Constructing and Reconstructing the “Rural School Problem”

Abstract

This chapter examines 100 years of rural education research in the context of the demographic, migratory, economic, and social changes that have affected rural America in the past century. The authors conducted a systematic review of the literature on rural teacher recruitment, retention, and training as a case study to examine the constancy and change in the construction of the “rural school problem,” a concept drawn from early work by urban education reformers. They found that attention to rurality as a factor affecting education boomed in the first half of the 20th century thanks to a commitment to achieving a kind of modernity, an emphasis that waned in the second half of that century when modernity was believed to have been more or less achieved. Neoliberal economic policies and the precariousness of rural economies revived interest in the resilience and adaptability of rural America in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, however, leading to a renaissance in rural education research but one largely restricted to a few subfield journals. The authors discuss the implications of these trends for the future of rural education research, including the use of place as a lens for considering education.

The story of rural America in the 20th century is one of significant change, with regard to the physical landscapes, economic structures, migrations of populations, and diverse ways of rural life (Bailey, Jensen, & Ransom, 2014). The increasing trend toward a globalized, integrated world economy has had complex implications for many rural communities in the United States. Farming communities have seen the increasing consolidation of family farms on industrial agricultural models (Bonnano, 2014). Communities with economies based on resource extraction have experienced economic booms and busts as logging, energy, and manufacturing companies pursue opportunities for cheaper production and labor abroad. New technological developments, particularly in energy, have changed the intensity of the mark these industries leave on rural landscapes (Schafft & Biddle, 2014, 2015; Sherman, 2009). Global migration patterns and growing populations have led to expanding cultural and ethnic diversity in some rural places and suburbanization or urbanization in others (Bustamante, Brown, & Irby, 2010; D. S. Massey & Capoferro, 2008; Salaman, 2003). Some rural communities have experienced intense outmigration of young people in search of economic opportunity in the face of local economic decline (Carr & Kefalas, 2009; Corbett, 2007; Petrin, Schafft, & Meece, 2014). In many rural communities the local populations are aging more rapidly than in cities, as suburban and urban baby boomers relocate to amenity-rich rural places and the rural poor, unable to move, age in place (Glasgow & Berry, 2013).

The changing social circumstances of America’s diverse and changing rural communities have created new opportunities and new challenges for rural schools and school districts. While the effects of these broad social forces have led to different outcomes in different communities, many rural communities have been marked by declining industries or boom-bust cycles of opportunity that complicate local opportunities for recent graduates, the consolidation of long-time community institutions such as local schools, the aging of White populations, and the introduction of young, new-destination immigrants, often from the global south, with educational needs new to the communities they enter (Bustamante et al., 2010; McLaughlin, Shoff, & Demi, 2014). In many rural areas, schools have faced these challenges in the context of increasing fiscal constraints, as tax bases have eroded and state and federal budget cuts have had implications at the local level (Strange, Johnson, Showalter, & Klein, 2012). While schools everywhere are facing similar issues, rural schools often face the additional burden of being one the few local social institutions in sparsely populated communities, and sometimes also of serving as one of the largest employers.

Over the course of this century, educational reformers and researchers have tried to make sense of the unique educational needs of rural communities within these changing social and economic contexts. Just over a century ago, the U.S. Commission on Country Life (1909) issued a definitive report on the status of life in rural America. Charged by President Theodore Roosevelt with the task of outlining ways to make rural American life more attractive, the report detailed, among other topics, deficiencies in the condition of country schools. Shortly after the report’s release, Ellwood Cubberley (1912), a prominent education reformer, deplored the state of rural schools, referring to the issue as the “rural school problem” (p. 75), a term that came to frame the nationwide interest of the time in education reform specifically for rural places and people. Cubberley’s lament was echoed by many of his contemporary progressive education reformers, until rural education eventually came to be seen as “the gravest of American problems” (Brooks, 1926, p. 155). Sixty years later, DeYoung (1987) described the zeitgeist of education reform from that era as “in essence based on a notion that rural ways of life were, and would increasingly become, archaic in an emerging urban and cosmopolitan America” (p. 124). It is possible to see this in the writings of Cubberley (1912), Foght (1912), Chase (1917), and others concerned about the provinciality of rural life and people, the administrative inefficiency of rural schools, and the lack of adequate preparation for rural teachers.

All research requires problem definition (Creswell, 2014; Kuhn, 1962; Maxwell, 2012), and the coalescing of research communities happens, in some sense, over agreement on the nature and scope of the problems to be addressed (Kuhn, 1962). Debates over parameters, term definitions, salient factors, and conceptual relationships dominate these kinds of discussions. As the field of education research has developed, agreement has fluctuated over whether the concept of place (the meaning that one gives to space)—rurality, in particular—is a valuable lens through which to view educational issues. However, the power of these largely urbanite educational reformers’ acceptance of this construction of rurality itself as “a problem” still echoes in the field today. Although the nature of the rural problem as defined by Cubberley and other education reformers of his generation may have changed, education researchers and advocates throughout the past century have attempted to document the complexities of rural schools’ adaptations to changing circumstances and to continue to educate rural youth for a future in which the sustainability of rural life is uncertain.

The purpose of the present review of the literature was to understand how education researchers in the past century have constructed the rural school problem through a case study of one recurring issue in the literature—rural teacher training, recruitment, and retention. In our review, we paid particular attention to how education researchers have couched rurality and defined or redefined the “rural school problem” over time. Tracing this lineage through this case is important to understanding the evolving relationship between attention to context and particularly spatial difference within the growing coherence of education research as a field in this century. We situate our discussion of these changes within the context of the social and economic forces affecting rural communities broadly throughout this time period, drawing on literature from sociology and rural sociology in order to better understand the sensitivity and responsiveness of education research to these social and economic changes.

Theoretical Framework

To identify relevant literature and the most significant changes influencing the landscape of rural education research, we relied on a theoretical lens that allowed us to consider sociocultural change, the advent of rural education as a scholarly field, and the larger perspective of education research that contextualizes and nests these issues as symbols brought into dialogue with one another. Using symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969) and transactional theory, we considered how conceptions of rurality and rural education ascribe meanings to the very condition of rurality. Symbolic interactionism allowed us to understand the meaning making that occurs through social interaction and the subjective meaning one gives to abstract ideas (e.g., “rural”) by examining how language is used to create discourse and interpretations (Blumer, 1969).

We also relied on transactional theory to understand the mutually shaping experience between the text (e.g., the literature on rural education research) and the reader (Rosenblatt, 1978, 1938/1983, 2005). Just as social interactions and meaning making are subjective, so too is reading. The reader does not come to a text devoid of experience; rather, the reader comes with his or her own unique experiences with language and the sociocultural contexts that have shaped those experiences. These histories inform the reader’s understanding, and according to Rosenblatt (1978, 1938/1983, 2005), these transactions shape the reader and the text during the process of reading or, in this case, the research.

This theoretical frame allowed us to examine language and discourse as symbols and to understand not simply that change has occurred but also how change is brought into dialogue with education research.

Method

To explore the issue of how the “rural school problem” has been constructed in the past century by educationalists, we began by reviewing the literature published in two rural-specific journals, the Journal of Research in Rural Education and The Rural Educator. Through a content analysis of article titles and abstracts,¹ we were able to identify four of the most prevalent topical areas of study: (a) school improvement processes; (b) school-community relationships; (c) teacher recruitment, retention, and training; and (d) youth achievement, aspirations, and retention in school. From these, we chose teacher recruitment, retention, and training as a topical case study for our review, because we felt that it represented an issue most directly within the control of schools as institutions and would therefore provide the most fertile ground for an exploration of education researchers’ social construction of rurality as it intersects with this educational focus of scholarly interest. Although we endeavored throughout our review to acknowledge the significant contributions of sociologists, rural sociologists, and anthropologists to our understanding in the past century of the dynamics of rural education within communities and used these contributions to frame our findings, the “rural school problem” as a concept emanated from educationalists. Therefore, we wanted to focus on the unique constructions and contributions of educationalists within the context of an education research field gaining coherence over the same time period (Lagemann, 2000). Although our case study approach did limit the volume of literature reviewed, it allowed us to provide a focused look at change in the relationship between an educational issue and perceptions of and interest in rurality over time.

Content analysis is a qualitative literacy research method in which text is examined for the recurring presence and intersecting relationships of themes, concepts, or words (Hoffman, Wilson, Martinez, & Sailors, 2011). This type of text analysis allowed us to infer and extract messages from the texts, seeking to understand how the texts were shaped by the author, intended audience, time period, and culture in which they were written (Hoffman et al., 2011). During a content analysis, recurring patterns provide the basis for interpretation and can “reveal the more subtle messages imbedded in a text” (Hoffman et al., 2011, p. 28).

Source Identification

We began our systematic review of the literature in 1911, directly after the convening of Theodore Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission, which, as we and others have argued, drew unprecedented attention to the lifeways of rural Americans. Because many academic search engines do not archive journal articles prior to 1970, we relied on Google Scholar and JSTOR as the primary avenues for locating education research related to rural teacher preparation, retention, and training for the time period of 1911 to 1970. For the decades after 1970, we used ERIC (EBSCO) and JSTOR. Web of Science was also used, but this returned no new relevant results not found in other search engines. Through each, we conducted decade-by-decade searches using the terms “rural education,” “rural teacher,” “rural teacher” AND “training,” “small schools” AND “teacher training” AND “rural,” “rural teacher retention,” “rural” AND “professional development,” and “rural” AND “pre-service” OR “inservice,” until we were satisfied that we were not seeing new, additional results. In sifting through the search results, reviewing article titles, abstracts, and in some cases, the full text of the article, we applied a number of winnowing criteria to our searches. Articles had to be English-language pieces published in academic or professional association journals, focused on the United States exclusively, and not summaries of conference proceedings or conference papers. We applied peer review as a criterion for articles published after 1970.² Books, unpublished dissertations, and government documents were excluded from consideration in order to ensure that we were comparing like material in our synthesis across the considerable time period encompassed in the review. We did this, in part, to ensure that the constructions of both rurality and the research problems being compared were developed within similar editorial constraints (i.e., a journal article length). The number of articles reviewed using these search strategies and criteria by decade is presented in Table 1.

Table 1

Results Reviewed by Decade

Decade	Relevant Results Reviewed
1910–1919	21
1920–1929	17
1930–1939	14
1940–1949	20
1950–1959	8
1960–1969	1
1970–1979	2
1980–1989	10
1990–1999	14
2000–2009	25
2010–2015	16

Source Analysis

Once we identified articles through systematic searches (n = 148), we approached the analysis of articles to address the research questions of (a) how “the rural problem” had been constructed within the education research literature and (b) how and if those constructions had changed over time. Recognizing that authors might approach the contribution of rurality to rural teacher recruitment, retention, and training from a variety of perspectives, our analysis looked at the source material cross-sectionally as well as longitudinally. We chose the decade as a boundary for these analyses because of the likelihood that literature written within a specific decade would be written in dialogue with other recent literature of the time period. As with any relatively arbitrary demarcation of time, a limitation of this strategy was the way in which literature on either side of a decade demarcation might reflect the scholarly conversation happening around the turn of a decade rather than the one happening 10 years prior, but we felt that decades would assist us in identifying trends across time and, more importantly, provide like units of analysis for comparison. Consistent with content analysis, our reading of the texts involved inspecting patterns of the texts and “drawing on combinations of inductive, deductive, and abductive analytical techniques” (Hoffman et al., 2011, p. 29), or inferences throughout the coding process. In this sense, our methods represent content analysis as “the method of making inferences from texts and making sense of those interpretations in a context surrounding the text” (Hoffman et al., 2011, p. 30).

Within-Decade Analysis

To begin identifying trends within decades, we took articles from a single decade (1911–1920) and each approached the 23 articles we had identified for this time period separately to answer three questions: (a) What type of article is this (empirical, theoretical, opinion/advocacy)? (b) Broadly speaking, what is the takeaway or enduring message? (c) How is the “rural school problem” constructed? We each separately made notes about these articles, including the generation of possible descriptive codes, and then compared our notes and generated codes to identify commonalities and divergences in our reading of these articles.

Across-Decade Analysis

To begin our comparison of sources across decades, we examined articles from a single journal (n = 10), Teachers College Record, that was in existence for the entirety of the period studied. We determined that articles from this journal were appropriate for this type of longitudinal analysis because the journal spans education research subfields and has published scholarly articles on a broad variety of topics in education since 1900.

To complete our analysis, we divided the data corpus of 148 articles, each reading half of the articles per decade, to compare codes by decade. We completed a common read of 25% of the articles across all decades. We then wrote summative memos of potential groupings of time and themes to arrive at the synthesis presented in our findings.

Findings

In examining the literature on rural teacher training, recruitment, and retention as a case study of the changing definition of the rural school problem over a century, we observed three distinct periods. In the following synthesis, we discuss these periods in the context of (a) the social and economic trends that defined rural America at those times, (b) the development of rural education research and education research as a field, and (c) the evolving conversation about the “rural school problem” with a focus on how this conversation manifested in scholars’ writing about teacher recruitment, retention, and training.

Identifying and Defining the “Rural School Problem”: 1909 to 1945

In 1909, Theodore Roosevelt’s convocation of the Country Life Commission signified a formal symbol of growing interest in and attention to the reformation of rural life in the United States (DeYoung, 1987). There was interest in improving transportation to rural areas by expanding railroads and building better roads and to ensuring rural access to modern technology, such as electrification and the telephone. Advances in farming technology were of interest to reformers as well, with an emphasis on what could be achieved by applying steam and motorized power to labor previously done by humans and animals. There was a burgeoning sense, in this era, that progress, and in particular, new efficiencies, could be achieved through the proper application of technology and human organization (Bowers, 1971).

In keeping with the zeitgeist of the times, there was consistent and growing interest in rural school reform as urban education reformers and leaders of local rural school districts took note of the findings of the Country Life Commission. Universities and normal schools began to form rural education departments designed to address specifically the unique needs of rural school reform. One of the primary foci of university-based, urban education reformers was on differentiated teacher preparation to aid recruitment and retention of teachers in rural areas. These reformers also debated the effect of consolidation on promoting better instruction and development of teaching staff and the role of the community in supporting the isolated rural teacher. Over the next several decades, interest in these topics and others around rural education grew so strong and were so commonly discussed that, by 1944, the first White House Conference for Rural Education was convened and established educational rights for every rural child, including the right to a modern education in modern buildings; an education that bridges the gap between home and school; health services, vocational guidance, school lunches, and public transportation; and sufficiently prepared teachers and school leaders who understand rural life. The well-intended Charter of Rights of the Rural Child to Education (Dawson & Hubbard, 1944) was written as a pledge to rural schools and students to solidify the government’s commitment to combating perceived inequities in rural schooling.

Defining a Rural School Reform Agenda by Defining the “Problem”

The literature of this period slowly defined many of the issues that constituted what reformers saw as “the rural school problem.” Reformers of the time addressed the growing concerns of increasing youth outmigration to cities by describing (often in desperate tones) an urgent need to train rural teachers to better deliver an education. Fishpaw (1912) wrote in her definition of “the rural school problem,”

As the environment of the country child differs from that of the town and city, so the rural school problem differs. We must admit that organization supervision, consolidated schools, sanitary buildings and a well coordinated and properly correlated course of study are all necessary for the solution, but we may have all of these and fail unless the trained teacher is at the helm. (p. 79)

These efforts were infused by an awareness of the difficulty of recruiting teachers who could serve these dual roles, largely because of teachers’ perceptions of the tradition-bound and parochial nature of rural America (Foght, 1912; Gray, 1916; Hillyer, 1916; Smart, 1919). Authors argued that rural school districts could not compete with the “physical comforts and the intellectual, spiritual, and social advantages of modern town life” (Hillyer, 1916, p. 31). Some authors described these needs as “puzzling educational problems” (Knight, 1920, p. 182; Shibley, 1917, p. 541), stating that “first-aid remedies” such as new gardens, new playgrounds, better seating arrangements, and better curriculum “would not work because rural schools have inadequate finances, in comparison with the city and town schools” (Shibley, 1917, p. 541). There was a hope that properly trained teachers could connect rural students to the natural charm of the rural environment and (in the hope of promoting a new generation interested in farming) prepare students to transcend the backwardness and parochialism assumed to be a part of their communities through exposure to high culture, assumed to be located in urban places (Smart, 1920).

In defining the parameters of the “rural school problem,” these early writers and researchers found that the construction proved useful in building consensus for the need for reform. This utility can be seen throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s in the formation of professorships and academic departments devoted to rural education, the formation of a federal Department of Rural Education, and the brief establishment of the Journal of Rural Education (Carney, 1918, 1932; Knight, 1920; McCallister, 1938; Dawson & Hubbard, 1944). As the infrastructure for exploring rural education problems received institutional support, discrete categories in which to understand the particular challenges of rurality emerged: school buildings, community support, teacher training, curriculum for students. The literature of this time is unspecialized and intersectional, providing broad, sweeping overviews of the interconnections among these issues, while also trying to identify the unique contributions of their constituent parts. In the relatively new progressive tradition, consideration of this problem even stretched to debating the teacher’s role in supporting the health and well-being of students and in promoting the economic development and education of their communities (Conaway, 1922). Henry Dewey (1910) identified the intersectional challenges of the rural context as a

lack of carefully-trained and experienced teachers, short terms of school, poorly constructed schoolhouses, insufficient equipment, annual or semi-annual change of teachers, enrollment too small for best results, many grades and small classes, limited social opportunities for teachers, inconvenient boarding places, teachers not in touch with life of community, and community not vitally interested in the schools. (p. 542)

The literature talks of rural as monolithic, with attention paid to the similarities of the challenges in bringing qualified teachers to these areas rather than the differentiated challenges, for example, in New England versus Appalachia versus the rural South or the West. This is not to say that the literature was uniform in its opinions, however. As “the rural school problem” became better defined and categorized, distinct lines of difference and debate around teacher recruitment, retention, and training also became more clearly defined.

Defining the Unique Responsibilities of the Rural Teacher

In the first part of the century, the image of the rural school depicted by reformers was largely consistent with what has become an enduring image of the one-room schoolhouse. However, the meaning imbued in this symbol seemed to vary depending on the agenda of the reformer. For some, the one-room schoolhouse, centered around a singular rural teacher, seemed to represent a defensible approach to the schooling of rural children, problematic only to its detractors (Gillette, 1912), while for others, particularly urban-based education reformers, that same schoolhouse seemed to represent the “poorest institution” (Inglis, 1921, p. 516), the antithesis of what was becoming “modern” education and symptomatic of the lag of rural schools behind their urban counterparts, with networks of teachers specializing in educating young people at particular ages overseen by an administrator trained in the new science of bureaucratic efficiency (Foght, 1912; Foote, 1923; Inglis, 1921). As these factions engaged, two key arguments begin to surface in the literature: one about the conditions necessary for proper instruction for rural children and the other about the adequacy of training and institutional support for rural teachers to create those conditions.

In regard to educating young people, scholars identified two main areas of need: one about the physical needs of rural schools (the adequacy of facilities) and the other about the content of the curriculum. Both of these issues, in the context of the one-room schoolhouse, were framed as questions of teacher responsibility and training. The problem with rural teacher recruitment and retention, Shibley (1917) wrote, was that “instructors [in training schools] are not properly trained in the subjects of rural schools and rural life—inseparable parts of each other” (p. 541). This problem was critical, he argued, because the isolation of rural teaching in one-room schoolhouses meant that rural teachers required more initial training and preparation than teachers in cities or towns. There is a tension in the literature of this time on focusing efforts on adequately preparing teachers for the challenges of the one-room schoolhouse versus pushing systematically for the consolidation of these outdated institutions in favor of more modern, consolidated schools with grade-level splits (Kephart, 1919). Underpinning this debate was how best to accomplish standardizing and improving education so that it could equal the education offered by urban communities. In other words, it was important, to use the phrasing of the United States Education Commissioner of the time, to focus on “a square deal for the country child” (Tigert, 1922, p. 354).

Reformers also questioned the relevance of the curriculum to promoting the best outcomes for rural youth living in rural contexts. Before John Dewey’s pedagogical creed advocating for the school experience to be as relevant as real life, some rural reformers made similar arguments, stating that the rural school experience should reflect the aims of the community, with agriculture being a decided preoccupation of these arguments. The conflation of rural vocational life with farming is common in the reform literature of this period. The focus on the importance of agriculture reflected the economic positioning of some rural communities, although not all. An interesting feature of the arguments for curriculum relevant to farming was the emphasis that many reformers placed on the ways in which such a curriculum would stem youth outmigration by more deeply connecting youth to the vocational realities of their parents (Dewey, 1910). Reformers considered this notion important in large part because of the role they believed rural communities played in providing the nation with food and raw materials (Cherry, Holdford, & Alexander, 1936). However, at the same time, it was acknowledged that the lure of “modern town life” could not be avoided and that therefore education, with a broad base in music, art, and other aspects of modern culture, should be included in the curriculum so that farm children, on growing up, would not feel deprived (Dunn, 1923; Foght, 1912; Meredith, 1929). Teachers, therefore, needed to be well versed in the ins and outs of what was seen as traditional country life and also able to deliver a strong curriculum in urban high culture. Adequate and differentiated training for rural teachers was seen as the way to support the development of this broad knowledge base (Bunting & McGuffey, 1928; Burnham, 1915; Shibley, 1917).

Although normal schools had been the means for educating teachers, universities were defining education as a discipline and reconsidering their role in educating rural teachers. Over time, many normal schools were renamed universities as their purpose was developed and widened; Knight (1920) and others advocated for separate rural education departments at universities “to train rural school and rural life leaders” (p. 177). Carney (1918) posed the issue of preparing rural teachers as part of the “neglect and backwardness” (p. 147) of rural schooling, citing the fact that more than one-third of rural teachers “had no professional preparation whatever, and thousands are but seventh and eighth-grade graduates, without even a high school training” (p. 149). Carney’s thinking mirrors initiatives at Teachers College to respond to the “rural life problem,” stating the university commitment to respond to “one of the most vital and urgent issues of our national well-being” and advocating that any university wishing to “meet national demands in the field of education must focus a considerable share of its attention and service in the direction of rural school needs” (p. 149). Fourteen years later, Carney (1932) reflected on these efforts within the context of the Great Depression, noting some limited progress in teacher pay and preparation, for example, but citing a persistent gap between rural teacher qualifications and those of their urban counterparts.

The refrain of the time was the need for “carefully-trained and experienced teachers” in rural schools (Dewey, 1910), with Chase (1917) stating that “no part of our school system is in such need of teachers of training, ability, and experience as the rural schools” (p. 61). Advocacy for teacher training often included a discussion on incentivizing teachers to live and work in rural areas, and academics and school leaders used journal articles as a brainstorming forum of sorts. They (e.g., Gray, 1916) discussed the option of teacher cottages, explaining that housing would support recruitment and retention efforts. Several authors engaged in these conversations about incentives, pointing to the tension between teacher recruitment in rural areas and the draw of “modern” amenities (Fishpaw, 1912; Foght, 1912; Smart, 1920).

This attention culminated, to a certain extent, in the White House Conference on Rural Education, hosted by Eleanor Roosevelt, and inclusive of writers and thinkers about rural education at that time. The end product of the conference was the definition of the Charter of Rights for the Rural Child to Education (Dawson & Hubbard, 1944), which laid out the rights of rural children “to a satisfactory, modern, education” (p. 14), to qualified teachers, and to an education program that prepares them for life after school, vocational or otherwise, among other specified rights. Unbeknownst to the drafters of the charter, the end of the war was coming and with it a shift in the characterization of rural schools and the rural school problem.

The Adolescence of Education Research and the Decline of Attention to Rurality: 1945 to 1980

By the 1950s, one center of the “rural school problem” as it had been defined prior to World War II—the ongoing debate about school consolidation and the antiquity of one-room schoolhouses—had largely been won rhetorically. As more and more one-room schools were closed in favor of consolidated community schools, the administrative modernity described by urban education reformers who had set their sights on solving the rural school problem had, by most measures, prevailed (Stonecipher, 1947). At the same time, education as a scholarly discipline in the United States was itself changing as educationalists embraced postpositivism and began to enjoy unprecedented government support for the problems posed by the field, including a rise in support for evaluation of education policies (Travers, 1958). As a result, perceptions of both the uniqueness of rurality as an educational context and, in particular, the unique preparation needs of the rural teacher became subsumed in a larger discourse of education as an institutional phenomenon, rather than as a community-based, highly contextual one.

The Manpower Crisis and the Rebranding of the Rural Problem

The writing of the late 1940s and early 1950s reflects a slow shift from the debates that characterized the educational conversation prior to World War II. The debates that started to gain traction, however, were less of a departure from those of the previous era than a rebranding or repackaging of them for a new age. Teacher shortages in rural areas in the late 1940s were acute because many teachers had left the profession during the war to enroll in the military or to provide nonmilitary services (Eliassen & Anderson, 1945; Washington, 1947). Referred to as the “manpower crisis” (Eliassen & Anderson, 1945, p. 119) or the “manpower problem” (Patton, 1957, p. 14), this issue was linked to a variety of factors: the low status of teaching as a profession and associated issues such as low salaries; low entry requirements; high turnover (Eliassen & Anderson, 1952; Lester, 1946; Washington, 1947; J. B. White, 1947); population growth, in particular during the baby boom immediately following World War II; and a “dictatorship in school administration” brought about through consolidation (Eliassen & Anderson, 1952). Additionally, the lure of opportunities that had not been as widely available to women prior to the war, such as business and administration, became strong in the postwar era, drawing women who might have become teachers prior to the war (Patton, 1957). The shortage was felt most acutely in elementary schools with rapidly expanding enrollments due to the baby boom, and particularly so in rural schools already struggling to recruit to newly consolidated schools and requiring teacher certification in more than one subject area (Eliassen & Anderson, 1952). However, in a survey of teacher training institutions, Ferrell (1946) found that no institution had specific plans for rural-specific teacher recruitment.

A Decline in Interest in Differentiating Training for Rural Schools

Along with the triumph of administrative centralization represented by consolidation, the relationship between teacher training institutions and rural schools seems to have changed during the postwar period, with normal schools and universities beginning to move away from the rural focus that had characterized some of their work in the first half of the 20th century. Despite the declaration of the White House Charter on Rural Education (Dawson & Hubbard, 1944) that “every rural child has a right to teachers, supervisors, and administrators who know rural life, and who are educated to deal effectively with the problems peculiar to rural schools” (p. 14), a mere 10 years later, Robinson (1954) observed,

Twenty years ago, 84% of the state teacher preparing institutions made some differentiation in the preparation of rural teachers. Ten years ago, 84% were offering rural sociology. At the moment, concern for rural education is at a low. One reason for this is that deans of schools of education seem to recognize but one difference between rural and urban schools, that of size. To them, reorganization of school districts is rapidly eliminating “the rural school problem.” (pp. 30–31)

Ferrell (1946) made similar observations, reporting on findings from a survey of teacher training institutions that showed that “no curriculum distinction is made in the education of teachers for rural and urban schools in the institutions reporting” (p. 360), although some continued to provide opportunities for rural field experiences. Ferrell predicted, rightly, that the period of training for teachers would be lengthened and standardized in the postwar era. In the 1970s, however, renewed attention was paid to the idea that rural schools might require special efforts from the university in order to adequately train, recruit, and retain teachers, and the idea of the field-based professor or the field-based training and in-service center was raised in the scholarly community once again. Bruce, Hubright, and Yarbrough (1976), in their statement of the problem, echoed sentiments raised earlier in the century when they suggested, “Lacking any preparation for rural schools, many teachers from urban academic centers find them unattractive” (p. 452). Shifting demographics and population, they argued, require that greater attention be paid to issues of rural equity. Mancus and Rodriquez (1980) discussed the limited use in rural areas of teacher centers, mostly because of issues of access. “Because rural school problems are not as visible nationally and the number of teachers and children are not as great,” they wrote, “the benefits of Teacher Centers have not reached more than a handful of communities” (p. 26).

The reduced interest in differentiating training for rural teachers may have been partially a function of the rise of postpositivism as a dominant lens for considering educational problems within the cohering field of education research in this period and also potentially a function of the growing coherence in institutional practice across the new landscape of consolidated schools (Lagemann, 2000). Lagemann (2000) argues that a preoccupation of university-based education researchers in the midcentury was raising the status of education as a discipline. In keeping with the spirit of the time in high-status social science research fields, such as sociology and economics, this was accomplished through an increased affinity for behaviorism and the insistence on the use of quantitative research methods with an eye toward creating knowledge that could be generalized to public schools across the country. Such behavior would explain the relative disappearance of explicit interest in and writing on rural education research within the field more broadly and on rural teacher training, recruitment, and retention specifically.

The Rise in Prominence of New Lenses for Examining Equity

These issues are reflected in the construction of scholarly problems around rural teacher recruitment, retention, and training through the use of new lenses for thinking about equity that had been overlooked or ignored in the previous decades. In the postwar period of the 1940s and 1950s, for example, new attention was paid to the intersection of rural inequity with regard to teacher quality and the inequity in teacher quality perpetuated by segregation (J. B. White, 1947). Although there had been explorations of these themes in previous decades, most notably in the Journal of Negro Education, the intersectionality of these issues had not been prominently foregrounded, and few comparisons of segregated schools had been made at all (see Brewton, 1943; Carney, 1932; Lee, 1944; McCallister, 1938).

In the 1970s, despite the paucity of literature discussing rural teachers, a few articles focused on the intersection between the special needs of certain marginalized populations and the challenges of meeting those needs in the rural context. Barnhardt (1974), for example, wrote about the challenges of implementing a teacher training program centered on teaching Alaskan Native students, looking carefully at the challenges associated with the remoteness of many Alaskan Native communities, as well as the unique historical and cultural concerns that might be important for teachers in these communities to better understand.

Exploring the Meaning of Rural Education Within a Globalizing World Economy: 1980 to 2015

In the late 20th century, the increased globalization of the U.S. economy, including the growth and domination of transnational supply chains in agricultural and other traditionally rural American industries, profoundly reorganized life not only in rural communities but in all communities (Bonnano, 2014; Heffernan, Hendrickson, & Gronski, 1999). The increasing emphasis on neoliberal economic policy, largely policies emphasizing free market decision making driven by bigger and bigger data, as well as the de-emphasis of the importance of antitrust regulations, resulted in the integration and internationalization of previously diverse and geographically bounded supply chains for food and natural resources (Constance, Hendrickson, Howard, & Heffernan, 2014). Although these trends were experienced everywhere in the United States, rural communities without the diversified local economies characteristic of many urban areas were particularly affected as the number of employers contracted and the relative negotiating power of the few companies left increased (Constance et al., 2014; Heffernan et al., 1999; Lobao & Stofferahn, 2007). More and more rural communities found themselves with reduced political power and beholden to the shifting sands of international company interests, leading to rising poverty (Sherman, 2014), community outmigration (particularly of youth seeking work; Corbett, 2007; Provasnik et al., 2007), and dependence on the cycles of boom-bust economies tied to global commodity prices (Schafft & Biddle, 2015).

With this shift in the national economic focus, the aims of school reform also shifted. Following the release of A Nation at Risk in 1983, there was an increased emphasis on the mobility of human capital and the preparation of young people for a geographically diffuse, ever-changing skills-based economy (Corbett, 2007; Eppley, 2015; Schafft, 2010; Schafft & Biddle, 2013). This emphasis intensified with the renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (No Child Left Behind) in 2001, with its emphasis on performance-based accountability, and the addition of college and career readiness under the Obama administration (Au, 2007). During this period, there was a resurgence in interest in rural education research and attention to differentiated rural teacher preparation, recruitment, and retention tinged with a tone of advocacy. For scholars interested in rural education, the policy and practice of education resulting from the confluence of decreased attention to rural communities and the political effects of the shift in educational purpose at the national level became, itself, the rural school problem. Corbett (2007) and Schafft (2010) suggest that, between the rapid globalization of the world economy and the resulting neoliberal shift of American educational policy, the resilience of rural communities, the necessity of their very existence, has never been tested in quite the way that it is being today.

The Crystallization of a Rural Education Research Community

In the early 1980s, the scholarly outlook toward prospects for rural communities was one of optimism, due largely to a demographic trend in migration patterns in the early 1970s in which rural population growth rates (4.2%) exceeded urban growth rates (2.9%) for the first time in the 20th century (Oelschlager & Guenther, 1983). Predictions in the literature of this time suggested that this switch would continue in the coming decades, and paved the way for strident insistence that rural education was an area that should hold wider scholarly and political interest (S. Massey & Crosby, 1983).

Around this time, a number of journals focusing exclusively on rural education were founded, including the Journal of Research in Rural Education, The Rural Educator, and the Rural Special Education Quarterly. Since their founding, these journals have published much of the American research using rurality as a salient analytical lens. From 1990 to 2015, only 15 out of the 55 articles found in search engines for our case study were published outside of these three journals. Furthermore, in a search of American Educational Research Association journals for this time period, only 9 articles contain “rural” in the title, and only 23 contain “rural” as part of their abstracts (as compared to 59 articles with “urban” in the title and 156 with “urban” in the abstract).

Increased Emphasis on Fiscal and Performance-Based Accountability

The demographic flip that informed interest in rural communities in the early 1980s had, by the end of the decade, been exposed as the demographic anomaly that it was. However, continuing into the 1990s and early 2000s, the problems articulated in many of the previous decades regarding rural teacher training, recruitment, and retention continued to attract scholarly attention: low salaries (Finson & Beaver, 1990; Jacobson, 1990; L. C. Miller, 2012), a lack of strong school leadership (Goodpaster, Adedokun, & Weaver, 2012; Haar, 2007), a lack of privacy (Maranto & Shuls, 2012), and the wide range of responsibilities required of a rural teacher outside of instruction (Berry & Gravelle, 2013; Finson & Beaver, 1990; LaChance, Benton, & Klein, 2007), as well as the need to serve as both a subject generalist and a specialist simultaneously. New factors affecting recruitment and retention were also identified, such as competition between new and veteran teachers (Huysman, 2008) and the rise of the use of distance learning technologies and school-university partnerships to combat teachers’ feelings of professional isolation (Cegelka & Alvarado, 2000; Fry & Bryant, 2006; Gal, 1993; Love, Emerson, Shaw, & Leigh, 1996; Murry & Herrera, 1998). However, the meaning of the contribution of these factors to the “rural school problem” seemed to change within the context of a renewed emphasis on fiscal factors and, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, performance-based accountability. As standardizing expectations around student performance became a cornerstone measure by which to judge teacher effectiveness, rural education researchers increasingly perceived their role as making visible the differences between rural contexts for schooling and the urban and suburban contexts for which policymakers seemed to be crafting education policy (Sher, 1978). In the case of teacher recruitment, retention, and training, this took the form of a reinvigorated call for differentiated training for rural contexts. In 1983, S. Massey and Crosby wrote,

Why are programs to train teachers for service in rural schools so scarce? Part of the answer lies in the fact that rural communities are politically invisible and impotent. Rural residents are far more likely to suffer in silence than to demand attention from agencies and institutions ostensibly designed to serve them. (p. 266)

The specter of school consolidation in search of economic efficiencies and economies of scale played an important role in the literature of this period. This threat to the very existence of rural schools haunts discussions of rural school problems, as declining enrollments symptomatic of larger economic issues tied to population migration and globalization clearly affected the daily life of rural schools (Eppley, 2015; Schafft, 2010). Fears of closure and the attendant economic troubles for both schools and communities are suggested to affect teacher beliefs and satisfaction with their work (Edington, 1976; Eppley, 2015; Maranto & Shuls, 2012). Furthermore, dissatisfaction with value-added measures and evaluative systems, increasingly popular in the early 21st century, only invigorated advocacy for increased attention to the role of context in mediating student achievement (Goetz, 2005; Newton, Darling-Hammond, Haertel, & Thomas, 2010).

A (Re)new(ed) Emphasis on the Importance of Place as a Concept in Teacher Training

Despite the articulation of the unique educational needs of rural contexts, teacher training programs of this period, following the trends of the 1960s and 1970s, rarely dealt with rural topics (Campbell, 1986; Fickel, 2005). Much of the research looking specifically at the relationship between university training and preparation for rural schools advocates for the inclusion of some rural-specific component of the curriculum, though one study did find little difference in satisfaction with their training program between teachers with rural and urban placements (Horn, Davis, & Hilt, 1985). Rural science teachers, in particular, were argued to be particularly poorly served by this inattention to rural circumstance, as training for science in most training programs is so highly specialized to the discipline (Finson & Beaver, 1990).

With regard to teacher training, the concept of sensitivity to place was a way for scholars to advocate for training programs with both social and spatial sensitivity across the rural-urban continuum. Rural education researchers, as part of a coalescing group, continued to explore the meaning of rural field experiences for preservice teachers in changing their perceptions of rural places. A new practice—introduced into the scholarly conversation at this time—of naming cultural deficit models in research exposed the century-long trend of looking only at problems of rural communities, rather than at the opportunities. Particularly in the early 2000s, authors began to acknowledge a trend of portraying rural as the absence of urban amenities, of population, and of assets or culture. At the same time, a rising sensitivity to the concept of “a sense of place” or “place attachment” provided a way forward for those wishing to move away from deficit perspectives and also looking for a conceptual counter to the global rhetoric of both educational purpose and curriculum (Azano, 2011; Azano & Stewart, 2015; Eppley, 2009; C. Howley & Howley, 2014). Place-based pedagogies, for example, provide a lens through which the uniqueness of a learning context—rural or otherwise—can be examined and leveraged to increase curricular relevance (Azano & Stewart, 2015, 2016).

Conclusion: “Rural School Problems” in the Second Century of Education Research

Rural teacher recruitment, retention, and training—the case study that has been the topic of this review—shed light on several evolving relationships over the course of the past century: education researchers’ changing perceptions of rural contexts; the manifestations of these changes as they relate to preparing, recruiting, and retaining the teacher labor force in these areas; and by extension, the changing nature of rurality itself during these periods. The patterns of interaction and constructed meaning that we have traced in these evolving relationships hold lessons for contemporary education researchers and directions for future scholarly work.

At the most basic level, the fluctuating prominence of rural education as a problem of the broader field, as exemplified in this case, demonstrates the changing attitude of education reformers and researchers to rurality over time and the different meanings ascribed to “rural problems” in different eras. When rural was painted as the antithesis to modernity, as the opposite of industrial progress, there was a movement among educationalists to create parity and equity between rural schools and town and city schools, which were equated with modernity. This was done, in part, because of a concern for the sustainability of rural areas—if education in these places could be considered equal to that in cities, then the out-migration that plagued rural communities could perhaps be reversed. The literature on rural reform from the first half of the 20th century is peppered with phrases that put the teacher at the center of this endeavor and emphasize preparing teachers for these premodern contexts and positioning them as the makers of a new, modern generation of rural citizens. However, the modernity conceived of by these reformers seems largely to have been a linear one that benchmarked progress by the number of consolidated schools, the proliferation of rural school supervisors, and the elimination of the one-room schoolhouse—not necessarily by real progress made in the efforts to prepare teachers.

After World War II, the achievement of many of the goals of this early period of rural reform, coupled with the status-seeking behavior of educational scientists, seems to have succeeded in eliminating the conversation on rural education as a unique educational context altogether. In the 1960s and 1970s, the little rural education reform conversation that persisted grappled with issues that brought into question the march toward modernity—for example, the suitability of modern rural schooling for Native populations (Barnhardt, 1974) or the necessity of buying into the new, liquid modernity introduced by neoliberal economic reform (Bauman, 2001; Corbett, 2007). After 1980, the increasing liquidity of a new globalized way of life brought into question the relevance of place as an analytic concept for thinking about education altogether, with ardent defenses of the importance of attention to rural education mounted by a newly crystallized rural scholarly community. However, this conversation has largely been contained to several subfield journals, while within the broader field of education research, rurality in this becomes one of many lenses through which to evaluate schooling, including increased attention paid to race, class, gender, ability, and many other previously marginalized perspectives.

Throughout the past century, concerns about equity around schooling in rural areas have been central to education researchers interested in rural contexts, although the nature of trenchant inequity has been deeply tied to the meanings ascribed to rurality and the definition of its problems. Moreover, the ways in which these “rural school problems” have been situated in the larger field of education research have perhaps become emblematic of rurality in general. Using symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969) as a lens, we wonder if readers’ meaning-making has interpreted educational challenges in rural contexts as unsolvable rural problems. The language used to describe these rural challenges—for example, “teacher training, recruitment, and retention”—creates a discourse that might unintentionally position rural as the “cause” of the problem itself. If one replaces these unsolvable problems or symbols with new language, then meaning-making—or solutions—might follow. Rather than discourse around teacher training, then, researchers could use language around equity. Does place-based school funding continue to marginalize low-income communities? Do teachers in a given state receive equitable pay? If researchers become entrenched in thinking that it is not desirable for a teacher to live and work in a rural community, then they position rurality in deficient or undesirable ways. If, instead, researchers discuss pay equality for teachers, they can reposition rural education challenges by understanding how policy inequitably privileges place.

There is some evidence, perhaps, of history repeating itself in the current push for explicit attention to urban contexts and their unique needs in the current field. At one time, entire departments of rural education were maintained specifically to understand the unique rural social context and how to best enact formal educational structures within it. Educators and researchers believed, sincerely, that unique preparation was needed for these social contexts in order for teachers to successfully fulfill the promise of modern education for these communities. This belief is clearly no longer in evidence—despite documentation of the enduring problems of teacher recruitment, retention, and training in rural places, for example, little differentiated preparation is now believed necessary for these rural contexts at all.

In recent years, much research attention has been paid to the belief that preparation programs that uniquely address issues of the cultural and linguistic diversity of urban communities, racial difference between teachers and students, and the unique opportunities and challenges of urban educational environments will adequately allow schools to enact modern educational practices in urban settings. Again, the language itself becomes symbolic of our values in education. If researchers diminish the need for specialized training for rural teaching at the same time they increase the attention paid to specialized training in urban contexts, then they place a certain value on those different contexts. By understanding how this discourse symbolically positions place, researchers can better understand how education programs may in fact institutionally devalue the need for teachers trained to work in rural communities. We assert that a critical perspective is needed in training teachers for all contexts.

Our observations on the implications of this trend extend to a caution and a recommendation. First, the caution: Rurality, as a concept, has changed in meaning for reformers as the social and economic context itself has changed. The conflation of rurality and antimodernity in the early part of the century meant that once the problem of rural education’s modern delivery was solved, attention to other persistent issues (e.g., teacher recruitment, retention, and training) also seemed to wane. The diverse needs of urban communities are similarly complex, and as social and economic systems continue to evolve in this 21st century, we caution education researchers interested in urban contexts to continue to document these complexities and not allow for the collapse of this term into any single dimension pegged to a singular conception of progress.

Second, we recommend that, as a field, we reevaluate education’s relationship to marginalized places and spaces in a holistic and inclusive way. Within the current globalized context, it can be difficult to perceive the relevance of studying places or allowing geographic realities to foreground our understanding of the world. It is the fate of the postmodern individual to live both locally and globally, shaped both by “the constraints of the body . . . contextually situated in space and time” and “the intrusion of distance into local activities” (Giddens, 1991, p. 680). The lived realities of students, teachers, administrators, and community members happen within the context of a school, situated in a place, and in the current American system of public schooling, much of the local economic and social realities of that place determine the opportunities and constraints of local schooling.

However, in combating the perceived erasure of these contextual differences within education research concerned with “best practices” and “generalizability,” there has been little unified effort among urban and rural education researchers to understand the similarities and differences of contextual opportunities and constraints in ways that embrace localized complexities but do not, ultimately, reify them. As marginalized places vie for power in our political system, there is a sense in the contemporary literature on rural education that attention to the urban context comes at the expense of attention to rural, and perhaps vice versa.

As the 21st century brings new social and economic changes for rural communities, it will be important for researchers to continue to critically evaluate these changes, to resist the collapse of rurality into one ascribed meaning, and to do so with broader attention to the similarities and differences of social and economic factors in other contexts and communities. To do this, the conversation about the political marginalization of place in a global context must be expanded. Advocacy for the importance of rural within education is not enough—researchers must find the intersection of rural realities with diverse sociospatial realities in the context of 21st-century globalization. It is in this intersection that researchers can move beyond defining and redefining “the rural school problem” and move to a place of promise that rural communities may offer in new or alternative ways forward in a context of global capitalism.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Amber Gray, social science and humanities librarian at the University of Maine, for her assistance with this chapter.

Notes

References

*Adams

B. L.

Woods

(2015). A model for recruiting and retaining teachers in Alaska’s rural K–12 schools. Peabody Journal of Education, 90, 250–262.

*Aley

(1910). Rural school teachers in Indiana. Journal of Education, 72, 630–631.

*Allen

C. H.

(1943). In-service education of teachers. Review of Educational Research, 13(3), 262–270.

*Anderson

E. W.

Eliassen

R. H.

(1949). Supply and demand in teaching. Review of Educational Research, 19(3), 179–184.

*Anglin

J. M.

Piland

D. E.

(1995). Reflections of a rural school student teacher. The Rural Educator, 17, 27–31.

*Askins

Schwisow

J. A.

(1988). A university-school partnership for providing in-service staff development to a rural school: The Greenwood experience. Journal of Staff Development, 9(4), 40–44.

(2007). High-stakes testing and curricular control: A qualitative metasynthesis. Educational Researcher, 36, 258–267.

*Ayer

A. M.

(1921). What rural teachers think of group teachers’ meetings. Journal of Rural Education, 1, 20–23.

Azano

(2011). The possibility of place: One teacher’s use of place-based instruction for English students in a rural high school. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 26(10), 1–12.

10.

Azano

A. P.

Stewart

T. T.

(2015). Exploring place and practicing justice: Preparing preservice teachers for success in rural schools. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 30(9), 1–12.

11.

Azano

A. P.

Stewart

T. T.

(2016). Confronting challenges at the intersection of rurality, place, and teacher preparation: Improving efforts in teacher education to staff rural schools with qualified teachers. Global Education Review, 3, 108–128.

12.

Bailey

Jensen

Ransom

(2014). Rural America in a globalizing world: Problems and prospects for the 2010s. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press.

13.

*Barber

L. L.

(1942). Beginning teachers in one-room schools: A problem in teacher-education. Elementary English Review, 19, 29–35.

14.

*Barley

Z. A.

Beesley

A. D.

(2007). Rural school success: What can we learn? Journal of Research in Rural Education, 22(1), 1–15.

15.

*Barnhardt

(1974). Being a native and becoming a teacher. Council on Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 5(4), 13–19.

16.

*Barrett

Cowen

Toma

Troske

(2015). Working with what they have: Professional development as a reform strategy in rural schools. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 30(10), 1–18.

17.

*Baughman

(1957). Will they be strangers in their own communities? Educational Administration & Supervision, 43, 182–192.

18.

Bauman

(2001). Liquid modernity. Cambridge, England: Polity.

19.

*Beilin

(1956). Effect of changes in rural life upon teachers’ attitudes toward the school program. School Review, 64, 181–186.

20.

*Berry

A. B.

Gravelle

(2013). The benefits and challenges of special education positions in rural settings: Listening to the teachers. The Rural Educator, 34(2), 1–13.

21.

*Beswick

Jones

(2011). Taking professional learning to isolated schools: Perceptions of providers and principals, and lessons for effective learning. Journal of Math Education Research, 23, 83–105.

22.

Blumer

(1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Berkeley: University of California Press.

23.

Bonnano

(2014). Agriculture and food in the 2010s. In Bailey

Jensen

Ransom

(Eds.), Rural America in a globalizing world: Problems and prospects for the 2010s (pp. 3–15). Morgantown: West Virginia University Press.

24.

*Borg

W. R.

(1965). Perceptions of the teacher’s role in the small rural school. Denver, CO: Western State Small Schools Project.

25.

*Boschee

M. A.

(1996). Perceived effects of training and compensation on rural and urban school based teacher educators. The Rural Educator, 18(1), 13–19.

26.

Bowers

W. L.

(1971). Country-life reform, 1900–1920: A neglected aspect of Progressive Era history. Agricultural History, 45, 211–221.

27.

*Brewton

(1943). Teaching and learning in small, rural schools. Peabody Journal of Education, 20, 322–329.

28.

*Brooks

T. D.

(1926). Progressive trends in rural education: A. D. Mueller. Elementary School Journal, 27, 155–156.

29.

*Brouillette

J. W.

Barrow

C. L.

(1943). Some persistent problems of rural life and education in the South. Peabody Journal of Education, 20, 266–271.

30.

*Bruce

W. C.

Hubright

R. L.

Yarbrough

V. E.

(1976). Decentralizing graduate education: A case for the field-based professor. Phi Delta Kappan, 57(7), 452–453.

31.

*Bunting

R. L.

McGuffey

(1928). Preparation of rural teachers. Teachers College Record, 29, 716–727.

32.

*Burkes

(1916). Rural supervision in Tennessee. Journal of Education, 83, 395–397.

33.

*Burnham

(1915). A decade of progress in training rural teachers. Elementary School Journal, 16, 181–189.

34.

*Burnham

. (1920). What the Western State Normal School is doing in training rural teachers. Journal of Rural Education, 2, 298–304.

35.

Bustamante

Brown

Irby

(2010). Advocating for English language learners: U.S. teacher leadership in rural Texas schools. In Schafft

Youngblood

(Eds.), Rural education for the 21st century: Identity, place and community in a globalizing world (pp. 232–252). University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

36.

*Campbell

M. K.

(1986). Preparing rural elementary teachers. Research in Rural Education, 3, 107–110.

37.

*Carney

(1918). The service of Teachers College to rural education. Teachers College Record, 19, 147–155.

38.

*Carney

(1932). The pre-service preparation of rural teachers. Teachers College Record, 34, 110–118.

39.

Carr

Kefalas

(2009). Hollowing out the middle: The rural brain drain and what it means for rural America. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

40.

*Cegelka

P. A.

Alvarado

(2000). A best practices model for preparation of rural special education teachers. Rural Special Education Quarterly, 19(3–4), 15–29.

41.

*Chase

W. O.

(1917). Some suggestions for rural school improvement. Journal of Education, 86(3), 61–62.

42.

*Cherry

A. M.

Holdford

A. V.

Alexander

(1936). Guide to the literature on rural education. Elementary School Journal, 36, 748–759.

43.

*Collins

E. A.

(1940). Survey of in-service training. Phi Delta Kappan, 23(4), 126–127.

44.

*Conaway

(1922). Better rural teachers. Journal of Education, 95, 488–489.

45.

Constance

D. H.

Hendrickson

Howard

Heffernan

(2014). Economic concentration in the agrifood system: Impacts on rural communities and emerging responses. In Bailey

Jensen

Ransom

(Eds.), Rural America in a globalizing world: Problems and prospects for the 2010s (pp. 16–35). Morgantown: West Virginia University Press.

46.

Corbett

(2007). Learning to leave: The irony of schooling in a coastal community. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: Fernwood.

47.

*Crabbe

A. L.

(1924). A study in teacher transiency. Peabody Journal of Education, 1, 295–300.

48.

*Crabbe

J. G.

(1913). The normal school. Journal of Education, 78, 230–231.

49.

Creswell

(2014). Educational research: Planning, conducting and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research (5th ed.). New York, NY: Pearson.

50.

Cubberley

(1912). Rural life and education. Cambridge, MA: Riverside.

51.

*Darlington

M. W.

(1937). New venture in the rural school. Phi Delta Kappan, 19(8), 239–242.

52.

*Davidson

(1921). Rural school supervision as an agency for improving rural schools. Journal of Rural Education, 1, 3–9.

53.

Dawson

H. A.

Hubbard

F. W.

(1944). Proceedings from The White House Conference on Rural Education. Washington, DC: National Education Association, Department of Rural Education.

54.

*Dewey

H. B.

(1910). Rural school possibilities. Journal of Education, 72, 541–542.

55.

DeYoung

A. J.

(1987). The status of American rural education research: An integrated review and commentary. Review of Educational Research, 57(2), 123–148.

56.

*Dunn

(1923). The curriculum of the rural elementary school. Teachers College Record, 24(2), 122–131.

57.

*Dunn

(1930). Modern education in small schools. Teachers College Record, 32(5), 411–423.

58.

*Eargle

J. C.

(2013). “I’m not a bystander”: Developing teacher leadership in a rural school-university collaboration. The Rural Educator, 35(1), 23–34.

59.

Edington

(1976). Strengthening the small rural school. Austin, TX: Educational Laboratory.

60.

*Edwards

(1939). Problems of rural education in the United States. Elementary School Journal, 40, 106–112.

61.

*Eggert

C. L.

(1937). Modern trends in rural education. Phi Delta Kappan, 19(8), 254–256.

62.

*Eliassen

R. H.

Anderson

E. W.

(1945). Teacher supply and demand: Investigations reported in 1944. Educational Research Bulletin, 24(5), 119–126.

63.

*Eliassen

R. H.

Anderson

E. W.

(1952). Investigations in teacher supply and demand reported in 1951. Educational Research Bulletin, 31(3), 67–74.

64.

*Elsea

A. F.

(1940). Modern rural school. Phi Delta Kappan, 23(4), 124–125.

65.

Eppley

(2009). Rural schools and the highly qualified teacher provision of No Child Left Behind: A critical policy analysis. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 24(4), 1–11.

66.

*Eppley

(2015). “Hey, I saw your grandparents at Walmart”: Teacher education for rural schools and communities. The Teacher Educator, 50(1), 67–86.

67.

*Favrot

L. M.

(1936). How the small rural school can more adequately serve its community. Journal of Negro Education, 5, 430–438.

68.

*Ferrell

D. T.

(1946). Current practice in the education of teachers for rural children. Peabody Journal of Education, 23, 360–363.

69.

*Fickel

L. H.

(2005). Teachers, tundra, and talking circles: Learning history and culture in an Alaska Native village. Theory and Research in Social Education, 33, 476–507.

70.

*Finson

K. D.

Beaver

J. B.

(1990). Rural science teacher preparation: A re-examination of an important component of the educational system. Journal of Science Teacher Education, 1(3), 46–48.

71.

*Fishpaw

(1912). The training of rural teachers. The Province of Education, 33, 79–83.

72.

*Flynn

H. E.

(1925). Teacher training in connection with high schools. Journal of Education, 101, 331–332.

73.

*Foght

(1912). The country school. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 40, 149–157.

74.

*Foote

J. M.

(1923). A comparative study of instruction in consolidated and one-teacher schools. Journal of Rural Education, 2(8), 337–351.

75.

*Fox

R. S.

(Ed.). (1956). Teaching in the small community (National Education Association yearbook). Washington, DC: National Education Association, Department of Rural Education.

76.

*Fry

S. W.

Bryant

(2006). Using distance technology to sustain teacher education for student teachers in isolated areas: The technology-supported induction network. Journal of Computing and Teacher Education, 23(2), 63–69.

77.

*Fulkerson

M. L.

(1917). The Oregon normal school rural week. Journal of Education, 85, 511–513.

78.

*Gal

(1993). Teachers and teaching. Journal of Rural Education Research, 9(1), 38–42.

79.

Giddens

(1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Boston, MA: Pearson.

80.

*Gillette

J. M.

(1912). Conditions and needs of country life. Annals of the American Academy of Political Science, 40, 3–11.

81.

Glasgow

Berry

E. H.

(2013). Rural aging in 21st century America. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer.

82.

Goetz

S. J.

(2005). Random variation in student performance by class size: Implications for NCLB in rural Pennsylvania. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 20(13), 1–8.

83.

*Goodpaster

K. S.

Adedokun

O. A.

Weaver

G. C.

(2012). Teachers’ perceptions of rural STEM Teaching: Implications for rural teacher retention. The Rural Educator, 33(3), 9–23.

84.

*Graves

(1931). Teacher training. Journal of Education, 113, 53–54.

85.

*Gray

A. A.

(1916). The teacher’s home. Elementary School Journal, 17, 201–208.

86.

*Green

C. R.

Weiner

C. A.

(1997). Arkansas evolution: The ruralization of Goodlad’s professional development school. The Rural Educator, 19(2), 11–14.

87.

*Haar

(2007). Retaining experienced, qualified teachers: The principal’s role. The Rural Educator, 28(2), 28–34.

88.

*Hammer

P. C.

Hughes

McClure

Reeves

Salgado

(2005). Rural teacher recruitment and retention practices: A review of the research literature, National Survey of Rural Superintendents, and case studies of programs in Virginia. Charleston, WV: Appalachia Educational Laboratory at Edvantia.

89.

*Harmon

Gordanier

Henry

George

(2007). Changing teaching practices in rural schools. The Rural Educator, 28(2), 8–12.

90.

Heffernan

Hendrickson

Gronski

(1999). Consolidation in the food and agriculture system. Washington, DC: National Farmers Union. http://www.foodcircles.missouri.edu/whstudy.pdf

91.

*Heyl

(1940). Guidance of rural teachers. Teachers College Record, 41(4), 334–338.

92.

*Hillkirk

Chang

Oettinger

L. A.

Saban

Villet

(1998). Supporting ongoing professional learning in rural schools. The Rural Educator, 19(3), 20–24.

93.

*Hillyer

T. A.

(1916). The preparation of rural school teachers by state normal schools. Journal of Education, 84, 31–33.

94.

Hoffman

J. V.

Wilson

M. B.

Martinez

R. A.

Sailors

(2011). Content analysis: The past, present, and future. In Duke

Mallette

(Eds.), Literacy research methodologies (2nd ed., pp. 28–49). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

95.

*Holloway

(2002). Using research to ensure quality teaching in rural schools. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 17(3), 138–153.

96.

*Horn

J. G.

Davis

Hilt

(1985). Importance of areas of preparation for teaching in rural /small schools. Research in Rural Education, 3(1), 23–29.

97.

*Howley

Howley

C. B.

(2005). High-quality teaching: Providing for rural teachers’ professional development. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 26(2), 1–5.

98.

Howley

(2014). Making sense of rural education research: Art, transgression, and other acts of terroir. In White

Corbett

(Eds.), Doing educational research in rural settings: Methodological issues, international perspectives, and practical solutions (pp. 7–25). New York, NY: Routledge.

99.

*Huftalen

(1911). How the teacher can secure the confidence and co-operation of director and district. Journal of Education, 73, 510–511.

100.

*Hunt-Barron

Tracy

K. N.

Howell

Kaminski

(2015). Obstacles to enhancing professional development with digital tools in rural landscapes. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 30(2), 1–14.

101.

*Huysman

J. T.

(2008). Rural teacher satisfaction: An analysis of beliefs and attitudes of rural teacher’s job satisfaction. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 29(2), 31–38.

102.

*Inglis

(1921). The one-teacher school. Journal of Education, 94, 516.

103.

*Jacobson

S. L.

(1990). Change in entry level salary and the recruitment of novice teachers. Journal of Education Finance, 15, 408–413.

104.

*Jaggers

R. E.

(1939). A desirable rural secondary school program. Peabody Journal of Education, 16, 404–409.

105.

*Jones

(1944). The White House conference on rural education: A summary report. High School Journa l, 27(5), 173–181.

106.

*Kephart

A. P.

(1919). Better teaching in rural schools. High School Journal, 2(5), 144–145.

107.

*Kibbe

(1928). An analysis of the activities of rural-school supervisors. Elementary School Journal, 28, 346–352.

108.

*King

(1988). Some basic understandings about rural education and staff development. Journal of Staff Development, 9(4), 8–11.

109.

*Kleinfeld

Mcdiarmid

G. W.

Grubis

Parrett

(1983). Doing research on effective cross-cultural teaching: The teacher tale. Peabody Journal of Education, 61(1), 86–108.

110.

*Knapczyk

Chapman

Rodes

Chung

(2001). Teacher preparation in rural communities through distance education. Teacher Education and Special Education, 24, 402–407.

111.

*Knight

E. W.

(1920). The state university and rural schools. High School Journal, 3(6), 177–183.

112.

Kuhn

. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

113.

*LaChance

Benton

C. J.

Klein

(2007). The school-based activity model: A promising alternative to professional development schools. Teacher Education Quarterly, 34(3), 95–111.

114.

Lagemann

E. C.

(2000). An elusive science: The troubling history of education research. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

115.

*Lee

M. A.

(1944). Improving the reading of the Negro rural teacher in the South. Journal of Negro Education, 13(1), 47–56.

116.

*Lester

(1946). Social status of the teacher. Review of Educational Research, 16(3), 291–297.

117.

*Lillehoj

C. J.

Spoth

Trudeau

(2002). Rural teacher training. The Rural Educator, 24(1), 3–12.

118.

Lobao

Stofferahn

C. W.

(2007). The community effects of industrialized farming: Social science research and challenges to corporate farming laws. Agriculture and Human Values, 25, 219–240.

119.

*Love

Emerson

Shaw

Leigh

(1996). Evolution of professional development schools in a rural setting. Contemporary Education, 67, 210–212.

120.

*Ludlow

B. L.

(1998). Preparing special education personnel for rural schools: Current practices and future directions. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 14(2), 57–75.

121.

*Lyons

(2008). More equal than others? Meeting the professional development needs of rural primary and secondary science teachers. Teaching Science, 54(3), 27–31.

122.

*Mancus

Rodriquez

R. C.

(1980). Rural teacher centers: New roles for teacher educators. The Rural Educator, 2(2), 25–29.

123.

*Maranto

Shuls

(2012). How do we get them on the farm? Efforts to improve rural teacher recruitment and retention in Arkansas. The Rural Educator, 34(1) 32–41.

124.

*Martin

L. E.

Shafer

Kragler

(2009). Blending together, step by step: Principal uses professional learning to combine two school cultures into one. Journal of Staff Development, 30(5), 20–24.

125.

Massey

D. S.

Capoferro

(2008). The geographic diversification of American immigration. In Massey

D. S.

(Ed.), New faces in new places: The changing geography of American immigration (pp. 25–50). New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

126.

*Massey

Crosby

(1983). Special problems, special opportunities: Preparing teachers for rural schools. Phi Delta Kappan, 65, 265–269.

127.

Maxwell

J. A.

(2012). Qualitative research design: An interactive approach (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

128.

*McCallister

J. E.

(1938). A venture in rural-teacher education among Negroes in Louisiana. Journal of Negro Education, 7, 132–143.

129.

McLaughlin

D. K.

Shoff

C. M.

Demi

M. A.

(2014). Influence of perceptions of current and future community on residential aspirations of rural youth. Rural Sociology, 79, 453–477.

130.

*Meredith

A. B.

(1929). The preparation of teachers for rural schools. Elementary School Journal, 29, 344–350.

131.

*Miller

C. L.

Gregg

H. D.

(1932). The teaching staff. Journal of Negro Education, 1, 196–223.

132.

*Miller

L. C.

(2012). Situating the rural teacher labor market in the broader context: A descriptive analysis of the market dynamics in New York State. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 27(13), 1–32.

133.

*Miretzky

Stevens

(2012). How does location impact meaning and opportunity? Rural schools and the NCATE Diversity Standard. Teachers College Record, 114(5), 1–36.

134.

*Mitchem

Wells

(2003). Using evaluation to ensure quality professional development in rural schools. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 18(2), 96–103.

135.

*Mollenkopf

D. L.

(2009). Creating highly qualified teachers: Maximizing university resources to provide professional development in rural areas. The Rural Educator, 30(3), 34–39.

136.

*Monk

D. H.

(2007). Recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers in rural areas. Future of Children, 17(1), 155–174.

137.

*Munsch

T. R.

Boylan

C. R.

(2008). Can a week make a difference? Changing perceptions about teaching and living in rural Alaska. The Rural Educator, 29(2), 14–23.

138.

*Murry

Herrera

(1998). Crisis in the Heartland: Addressing unexpected challenges in rural education. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 14(1), 45–49.

139.

Newton

X. A.

Darling-Hammond

Haertel

Thomas

(2010). Value-added modeling of teacher effectiveness: An exploration of stability across models and contexts. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 18(23), 1–27.

140.

*Oelschlager

Guenther

(1983). Rural school innovations, preparation, awareness and adoption. NASSP Bulletin, 67, 94–99.

141.

*O’Hair

Reitzug

U. C.

(2006). Working for social justice in rural schools: A model for science education. International Electronic Journal for Leadership in Learning, 10(28), 1–11.

142.

*Patton

J. G.

(1957). Manpower problems in rural schools. Teachers College Record, 59(1), 14–20.

143.

*Pavia

B. K.

(1982). Dipping sheep and Shakespeare, or how an urbanite was kept down on the farm. English Journal, 71(2), 22–26.

144.

Petrin

Schafft

K. A.

Meece

(2014). Educational sorting and residential aspirations among rural high school students: What are the contributions of schools and educators to the rural brain drain? American Educational Research Journal, 51(2), 294–326.

145.

*Phelps

C. L.

(1917). Training of rural teachers. Elementary School Journal, 17, 662–667.

146.

Provasnik

Kewal Ramani

Coleman

M. M.

Gilbertson

Herring

Xie

(2007). Status of education in rural America (NCES 2007-040). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics.

147.

*Reaves

Larmer

W. G.

(1996). The effective schools project: School improvement in rural settings through collaborative professional development. The Rural Educator, 18(1), 29–33.

148.

*Reeves

F. W.

(1935). Rural educational problems in relation to the new trends in population distribution. Social Forces, 14(1), 7–16.

149.

*Rhoads

(2011). Despite rough seas, teachers in rural Maine swim together. Journal of Staff Development, 32(2), 22–26.

150.

*Robertson-Kraft

Duckworth

(2014). True grit: Trait-level perseverance and passion for long-term goals predicts effectiveness and retention among novice teachers. Teachers College Record, 116(3), 1–27.

151.

*Robinson

W. M.

(1954). Preparing teachers for rural schools. Phi Delta Kappan, 36(1), 29–31.

152.

*Rose

C. E.

(1917). The education of a rural teacher. Journal of Education, 86, 298.

153.

Rosenblatt

L. M.

(1978). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

154.

Rosenblatt

L. M.

(1983). Literature as exploration (4th ed.). New York, NY: Modern Language Association. (Original work published 1938)

155.

Rosenblatt

L. M.

(2005). “Retrospect” from “Transactions with Literature.” Voices From the Middle, 12(3), 13–19.

156.

Salaman

(2003). Newcomers to old towns: Suburbanization of the heartland. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

157.

*Sand

O. P.

(1943). In-service training for rural teachers through professional reading. Peabody Journal of Education, 20, 336–343.

158.

Schafft

K. A.

(2010). Conclusion: Economics, community, and rural education: Rethinking the nature of accountability in the twenty-first century. In Schafft

K. A.

Youngblood Jackson

(Eds.), Rural education for the 21st century: Identity, place and community in a globalizing world (pp. 275–289). University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

159.

Schafft

K. A.

Biddle

(2013). Place and purpose in public education: District mission statements and educational (dis)embeddedness. American Journal of Education, 120(1), 55–76.

160.

Schafft

K. A.

Biddle

(2014). Education and schooling in rural America. In Bailey

Jensen

Ransom

(Eds.), Rural America in a globalizing world: Problems and prospects for the 2010s (pp. 556–572). Morgantown: West Virginia University Press.

161.

Schafft

K. A.

Biddle

(2015). Opportunity, ambivalence and the purpose of schooling in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale region. Human Organization, 74(1), 74–85.

162.

*Scribner

J. P.

(2003). Teacher learning in context: The special case of rural high school teachers. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 11(12), 1–23.

163.

*Sears

J. B.

(1917). The normal school and rural education in California. Education, 37(7), 410–426.

164.

Sher

(1978). Education in rural America: A reassessment of conventional wisdom. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

165.

Sherman

(2009). Those who work and those who don’t: Poverty, morality, and family in rural America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

166.

Sherman

(2014). Rural poverty: The Great Recession, rising unemployment, and the under-utilized safety net. In Bailey

Jensen

Ransom

(Eds.), Rural America in a globalizing world: Problems and prospects for the 2010s (pp. 523–542). Morgantown: West Virginia University Press.

167.

*Shibley

A. P.

(1917). Improving the rural school: A program of progress. Journal of Education, 85(20), 541–542.

168.

*Silver

(1987). Compliance with PL94-142 mandates: Implications for rural teacher training programs. Research in Rural Education, 4(3), 103–109.

169.

*Smart

T. J.

(1919). Training a socialized rural leadership. American Journal of Sociology, 24(4), 389–410.

170.

*Smart

T. J.

(1920). A program to meet the immediate shortage of rural teachers. American Journal of Sociology, 25, 456–468.

171.

*Smith

(1921). The place of the city normal school in a state system of teacher training. Journal of Education, 93, 229–231.

172.

*Stonecipher

E. E.

(1947). A brief history of the one-teacher school. Peabody Journal of Education, 25, 130–138.

173.

*Storer

J. H.

Crosswait

D. J.

(1995). Delivering staff development to the small rural school. Rural Special Education Quarterly, 14(3), 23–30.

174.

Strange

Johnson

Showalter

Klein

(2012). Why rural matters 2011–12: The condition of rural education in the 50 states. Washington, DC: Rural School and Community Trust.

175.

*Summerville

Johnson

C. S.

(2006). Rural creativity: A study of district-mandated online professional development. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 14, 347–361.

176.

*Theobald

N. D.

(1991). A persistent challenge: Staffing special education programs in rural schools. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 7(3), 39–50.

177.

*Tigert

J. J.

(1922). The need for educational equality. Journal of Education, 95, 354.

178.

*Torrence

(1956). A study of the relationship of certain competencies to success in teaching vocational agriculture. Journal of Experimental Education, 25, 1–31.

179.

Travers

(1958). An introduction to educational research. New York, NY: MacMillan.

180.

U.S. Commission on Country Life. (1909, February). Report of the Country Life Commission and Special Message from the President of the United States (S. Doc. 705, 60th Congress, 2nd session). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

181.

*Vaughn

Saul

(2013). Navigating the rural terrain: Educators’ visions to promote change. The Rural Educator, 34, 1–9.

182.

*Washington

A. H.

(1936). The American problem of rural education. Journal of Negro Education, 5, 420–429.

183.

*Washington

A. H.

(1940). Negro secondary education in rural areas. Journal of Negro Education, 9, 513–524.

184.

*Washington

A. H.

(1947). Rural education—To the teachers of rural America. Journal of Negro Education, 16, 100–104.

185.

*Weiler

(2005). Mabel Carney at Teachers College: From home missionary to White ally. Teachers College Record, 107, 2599–2633.

186.

*Wells

J. A.

(1937). Adequate rural education: The backbone of the nation’s progress. Peabody Journal of Education, 15, 144–147.

187.

*Weltzin

(2015). Dare the teacher breathe? The American Scholar, 4, 214–222.

188.

*White

J. B.

(1947). A study of the teachers in the small rural schools of South Carolina. Peabody Journal of Education, 24, 266–275.

189.

*White

Kline

(2012). Developing a rural teacher education curriculum package. The Rural Educator, 33(2), 36–43.

190.

*Wigle

Sylvester

(1996). The professional knowledge base of rural inservice teachers. The Rural Educator, 17(3), 35–40.

191.

*Winship

A. E.

(1917). Rural school ideals. Journal of Education, 85, 286–287.

192.

*Wofford

(1940). Education for teachers in the rural environment. Teachers College Record, 41, 323–333.

193.

*Wood

M. B.

Jilk

L. M.

Paine

L. W.

(2012). Moving beyond sinking or swimming: Reconceptualizing the needs of beginning mathematics teachers. Teachers College Record, 114(8), 1–44.