Abstract
We use nearly 430 million standardized test scores, including test scores from more than 6,500 rural school districts, to describe educational opportunity in rural America. Although we find modest differences in outcomes between rural and nonrural students overall, these disparities are larger for specific socioeconomic, racial-ethnic, and geographic groups. We also find that the relationship between socioeconomic status and achievement is somewhat weaker in rural areas compared to nonrural areas. Variation in third-grade achievement and learning rates is considerable among rural districts, indicating that rates of early and middle childhood educational opportunity are not evenly distributed throughout rural America.
- © 2022 Russell Sage Foundation. Drescher, Jessica, Anne Podolsky, Sean F. Reardon, and Gabrielle Torrance. 2022. “The Geography of Rural Educational Opportunity.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 8(3): 123–49. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2022.8.3.05. The research described here was supported by a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences (R305B140009). The article would not have been possible without the assistance of Belen Chavez and Demetra Kalogrides. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute of Education Sciences or the U.S. Department of Education. Direct correspondence to: Jessica Drescher, at jesscboyle{at}stanford.edu, 520 CERAS Building, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, United States.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.