things that — you know, all the answers on these states, as we go through them, remind me that we need to say that one of the things that's really important to do…

Dan:
I'm sorry, who's talking now?

Rachel Tompkins:
…after we look at the numbers in this report, is to ask a bunch of other questions and go look at why some of these things are the way they are. I mean, I think — as we said, the thing that leaks out here, that if you wanted to say that Connecticut ought to look at something more, it would be the general fund revenue gap, but you can't say a whole lot beyond that about specifically what you ought to do or what ought to happen on that, because you'd have to know where the gap is, and does that gap match up with the kids that aren't doing so well and where you've got problems. There's just a lot more questions you need to answer.

Marty Strange:
Yeah, Dan, that was Rachel Tompkins, President of the Rural Trust.

Dan:
Thanks.

Marty Strange:
The — yeah, and Connecticut is a state that has large regional high schools for the most part. That's why the mean organizational scale is pretty large for the state. It isn't in the top tier of organizational scale, but it's pretty big, and a lot of states with schools that big who are wealthy enough to feel they have choices are looking at ways to break those schools up into smaller units, and that's probably something that has some currency in Connecticut as well.

Jason:
Okay, next we have Cheryl from Successful Farming Magazine.

Cheryl:
Yes. In Iowa, where we're based, we hear a lot about the fact that some of our smaller high schools are not able to offer the Advanced Placement classes, and we hear and read about this as being a reason for them to reorganize further. And I wondered if anything in your report addresses this; plus, in a related question, I do know of at least one rural high school that is a formed charter school that's working with the community college as a way to overcome perhaps some of this, and I just wonder what kind of a — is there a lot of this going on? And is it worth the importance that we hear about it, in terms of the AP coursework for college preparation?

Jerry Johnson:
Rachel, do you want to address that?

Rachel Tompkins:
I'll take a crack at that initially. I think it would be a really inefficient strategy to reorganize schools and consolidate schools in order to offer Advanced Placement courses to the small number of students that are likely to take them. I do, however, believe that there are a lot of ways to offer not only Advanced Placement but upper division courses, and the dual-enrollment kinds of courses you're talking about that are allowed when you have a partnership between a high school and a community college, or a high school and a college. There are ways to do that, making use of distance learning and a variety of other ways, and yes, there are a lot of places around the country that are doing that. In fact, there's a lot of consideration these days on trying to build ever more connections between the K-12 system and higher education, and doing it in a variety of ways. You know, there's a lot of buzz around early college high schools, and in fact, there are a lot of people in — a lot of schools in rural areas that I'm familiar with that have moved to dual enrollment and relationships with community colleges without going to charter status. I mean, they're just doing it as part of the regular routine. I think it's a good idea, and I think that moving to consolidate or reorganize schools based upon the need to offer a few students upper division or Advanced Placement courses is not a good first step to take.

Cheryl:
Thank you.

Marty Strange:
Yeah, Iowa, by the way, is — this is Marty, Marty Strange — Iowa is a state that really spends pretty modestly on instruction in its schools. Iowa's schools are not inefficient, their rural schools, and of course, their graduation rate is second only to their neighbor, Nebraska. And their test scores are not the highest in the nation, but they're in the second tier, the second quartile as we put it. And it's a state that has very small schools that are very effective at working kids through and getting them to graduate on time and getting them to do pretty well on tests, and it's a state whose educational system is really something that it's long been proud of, and it has good reason to be. And dismantling it in favor of a consolidation strategy so that you can offer some AP courses — I don't know, the experience in a lot of states that we've been in is that AP courses are — when you consolidate schools in order to achieve the economies of scale necessary to offer AP courses, what you find is that kids are so burdened by the time requirements associated with travel to and from these larger schools that they simply don't have the time or the energy, or at least don't choose, to take the AP courses. There's a very interesting study in Nebraska that didn't look at AP courses per se, but looked at the relationship between the size of schools, the curriculum offerings, and the rate of participation by students in the curriculum. And what they found is that as you get bigger schools, yes, you get more courses, and yes, you get less participation by students.

Jason:
All right, thank you, Marty. That wraps up the question portion. Rachel, Marty, or Jerry, do you have anything you want to say as sort of a closing remark?

Rachel Tompkins:
Well, I want to thank everyone for being on. We'll be happy to respond to questions that people have after this is over. As I said at the beginning, we really hope that the facts in this report give all of you some realistic sense of what life is like in rural places and rural schools. A very diverse picture of rural America emerges from this, and we look forward to reading all your stories about it.

Jason:
Thank you very much, Rachel. Rachel referenced following up with questions. You can call (202) 667-0901 and ask for Stacy Garrett. You can also call (202) 822-3919 and ask for Alison Yaunches. Or you can e-mail Stacy.Garrett@widmeyer.com. And we promise we will get back to you and get your questions answered. Thank you all for participating. We appreciate the time you've given us, and we hope you have a good afternoon. Bye-bye.

Why Rural Matters 2005: The Facts about Rural Education in the 50 States is available online as a PDF document. Print copies are also available for purchase..