Describing the Size of Rural-Serving Public School Districts in the US: Common Forms and Heterogeneity

• In Event: Setting Boundaries: Exploring Policy Implications of Rural Locale Classifications and School District Borders

Abstract

Objectives

School districts are critical organizational actors in the implementation of state and federal education initiatives and the development of local instructional and student support practices (Dineen et. al., 2022; Marsh et. al., 2005). Existing research on policy implementation tends to assume large horizontally fragmented central offices in which specialized professionals oversee policy within their domain (e.g., Spillane, 1998; Daly & Finnigan, 2011, Honig, 2008). In contrast, rural districts profiled tend to have small administrative teams, and as a result, superintendents may serve in multiple roles related to day-to-day school operations (Sutherland & Seelig, 2021). Further understanding the organizational characteristics of rural school districts can help inform asset-oriented and locally-feasible policy designs.

While rural education is sometimes equated with small (Welsh, 2024), rural districts vary in terms of their geographic catchment areas and, relatedly, the size of their student enrollment (Burrola et. al., 2023; Gutierrez & Terrones, 2023). Indeed, case study evidence suggests that superintendent roles (Bredeson et. al., 2011) and curriculum implementation (Zuckerman et. al., 2018) may also differ between rural areas by district size. However, there have been no systematic efforts to describe variation in rural district size and staffing nationally. In this paper I draw on school and district-level data from the NCES Common Core of Data to explore:

How does the size, including enrollment and central office staffing, vary among rural-serving districts by National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) sub-locale code and region?

Methods & Data

I utilized the NCES 2022-2023 Local Education Agency (LEA) Universe Survey to create a database of all rural-serving public school districts in the United States. I define a district as “rural serving” if there is at least one school in the district designated as Rural by NCES. This approach is beneficial as rural schools that are part of county-wide districts are often not classified as rural at the district level if they neighbor towns or cities (Gutierrez & Terrones, 2023). In total, I identified 9,053 of rural-serving districts administering 25,026 rural schools. See Table 1 for school demographic characteristics.

Using these same datasets, I identified publicly-available measures of district size including enrollment, number of schools, and LEA staffing. I conduct descriptive analyses of district size NCES locale code and geographic census region and exploratory cluster analysis to identify common district types. I use an approach similar to Heinrich et. al. (2019) and Balzer Carr & London (2020) where I first conduct agglomerative hierarchical clustering to identify a reasonable number of clusters contained in the data and then iteratively refine cluster groupings based on their usability and face validity.

Analysis & Preliminary Results

Rural-serving districts range widely in district size and staffing as seen in Tables 2 and 3. On average, rural-serving districts in the South tend to have higher enrollment, operate more schools. However, there is substantial within-state variation in district structures. NCES classifications also explain a very small percentage of the overall variation in the structural characteristics of rural schools, suggesting that grouping by locale may obscure meaningful variation in district size and structure.

Author

• Sara White, Vanderbilt University