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America's rural schools are performing as well as their urban counterparts, but much remains to be done if we hope to make our rural education system one of the best in the world.
A rural renaissance in the 1990s has refocused attention on schools and other institutions that shape economic and social outcomes. Perceptions of rural schools and the quality of rural education have moved away from the condescension of an earlier era. Where rural schools were once viewed as out of touch with modern society, suffering from geographic isolation and the inefficiencies of small enrollments and lack of specialization, they are often now praised for some of those same attributes. Mounting statistical and anecdotal evidence of the benefits of small school size and close ties with the local community have led to favorable comparisons of rural schools with their often oversized urban counterparts.
Until recently, the lack of data limited our ability to assess the performance of rural schools and their long-term impacts on students and communities. That has changed. We are now better able to describe general trends in the quality of rural education and identify specific strengths and weaknesses in the entire range of educational institutions and processes that make up the rural education system.
The picture that emerges from the most recent research is that rural schools are generally performing as well as urban schools. A key measure of performance-standardized test scores-demonstrates that rural students in the 1990s can easily hold their own.
But weaknesses remain-partly the inevitable downside of small size and lack of specialization and partly a manifestation of the socioeconomic milieus that distinguish many rural areas from urban areas. For example, compared with urban youth, rural youth are less likely to be academically prepared for and attend college. Thus, rural schools are competitive at grooming workers for jobs in the lower and middle ranges of the skill distribution but have still not caught up with urban, and particularly suburban, school districts in preparing students for advanced education.
The past decade has emerged as a critical moment for many rural labor markets. Computer use in the workplace has accelerated, and rural firms appear to be adopting high-tech production and management methods at about the same rate as...