Jessica Grose of the New York Times wrote earlier this week about the plight of rural schools. The headline is "Rural Kids Need More than Vocational School." Her newsletter was inspired by Beth Macy's new book, Paper Girl, which claims to be about rural America--broadly defined. In the book, Macy takes up some rural K-12 education deficits, and she cites the work of Prof. Catharine Biddle of the University of Maine.
[Biddle] explained that while [a range of wraparound] services are also in demand in high-need urban and suburban districts, it’s a particular challenge to offer them in rural America. Most school systems run on economies of scale and a per-student funding model; it poses a great challenge to provide wraparound services to districts with fewer students who have a lot of needs and who are also spread out. Rural districts already face a teacher shortage, and earlier this year, the federal Department of Education cut funding to teacher training programs that might have helped alleviate some of those shortages.
In one paper Biddle wrote, where she spoke to over 100 educators in rural Maine about how they dealt with children with adverse childhood experiences, a teacher mentioned that the school nurse is on site just once a month, and that teachers feel as if they are acting as ad hoc social workers on a daily basis.
Thus, Grose's column, among other things, points out is the spatial inequality between rural and urban. Other not-so-distant NYT attention to rural educational deficits is here (NYT Magazine 2021).
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