Our friends over at the Rural School and Community Trust will be releasing the 2009 version of "Why Rural Matters," its 50-state analysis or rural schools. This is the fifth report in the "Why Rural Matters" series and will be the subject of a webinar to be held Wednesday. For full details, go here. 

The reports will help people judge how their states are doing when it comes to serving rural students. There's quite a variety in outcomes, that's for sure. For instance, the non-profit group reports that graduation rates for students in high schools with high levels of poverty range from 28% in Wyoming to over 90% in Nevada. In all, the report will measure states along 25 different indicators.

In a preview to the report, the Rural School and Community Trust reports that several states have emerged with "pressing rural education concerns. Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, North Dakota, Colorado, Illinois, Ohio, New York, and Washington join several southern and southwestern states in facing crucial challenges related to rural educational policy and rural educational outcomes. California ranked high on indicators related to concentrated poverty and student and family diversity, as did Alaska, which had ranked high on diversity in 2007." 

The big thing in the Obama administration's education department is charter schools. But who needs school choice in rural communities where there are just a few hundred students. In small districts, what students need are qualified teachers. Education Week reporter Michele McNeil writes that rural schools advocates say policies promoted by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (above) "favor education improvement ideas that are best suited to urban settings. Initiatives such as the Race to the Top Fund competition fail to recognize the distinctive problems facing rural districts, which serve some 13 million students, or about one-quarter of the nation’s public school enrollment, according to the Rural School and Community Trust, based in Arlington, Va.

'Both Duncan and [President Barack] Obama are so narrowly focused on inner-city solutions for education challenges,' said South Dakota state Sen. Sandy Jerstad, a Democrat from Sioux Falls and a member of her legislative chamber’s education committee."

Duncan has heard the criticism from rural schools and is unimpressed. "Rural schools should let their unique challenges become excuses for keeping the status quo," he wrote in an Ed Week column in June. Still, McNeil notes, when Duncan shows up in a rural community as part of the administration's "listening tour," his "answers didn't seem to distinguish the problems of rural districts from those of their urban counterparts." Of particular interest to rural educators is the criteria for determining who will receive grants from a $4.35 billion "Race to the Top Fund." Charter schools are a big part of the formula in that competition.

Are leaders born that way? Richard Oswald doesn't think so. They're inspired by calamity and trained to encourage others.

The State of Alaska is creating a position for director of rural schools within its education department.

Educators there praised the new post as a measure that could improve rural schools, save tiny ones, focus on the education of Native American students, and devise good alternatives for communities whose schools must close.

Matt Nevala, of Tundra Drums, writes that with very low enrollments,  several rural Alaska schools risk closure now. “Joe Banghart of the Iditarod School District says Shageluk, Takotna and Anvik project 12 to 14 students but could drop below that.”

Alaska’s state legislature passed a bill last year to cushion tiny schools somewhat. Rather than withdrawing funding abruptly when schools shrink below 10 students, the state reduces funding gradually over four years, so that communities and school boards have time to work out education plans for the remaining students.

For more on the new rural schools director position, contact Alaska’s Department of Education and Early Development.