This article describes the implementation of an initiative to encourage voluntary school district mergers in Vermont. The law was intended to increase educational opportunities for Vermont students while reducing costs. Three research activities were conducted to understand how districts and supervisory unions around the state responded to the new…

The purpose of this study was to inform the upcoming and overdue reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) by exploring whether rural school districts face disadvantages as they attempt to follow the law's provisions and, if so, if the law's rural-specific section ameliorates these disadvantages. The research…

Interview, document, and observational data were used to examine grade K-2 teachers' and literacy coaches' perceptions of the benefits and challenges of collaborative action research as a professional development initiative in rural schools. Eleven teachers and five literacy coaches in five northern Ontario school districts participated in…

Why read? We take a turn in the conversation initiated by Jean Stockard's article, "Increasing Reading Skills in Rural Areas: An Analysis of Three School Districts" (2011a), with a dialog in which we engage the epistemological positions at play within this debate. We understand the different positions as representations of each author's ideas…

Jean Stockard's (2011) article in the "Journal of Research in Rural Education," "Increasing Reading Skills in Rural Areas: An Analysis of Three School Districts," offers a productive opportunity to discuss the standardization of language and literacy teaching and learning in rural schools. The purpose of this response is to (re)initiate…

A national survey of rural school systems in the United States was conducted to determine the extent to which distance education is being utilized by rural schools, the technologies used, the curriculum areas impacted, the perceived needs for distance education, their satisfaction with distance education, and the barriers to distance education…

This article presents district administrators' reflections about (a) the contextual challenges they face in leading a high-need rural school system in Central Appalachia and (b) the change initiatives they implemented to transform the principalship from school management to instructional leadership. After several years of reform efforts, the…

I present a case study of the influence of rurality and a sense of place on leaders' beliefs about purposes of local schooling and their concomitant theories of action in one rural school district. Interview data show that despite their portrayal of life in the valley as a privilege, most leaders viewed their place as presenting more problems than…

We draw on interactional community theory to analyze the relationship between information technology and local development through a case study of a geographically isolated and economically disadvantaged rural school district. This district has used state-of-the-art information technology infrastructure in a broad-based community and economic…

Chronic student mobility, and in particular the mobility of students from low-income backgrounds, poses a serious yet underdocumented problem for rural schools. This article combines analyses of state-level school district data with survey and interview data to examine the patterns of low-income student mobility in upstate New York, and to assess…

Large numbers of rural districts have experienced sharp declines in enrollment, unlike their suburban counterparts. Accurate enrollment projections are required, whether a district needs to build new schools or consolidate existing ones. For school districts having more than 600 students, a quantitative method such as the Cohort-Survival Ratio…

Case study of a poor, rural Pennsylvania school district's experience with the Reading First initiative illustrates how the No Child Left Behind Act confines districts to a few federally prescribed, "scientifically proven" curricula that ignore local conditions. Sanctioned schools are negatively labeled but receive inadequate funding, setting the…

Since the authors' previous article was submitted, the Reading First proposal in question was funded without revisions. This may have happened because a new governor and political party had replaced those in charge of the Reading First program. Three implications arise: persist when values collide; who controls state government matters; and…

Describes how local, within-school factors at two rural elementary schools located in different parts of Kentucky influenced efforts to achieve the mandated goals of the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 (KERA). Discusses the tension created by imposing generic reform measures on very different rural places. An appendix presents KERA goals.…

A survey of 604 principals of suburban and rural schools in Ohio and West Virginia found that suburban Ohio principals showed less interest in traditional-consensual approaches to planning, whereas rural Ohio principals showed less interest in the new technicist approaches. Suburban West Virginia principals favored the new technicist approach,…