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Rural education
Are Rural Republicans Different When It Comes to Public Opinion on Education Policy?
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceConservative education policy in the United States increasingly emphasizes school choice, decentralization, and parental authority. This chapter examines whether these priorities resonate equally across geographic contexts, focusing specifically on rural Republicans. Using data from the 2015–… more →
Estimating Compensating Wage Differentials for Public School Teachers in High-Poverty and High-Minority Schools: Evidence from U.S. National Data, 1988–2018
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentUsing a hedonic wage framework, this paper estimates compensating wage differentials (CWDs) for teachers in high-poverty and/or high-minority schools, drawing on thirty years of nationally representative data from the School and Staffing Surveys (SASS), National Teacher and Principal Survey (… more →
Revisiting The Rural Teacher Workforce: Insights from a Novel Rurality Measure
How we define rurality fundamentally shapes our place-based understanding of the teacher workforce. This study uses the Community Assets and Relative Rurality (CARR) Index—a novel, multidimensional measure of rurality—alongside longitudinal administrative data to examine K–12 teachers in Kansas… more →
Supportive Teacher Working Conditions as a Tool to Retain Non-Local Teachers in Rural Schools
Rural school administrators prefer hiring homegrown teachers because they are more likely to stay than non-local teachers; however, administrators need to hire non-local candidates to meet their staffing needs. Our examination of rural teachers’ preferences for local was guided by person-… more →
The Four Day Gamble: The Quasi-Experimental Effects of Four-Day School Week Adoption on Teacher, Principal, and Paraprofessional Staff Turnover and District Financial Outcomes
Four-day school week (4DSW) adoption is an increasingly popular policy, particularly for rural districts that are seeking to reduce educator turnover and district expenditures. Using a staggered treatment event study design, I am among the first to estimate the quasi-experimental effects of 4DSW… more →
Lifting Up Attendance in Rural Districts: A Multi-Site Trial of a Personalized Messaging Campaign
Elise Swanson, Sativa Thompson, Jennifer Ash, Hayley Didriksen, Thomas J. Kane, Douglas O. Staiger, Lisa Sanbonmatsu.Topics: Families and CommunitiesTags: Absenteeism, Rural educationStudent absenteeism has remained high following the COVID-19 pandemic and districts need low-cost strategies to improve attendance. In 2020-21, the National Center for Rural Education Research Networks piloted a promising personalized messaging intervention in 8 rural districts in New York and… more →
From Population Growth to Demographic Scarcity: Emerging Challenges to Global Primary Education Provision in the Twenty-first Century
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceDemographic pressures are reshaping the challenges faced by primary education systems around the world in ways that carry significant implications for the landscape of global educational inequality. We first demonstrate highly disequalizing demographic pressures on the world's educational… more →
Variations in Pre-Primary Education Infrastructure Within and Across Administrative Sectors in Rwanda
Topics: Families and CommunitiesThis study examines disparities in structural quality across Rwanda’s pre-primary modalities—centre-based, community-based, and home-based—operating under a single policy framework. Using data from 4,875 settings across 91 administrative sectors in seven districts, we applied multilevel models… more →
Distance to Opportunity: Higher Education Deserts and College Enrollment Choices
We study how geographic access to public postsecondary institutions is associated with students’ college enrollment decisions across race and socioeconomic status. Leveraging rich administrative data, we first document substantial differences in students’ local college options, with White,… more →
Raising the Floor: Teacher Retention Effects of a Statewide Minimum Salary Increase
Attracting and retaining a high-quality teacher workforce is a central challenge for education policy, and higher teacher salaries are often proposed as a solution. The LEARNS Act increased Arkansas's minimum teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000, guaranteed all teachers a minimum raise of $2,… more →
Teacher Retention and Quality in the Four-Day School Week
The four-day school week is a school calendar that has become increasingly common following the COVID-19 pandemic. Proponents of the calendar often claim that offering teachers a regular 3-day weekend will help schools better retain existing teachers and recruit new teachers to their district… more →
Next-Generation Teacher Evaluation in Rural Missouri: Main and Moderated Effects on Student Achievement and Effects-to-Expenditure Ratios
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentTags: School reform, Rural educationWe extend teacher evaluation research by estimating a reformed evaluation system's plausibly causal average effects on rural student achievement, identifying the settings where evaluation works, and incorporating evaluation expenditures. That the literature omits these contributions is… more →
Rural Early Childhood Programs & School Readiness: An Evaluation of the Early Steps to School Success Program
Topics: Student LearningPrior research has clearly established the substantial expected payoffs to investments in early childhood education. However, the ability to deliver early childhood programs differs across communities with access to high quality programing especially hard to establish in rural communities. We… more →
Returns to School Spending in Rural America: Evidence from Wisconsin’s Sparsity Aid Program
Tags: Rural educationWe study the effects of increased school spending in rural American school districts by leveraging the introduction and subsequent expansion of Wisconsin’s Sparsity Aid Program. We find that the program, which provides additional state funding to small and isolated school districts, increased… more →
School-Based Healthcare and Absenteeism: Evidence from Telemedicine
Topics: Student Well-BeingThe prevalence of school-based healthcare has increased markedly over the past decade. We study a modern mode of school-based healthcare, telemedicine, that offers the potential to reach places and populations with historically low access to such care. School-based telemedicine clinics (SBTCs)… more →
The Impacts of School District Consolidation on Rural Communities: Evidence from Arkansas Reform
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceTags: Rural education, School districtsOver the past fifty years, school districts have consolidated in an effort to achieve economies of scale. While the determinants and effects of district mergers on operations have been studied (Gordon and Knight 2006; Duncombe and Yinger 2007; Jones et al 2008), the impact on communities has not… more →
Sibling Spillovers in Rural China: A Story of Sisters
Topics: Families and CommunitiesWe study sibling spillover effects on the school performance of the elder sibling from the younger sibling using data on multi-children households in rural China. We use the variation in the younger sibling’s schooling status to parse out the spillover effects and exploit the arbitrary school… more →
The Opioid Crisis and Educational Performance
Topics: Student Well-BeingThe opioid crisis is widely recognized as one of the most important public health emergencies of our time, and an issue that is particularly acute for rural communities. We propose a simple model of how opioids in a community can impact the education outcomes of children based on both the extent… more →
The Forgotten 20 Percent: Achievement and Growth in Rural Schools Across the Nation
Topics: Student LearningNearly one in five U.S. students attends a rural school, yet we know very little about achievement gaps and academic growth in rural schools. This study leverages a unique dataset that includes longitudinal test scores for more than five million 3rd to 8th grade students in approximately 17,000… more →
How much can we remedy very low learning levels in rural parts of low-income countries? Impact and generalizability of a multi-pronged para-teacher intervention from a cluster-randomized trial in The Gambia
Alex Eble, Chris Frost, Alpha Camara, Baboucarr Bouy, Momodou Bah, Maitri Sivaraman, Jenny Hsieh, Chitra Jayanty, Tony Brady, Piotr Gawron, Peter Boone, Diana Elbourne.Topics: Student LearningTags: Rural education, PovertyDespite large schooling and learning gains in many developing countries, children in highly deprived areas are often unlikely to achieve even basic literacy and numeracy. We study how much of this problem can be resolved using a multi-pronged intervention combining several distinct interventions… more →