Take Care When Cutting: Five Approaches to Disaggregating Data on Rural Schools

• In Event: 25.036 - Undertheorized and Understudied: New Directions in the Research of Educational Inequality

Abstract

Education research often neglects or incorrectly defines rural and/or remote schools. These errors threaten policymakers’ abilities to understand geographic locale factors that could impair policy formulation, enactment, and evaluation. To enhance the precision of future school-level studies, we conducted a systematic literature review of 156,000-plus articles in ERIC to study the extent to which education researchers report rurality/remoteness clearly. For example, articles that considered rural settings failed to define rurality in 92.2% of cases. Next, we developed five statistical approaches to operationalize rurality and remoteness using the National Center of Education Statistics’ Urban-Centric codes. We found wide variations in (a) proportional school counts as rural and/or remote, (b) effect sizes, and (c) which school types were relatively disadvantaged.

Authors

• Michael Thier, International Baccalaureate

• Paul T Beach, Inflexion

• Charles R. Martinez, University of Oregon

• Keith L. Hollenbeck, University of Oregon