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The Status of American Rural Education Research: An Integrated Review and Commentary

The history of American education has been primarily an urban history. School reform movements of the mid-19th century were targeted at the particular problems brought on by the Industrial Revolution. Early 20th-century school administrators, and later progressive educators, defined the majority of America’s educational problems in terms of school-based occupational and community living skills that city dwellers needed in modern America. Finally, school reforms of the 1950s–80s have been targeted primarily at such concerns as the plight of minorities in inner cities, national defense needs, and now occupational skills necessary to compete internationally. Such reforms have had the net effect of continuing the century-long bias of much educational policy, scholarship, and research toward urban-based issues and concerns. On the other hand, a variety of research and policy initiatives have emerged in rural America, typically sponsored by state departments of education in primarily rural regions of the country and by numerous grass-roots organizations. Similarly, there has begun to emerge an interesting yet diverse literature on issues and problems in rural education. Themes such as education for economic development, problems with achieving educational equity in rural America, issues in appropriate school size, the role of the school in community life, problems with the training and rewarding of professional staff in rural schools, and so forth have begun to draw serious attention from a new wave of rural education researchers. The purpose of the following literature review is to elaborate on historical and contemporary reasons why scholarship on rural education has been relatively underdeveloped in this country, to briefly survey current initiatives in emerging rural education scholarship, and to speculate on the possibilities and dilemmas this field faces in its future evolution.