Painting the Landscape of Rural Racial Achievement Gaps: Locale, Race, and Achievement

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

More than one in four of America’s public schools—and nearly one in six of the nation’s students—are in rural areas, and students in many rural places face significant challenges. Despite this knowledge, the understanding of educational needs in rural communities is not nuanced. For instance, distance from urbanized areas is closely related to access to academic programs for students, to professional development for teachers, and other educational resources; nonetheless, the education research tends to portray rural communities as homogeneous. Moreover, while rural schools are becoming more racially diverse, and racial achievement gaps still exist, less research has been conducted to shed light on this issue. This study intends to examine the variation within and across rural school districts to investigate its relation to academic achievement gaps. Data for this research are drawn from Stanford Education Data Archive, which consists of 300 million standardized math and English Language Arts student test scores from every public school district in the U.S. during the 2008-09 through 2014-15 school years. The findings of this study highlight that racial achievement gaps exist in rural school districts, and they are non-negligible. In addition, rural remote districts, which are farther away from the urbanized area than other rural fringe and rural distant districts, have the widest racial achievement gaps. Notably, while Black-White achievement gaps narrowed as the proportion of Black students increased, Hispanic-White achievement gaps widened as the proportion of Hispanic students increased.

Author

• Se Woong Lee, University of Missouri