 This meeting is now being recorded. All guests have been muted. I'm very briefly. I'm Caitlin Howley and I'm working enough to serve as the Associate Director of the Appalachia Regional Comprehensive Center or the ARC. ARC is one of 15 regional centers funded by the U.S. Department of Education to provide capacity building technical assistance to state departments of education. The ARC serves Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. And now I'm really delighted to introduce today's presenter, Kai Schaft. Kai is an Associate Professor of Education in the College of Education at Penn State University and the Director of Penn State Center on Rural Education and Communities. He's also the editor of the Journal on Research in Rural Education. He's trained as a rural sociologist and his work focuses kind of broadly on the intersection between social inequality and spatial inequality. He's interested in morality. His major areas of research include the interrelationship between rural poverty and student transancy, context for rural use development, farm to school program implementation and rural health outcomes. So you have a sense of where we're going today. I'm gonna talk about what our objectives are, which are pretty simple and straightforward on the surface anyway. To consider and discuss rural sociocultural dynamics, how they might arise and how they might show up in your work with rural school districts. And then second, to consider and discuss issues state departments of education might think about as they work with rural districts. So let's get rolling. I'm gonna turn things over to Kai now. Kai, it's all yours. Wonderful, thank you so much, Caitlin. And thanks for inviting me here to this webinar and hello to all of you out there. That was a great introduction. And yeah, so I guess what I'd like to do today is to talk about the context of rural schools and rural communities and how that context might affect the way that state and federal educational reforms might be received by rural communities. And what that in turn may imply for how state departments of education interact with and assist rural school districts. So I really do hope that this presentation will be of use to all of you. As Caitlin said, I do direct the center on rural education in communities at Penn State. And this is based within the College of Education. And what the center does is really sort of a combination of research and outreach, all of which focuses on the intersection of rural schools and rural communities with a specific focus on the relationship of between the well-being of each, how the well-being of rural schools translates to rural communities and vice versa. And I also there, as Caitlin mentioned, edit the Journal of Research in Rural Education, which is sort of the, probably the premier scholarly journal on rural education, both domestically and perhaps even internationally. So what I'd like to do is to break this talk into four parts. First of all, I'd like to talk about what is rural and building off that, talk about what is rural education. And I hope that you'll bear with me on this because I think that in order to talk about these broader issues of how state departments of education might interact with and assist rural school districts, it really is important for us to spend a little bit of time talking about how we might understand rural and how that affects the way that education and educational reforms are perceived. Then I'd like to talk about some key issue areas for rural schools and communities and finally wrap up with an example of local responsiveness to educational reforms and some concluding thoughts. So to begin a conversation about rural education, I think it's really important to simply ask, is rural? And the reason for this is that rural is one of those tricky concepts that seems so intuitively obvious, but it becomes less obvious the closer that you examine it. And to my mind, there are a few reasons why this is a tricky concept. First of all, there are multiple institutional ways in which we can define rural. Definitions that typically rely heavily on population size, concentration and density. For example, the metro non-metro distinction used by the Office of Management and Budget, the US Census definitions or the MCES metro-centric locale codes used in the Common Core data. So for example, with census definitions, rural refers to open country and settlements with less than 2,500 people. So by this definition, as of a couple of years ago, about 19% of the population could be considered rural by residents down from about 21% 10 years ago. Despite population concentrations in urban areas, the other side of the coin is that really geographically, the US remains a highly rural country in terms of the sheer landmass, as this map suggests that shows the urbanized areas and urban clusters and all the other geography that is not rural. So by contrast, the Office of Management and Budget designates counties as metropolitan or micro-pollutant depending on the size of the urbanized areas within them with all the remaining counties designated as non-metro. So using these criteria on metro territories, not as extensive as the rural territory, but still significant, about 75% of the US land areas non-metropolitan, about 16% of the population resides in non-metro areas. But this really has its operational limitations. So I live in Center County, Pennsylvania, which is where I'm speaking to you right now. And that is right in the middle of Pennsylvania, it's where Penn State is based, and it's a metropolitan county. But it also contains some recognizably rural places. And so the picture that I'm hoping that you're seeing with the Amish buggy right there is that could be taken a mile from my house. And yet in terms of its metropolitan status, Center County is indistinguishable from Philadelphia County or San Francisco County. And then there are the MCES Common Core of Data, Urban Centric Locale Codes, which are based on a place's proximity to centers to find urban areas and classifies territory into four major types, each with three subcategories allowing for greater precision in classifying areas. So there's lots of different ways of sort of officially defining what rural is, but one criticism of all of these approaches is that rural remains a residual category. That is, it's defined according to what is not rather than what it is. And in so doing, it tends to, this residual category tends to obscure significant within category variation. Now, I think perhaps more germane to our discussion today, we can think about rural as defined in symbolic terms. And with this, we begin to move away from the way that policy makers think about rural to the way that rural people themselves think about where they live and what that means to them, as well as the images that non-rural people have of rural America. So that is places are not only rural because of a particular structural or demographic or environmental characteristics, but because people who live there think of themselves as being rural with respect to a set of social, moral and cultural values. So a number of years ago, I heard Mike Arnold, who's a longtime figure in the rural education research world, he once said that when you lock your car on Sunday as a church to keep your neighbors from putting zucchinis on the seat, you know you're probably in a rural place. And I've heard other people talk about rural in terms of the distance one has to drive to go to a Walmart or a McDonald's or even a Starbucks. And it turns out that while about 82% of the US population lives within a census defined urbanized area, approximately the same population, proportion of the population lives within 20 miles of a Starbucks. I think though more to the point a few years ago, I was traveling around to different rural communities conducting focus groups as part of a larger study. And I frequently heard comments like the following. So this one focus group member says, a lot of times I think this type of community is somewhat bred into these kids. And I'm from experience in that you want to sometimes come back to where your roots were and raise your kids how you were raised. So even though they want to get away and go to college or go wherever, I think long term, some of those kids usually end up back in this community or in another one like it, like in my case. And then another focus group member responds, I was telling this teacher yesterday, there's a new thing on Facebook, you know, 25 random facts about me. Anyway, one of the facts that my middle son put down was that he was raised on dirt roads and that's where he wants to raise his kids. So there are strong positive symbolic associations with morality, linking it to family and community, neighborliness, closeness to nature, as well as associations with the American iconography of the frontier and individualism and self reliance and this kind of thing. But at the same time, it's also really important to acknowledge the equally persistent negative stereotypes of rural as backwards, second rate, pre-modern or even anti-modern stereotypes that may also affect how rural people see themselves and how others view them. And you know, it's really interesting. I don't have TV at home, but I spent last week at a series of meetings out in Idaho and when I travel and I stay in a hotel room, I watch TV and it's really interesting to me how it seems as though in the last couple of years it's just been this real explosion of these rural reality shows. And so, you know, you have the precursors with things like the Beverly Hillbillies when you have an image up here on the slide. But, you know, when I was in my hotel room last week, I was watching the show about the Amish Mafia and Call of the Wild Man and of course you can think about like Buck Wilde and Duck Dynasty and Honey Boo Boo, it's quite interesting. And I think that these shows really tie into some of these more negative stereotypes about rurality. Now, you know, I can give you another example from the standpoint of educational administrators. When I first got to Penn State and started directing the center, one of my colleagues said, you know what you really should do is perhaps organize a set of courses around which we can form a rural specialization certificate for our educational administrators who are going through the educational leadership program. And so that seemed like a reasonable enough idea to me and I talked to a couple of different people about it and ultimately I went to the executive board meeting at the Pennsylvania Association for Rural and Small Schools and the board members were all made up of rural superintendents. And it was really interesting to float this idea by them because I could just, they sat there kind of stony-faced and they knew me and they liked me and they didn't want to let me down or anything like that. But finally one of them said, you know, Kai, we appreciate what you're doing here and we understand what you're doing but the reality is that this rural specialization certificate wouldn't help us. In fact, if anything, it would hurt us because as rural superintendents and rural educational leaders were already perceived as not being able to handle the larger school districts and the urban school districts even though arguably you need much more finely tuned management skills because of all the additional things that you have to do with fewer resources. And so this certificate would paint us into a corner and typecast us as rural and limit our mobility. So I found that very interesting. So how might these images and identities and associations translate into the ways in which local people react to educational reforms and or state assistance? And I think that we can reasonably imagine a couple of different possibilities including the implicit message that rural schools need to fix things somehow so that ties into the idea of rural as deficient or rural as backwards. The resistance to having local control and decision-making undermined. The belief and especially in historically working class communities that higher education credentials are not necessary to be self-sufficient. And in fact, maybe those credentials are even an indication of one's lack of ability to be successful in one's home community. And finally, the resistance to taking marching orders from outsiders who may have only limited understanding and a lack of responsiveness to rural needs and assets. And with this last point, I sort of think about the example of the investing in innovation or I3 grants which is a competitive federal grant program supporting innovation in public schools. And so to encourage projects focused on rural education in the first round of grants in 2010, the Department of Education offered two bonus points in the scoring system for projects that were somehow focused on the unique challenges of rural educational contexts. So among the 49 grant recipients, 19 or 39% made this claim that there was some sort of rural component to this. But most applicants did not propose using innovations that originated in rural schools and had had little or no prior use in rural schools. And only two proposals were designed to operate entirely in rural schools. And in one instance, there was actually no intent to engage in any rural school district whatsoever. And one of the winners was the Board of Education of the City of New York City, School of One proposal. So in short, underdeveloped municipal and administrative capacity tends to disadvantage rural districts left to compete with more densely populated areas for resources. And at the same time, the federal policy environment often demonstrates an inadequate understanding of rural needs and resources. So lastly, thinking about rural and nailing down what rural is, is the remarkable diversity of rural people and places. And this goes back really to the criticism of rural as a residual category. And it also has implications, I think, for educational reforms that are constructed or perceived to be constructed with urban areas in mind or as one science fits all approaches. So as an illustration, let's take a moment to look at some photographs from the part of the country I'm in, which is the Mid-Atlantic region and the background of these slides, you see a photograph of a barn in rural New Jersey and we can probably all agree that this looks rural. And yet, here's a photograph of Tidewater, Maryland, which I think we could also describe as rural. But we can leave the Mid-Atlantic region and encounter a whole range of rural contexts in terms of histories, economies, demography, landscapes and culture, including Appalachian, West Virginia, the Black Belt of the Deep South, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountain West, on out to the West Coast, and here's a picture of Nia Bay, Washington home of the Maca Nation. And last, probably the most rural place I've ever been, Deep Springs, California, yet at the same time, located in one of the most urban and populated states in the nation. So what does this all mean for rural education? Well, rural schools and educational contexts obviously share a lot of characteristics and issues with non-rural contexts and we can do sort of a laundry list here and they include issues around academic achievement, English language learners, dropouts, turning around low-performing schools, parental engagement, but rural educational contexts are also associated with issues that if they're not unique to rural education certainly are disproportionately characteristic and I would argue that some of these include things like technology and distance education, school community connections, teacher and administrator recruitment and retention and again, I remind you of this whole notion of rural as a low status administrative appointment. Demographic change and institutional capacity and regarding the last point, the issues associated with institutional capacity and rural school settings don't just have to do with smaller school sizes, remoteness, and difficulties with teacher and administrator recruitment and retention, but with poverty. So we often think about poverty as an issue that principally affects cities and yet it often comes as a surprise to many people when they learn that in this country, non-metro poverty rates have always been higher than metro poverty rates. In fact, only central city poverty rates are higher than non-metro rates. So this is an issue not only for institutional capacity, but also in terms of the student populations enrolled in rural schools and the kinds of issues that they bring to the table. Among the 10 states with the highest incidence of poverty, 36% of students and 57% of school districts are located in rural areas. Over 26% of children in non-metro America currently live in poverty, an increase of about 4.5% from just five years ago. Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is the primary federal program designed to provide additional resources to schools serving economically disadvantaged students, as you know, with funds dedicated towards improving student academic achievement. But many rural education advocates have protested that the formula governing the disbursement of Title I funds is weighted in ways that significantly disadvantage rural school districts in addition to many small city high poverty. So Marty Strange, for example, notes that in Virginia, Fairfax County with a 6% poverty rate gets more Title I money for each disadvantaged student than rural Virginians, Lee County Public Schools with a 33% poverty rate. So this again, I think, speaks to the ways in which federal education policy can be interpreted as not being entirely responsive to rural needs and realities. And by extension, the ways in which rural stakeholders might respond to various federal and state level reforms and policies. So let's turn to a few key issues of rural education. And the first and one of my favorites is the rural school community connection. So rural schools have tremendous symbolic importance to rural communities and they function as a key site of civic interaction and intergenerational identity. And I think a really excellent example of this was once when I was visiting a school in rural Eastern Washington state and I was conducting some focus groups and I was between focus groups and I wandered out into the atrium of this high school and I looked up at the wall and there was a photograph, a portrait of the graduating class from the previous year. And I looked next to it and there was a class from the year before that and the year before that and the year before that and I walked along the wall of this atrium down one wall, down the next wall and down the third wall until I got back to 1916. And it was remarkable to me that here were all the photographs of the people who had graduated from this school and I went into the next focus group and I said, you know, I gotta tell you, I was just out there taking a look at the graduating class pictures and that was really cool. And I said, you know, I bet that some of you all were up in those photographs and this was a focus group of community members and they said, oh yeah, yeah, we're up there. Our parents are up there. Our uncles are up there. Our teachers are up there. And it just, it really gave me pause to think about what that experience must be like to grow up in that kind of a community and go to that kind of a school and see the pictures of your parents and your teachers on the wall and know that one day your picture will probably be on that wall as well. Well, rural schools are characterized by their relatively smaller size. So nearly 64% of schools in rural areas have 400 or fewer students, but the same is true for only 39% of city schools. And similarly, while only about 16% of students in cities attend schools with 400 or fewer students, in rural areas overall, nearly one third of students attend schools that size. Parents of rural students are more likely to attend school events or volunteer on school committees. Teachers in rural schools also report fewer problems with students in higher levels of job satisfaction. And in many rural places, the school is often an area's largest employer. So because of these characteristics, rural schools are often described as fostering especially strong social ties given their smaller size and the close linkages to the communities that they serve. And I think that it's really important, particularly in the light of some of the negative stereotypes of rural to seriously consider these characteristics and the way that they represent I think unique assets of rural schools. The presence of a school within a community can also be strongly related to elevated indicators of broader social and economic welfare, including housing values and local employment. So this means that those in positions of leadership within a rural school district, including the superintendent and school board members, they necessarily assume not only educational leadership roles, but local community development roles as well. So therefore those in leadership positions within rural schools, not only are the subjects of public scrutiny, but they're far more frequently required to assume community outreach roles and hone community relationship building skills in ways that are less common than within urban settings. So in other words, much more so than in many other places, the relationship between rural schools and the communities they serve is a deeply symbiotic relationship. Healthy schools beget healthy communities and vice versa. Alternately, this is one of the reasons why the threat of consolidation and school closure is so controversial and anxiety provoking in rural areas because of the ways in which schools play such critical local economic, symbolic and social roles. So how educational reforms have the potential to disrupt rural relationships? Well again, we can think about a couple of different ways in which this might take place. So we can ask things like what are the implications of accountability measures, teacher evaluations, performance incentives, critical friend professional development, and so forth in the context of communities where everyone knows everyone. How might accountability measures, especially in small schools, inadvertently create new kinds of exclusions? So performing children and their families, how are they gonna be treated if they're seen as liabilities to this school? And this brings to mind a conversation I had with a rural superintendent in New York State when I was doing my dissertation research and I was interviewing him about transient students coming in and out of his district. And I asked him, what kind of programs do you have in place set up for these students to help stabilize them? And his immediate response was stabilize them? Why would we wanna stabilize them? We don't even want them here. They're not our students. Finally, the threat of school closure or consolidation. Perhaps as a consequence of underperformance has real implications for rural people and communities. And I know that during the 90s, West Virginia went through a fairly massive process of school consolidation. So that has real impacts for how local people view these kinds of reforms and policy moves. So let's talk now briefly about student achievement and post-secondary transitions. So a body of scholarships suggests the social and academic benefits of smaller school environments. Although others have argued that rural schools, by virtue of their decreased size and capacity, are maybe less able to offer the breadth curricular options in comparison to their urban and suburban counterparts. I think this may be offset a bit by distance education and this kind of thing, but in any case, overall data suggests that rural schools tend to perform relatively well in academic assessments in comparison to their urban and their suburban counterparts. So in general, if we look to the national assessment of educational progress, reading and mathematics scores, only suburban schools really outperform rural schools. But the figures are not so promising when it comes to post-secondary transitions and college enrollment. And these barriers include things like cost, the physical proximity to higher education institutions, the mismatches between college degrees and local labor market needs. That is, can you use a college degree in your home community? And the potential for lowered expectations and aspirations in terms of post-secondary degrees among rural parents. And a recent study by Su Yong-byun and colleagues, presents some data about student achievement and post-secondary transition and lays out the achievements and the differences between rural suburban and urban places. So we see some of those data there. So how might we understand the relatively good secondary achievement and relatively lowered post-secondary achievement in the context of rural realities? Well, again, we can think about things like the ambivalence about post-secondary education in terms of both its costs and its opportunity costs. So for instance, debt, the distance from the family and the home community of the higher ed institution, rural brain drain. And the extent to which higher education means that your best and brightest are going to basically get a one-way ticket out of the rural community. And in the process, subsidize the development of other probably non-rural places. Again, from last week when I was out in Idaho, I was at a rural education meeting and I was speaking with the head of a foundation. And this person said, you know, we have some real problems in Idaho with kids, rural kids getting into college and then staying in college. And I would like to see even in the smallest community, you know, with a graduating class of 23 kids, I'd like to see all 23 of those kids feel like they can apply to Stanford and make that application and get into Stanford and go to Stanford. That's what I'd like to see. And my response to her was, well, you know, I think that's great and it's really important for, you know, for us to have high expectations for our kids, but I think that if we're concerned about the vitality of rural places and rural communities, we need to ask ourselves, do those kids have a place back in their rural communities with that degree from Stanford and with the student debt that they have racked up and all this. So this is not an argument to keep kids, you know, back on the farm or necessarily to keep them in their rural communities, but it's really about what options young people have and how those options or lack of options might affect how they develop their post-secondary aspirations. So, you know, connected to this is, you know, that you might think about the creation of internal conflict for youth who would like to remain local and or who don't necessarily aspire to a college degree. And lastly, you know, there may be a lack of parental support for post-secondary education if there's no family legacy or experience of college going. So where does this leave us? On the one hand, schools are fundamentally local institutions run by locally elected school boards and occupying the nexus of community, educational, social and economic activity and educators and educational leaders must therefore be responsive to local needs and issues. On the other hand, schools are institutions of the state and as such are beholden to state and national level interests, mandates and directives. And this is attention that's not new. It has deep roots in rural education in the US. So, you know, 100 years ago, school reformers in the US began to talk about what became known as the rural school problem. And these reformers argued that rural schools were just too inefficient for the demands of a rapidly changing urbanizing and globalizing society and people in rural communities were simply ill equipped to run their own schools and prepare students to be economically competitive and productive in a modernizing world. And, you know, I think this is one of those things where the more things change, the more they stay the same. And, you know, a pair of contemporary rural researchers Kanapel and DeYoung argued nearly a century later in 1999 that at the heart of the rural school problem is the conflict over the purpose of schooling with state and national reform leaders typically calling for schools to prepare students to contribute to national interests while rural education scholars and probably many rural parents believe rural schools should also serve local community interests. So this raises, I think, some really interesting and really difficult questions about the nature of education and also the nature of accountability. So to whom is education accountable? What purposes or whose purposes does it serve? So again, this is not to say that educational improvement and raising test scores is not desirable or that we don't want our students to be economically competitive in an increasingly volatile and global economy, but it is to suggest why educational researcher and sociologist Michael Corbett has referred to contemporary schooling within rural areas as the essential institution of disembedding. So that is a set of practices that privilege standardization and efficiency in business models of school management in the process severing attachment to place and producing mobile adaptable youth who can flexibly respond to changing labor market conditions on national and indeed global scale. So the critique is that standards require curricula and assessment that's purposefully decontextualized and because curricular standards are so expensive, little opportunity remains for teachers to engage students in curricula tied to location or tied to place. Students are geared towards competitiveness in a global marketplace rather than in a local arena and in a high stakes accountability environment, the opportunity costs for place-based education may simply be too high. Or as a rural administrator once told me, if it doesn't raise test scores, it's just not relevant to my job. So here's some further evidence that somehow schooling is becoming more distant from the local and lived realities of students. There's an annual survey of US high school seniors that's been conducted through the University of Michigan which found that 34.6% of students in 1983 reported that their courses were quite or very interesting while 19.8% found their courses slightly or very dull. By 2005, only 21.2% found their courses quite or very interesting and a third found their courses slightly or very dull. And in 1983, over 40% of seniors found their coursework often or always meaningful but by 2005 that figure dropped to 27.5%. And we see very similar changes regarding the percentage of seniors believing that their schooling would be quite or very important later in life. And so this is arguably a very different sort of educational outcome and one that raises different sorts of questions about how we think about accountability. So rural schools hold enormous symbolic, cultural and economic importance to the communities they serve but schools really can't survive long if the communities they serve are experiencing unchecked economic decline and social fragmentation. So again, I think it's really in the best interest of both school and community to work towards mutual enhancements and wellbeing. So enlightened educational leadership that takes seriously the 21st century needs of students as well as the communities in which they live in can't help but interpret academic and community betterment not as mutually exclusive but as fundamentally mutually reinforcing priorities. So now I'd like to turn to the practitioner end of things. What does an integrated approach to rural school and community development mean for educators and administrators? What in turn might state educational administrators learn from examples like this? Well, at the Center for Rural Education and Communities, one of the things that we do is we partner with the Pennsylvania Association for Rural and Small Schools to offer an annual award called the Building Community Award. And this is an award that recognizes a rural school or rural district that's shown innovative practices by improving education while strengthening the communities that they serve. And this is one of the winners of this program, the St. Mary's Area Middle School, which is located in the heavily forested and sparsely populated north-central part of Pennsylvania. The school has an enrollment of about 550 students and it's located on this multi-acre tract of land and much of it covered by forest. So there are strong traditions in the area of hunting and fishing. Forestry provides an important part of the area's economic base. And because of this, it's a little surprise that a significant share of the school's efforts and activities reflect this identity and contain a strong emphasis on natural sciences and environmental stewardship. So over the past several years, St. Mary's Middle School spearheaded a set of coordinated environmental education initiatives that draw from local context and at the same time dovetail with curricula in ways that speak directly to the live local experience. The centerpiece of which is the development of a regional environmental learning center funded through a series of grants, sponsorship and student-led fundraisers. So this originated initially from microbiology lessons that were conducted in a stream flowing through the school's campus. And it occurred to St. Mary's educators that there was an important untapped opportunity to adapt the science curriculum in ways that could take advantage of the natural environment literally at the school's doorstep. So raising funds from a variety of local and state-level sources and making use of student and community volunteer labor, the school designed and constructed what has become a student-managed trout nursery that currently raises and releases over 1,000 trout into local streams each year. So integrated into the local curriculum, as well as directly responsive to state academic standards, students are completely responsible for managing water quality, feeding, stocking, controlling for disease, and monitoring the production of effluent. So students record data on trout health, feeding habits, stress levels and appearance and they assist in maintaining tanks and fish raceways. So the aquaculture project has also been coupled with a building of an all-season outdoor classroom and an accompanying greenhouse complex. The construction of the complex was supported in part through a grant sponsoring a crew of local at-risk youth employed through the Pennsylvania Conservation Corps and the school has since created additional youth employment opportunities during the summer months at the site through the Regional Workforce Investment Board. So the greenhouse complex was developed as a natural extension of the aquaculture project and provides a hands-on opportunity for students to investigate hydroponics and aquaponics as a means of addressing water quality. Basically, they had all this waste water from the aquaculture and they needed to have something to do with it. So through the greenhouse complex, students discharged the nitrogen-rich waste water from the trout nursery and this water is then filtered through the soils that in turn supports the plants raised in the greenhouse. So the question then was, what are they gonna raise in the greenhouse? Well, they decided, students decided that they would use the water to grow niche plant species that could be used in the environmental remediation of acid drainage at local mining sites and effort coordinated with the elk conservation, elk county conservation district and a local campus of Penn State University. And so there are additional plans to expand the greenhouse effort in the form of an intergenerational gardening project linking middle school students with seniors from the community who have expertise in horticulture to create additional community mentoring opportunities. That the Environmental Learning Center also has a strong focus on alternative and renewable energy. So there's a grant funded a one and a half kilowatt wind turbine that helps to provide energy used in the outdoor classroom and the trout nursery. And this is coupled with three mobile solar labs for use in science instruction. So there are additional fixed solar panels are planned for the outdoor classroom with plans for students to monitor the output which will then be used to power the batteries for a green golf cart used for transportation across the school campus. Middle school is also pursuing plans to produce biodiesel from waste cooking oil. So in total it's difficult not to be struck by these efforts how they address community issues in a variety of practical applied ways, their thematic integration, how they link the school and students with the broader community, the ways in which social and institutional networks both formal and informal have developed through these efforts. And the way in which academic instruction has been seamlessly superimposed hands on student driven and locally relevant learning opportunities. And these are all efforts that are very much focused on academic achievement and in fact on student academic outcomes and test scores. So what might an enlightened rural educational leadership look like? Well, a starting point might be to consider the revised standards for preparing school administrators. Released in 1996 by the council of chief state school officers, the interstate school leaders licensure consortium or ISLIC standards were revised over a two year period and released in March, 2008. Adopted by the national policy board for educational administration, ISLIC standards are the first step towards creating comprehensive, locally tailored practice standards and other approaches for developing and retaining high quality school leaders. So the new policy standards are intended to shape and influence policy as well as provide guidance to education and policy leaders at all levels about the traits, goals and responsibilities of school and district leaders. So consequently, they have an inherent high value for preparing future leaders in rural school districts and schools. In an article that Hobart Harmon and I published in The Rural Educator a couple of years ago, we take these ISLIC standards and provide example questions for each standard to spur thinking regarding how to connect the standard and the role of the school to worthy community development efforts. Questions that reflect our belief again that good rural schools are only possible where community and school share a responsibility and take collaborative actions that strengthen positive results for all students to be successful and where community social capital serves the school and the school fosters a sense of place among the students. So for example, standard number one, setting a widely shared vision for learning. We might ask, how will the district or school leader gain the input and continuous support of key community leaders in setting and sharing the vision for student learning at the school? The second standard, developing a school culture and instructional program conducive to student learning staff professional growth. We might ask, how will the district or school leader encourage all school staff to become actively involved in the community as a means of professional growth for improving instructional effectiveness? Third standard, ensuring effective management of the organization, operation and resources for a safe, efficient and effective learning environment. How will the district or school leadership collaborate with community organizations to ensure a safe and effective learning environment for all students? Collaborating with faculty and community members, responding to diverse community interests and needs, mobilizing community resources. We might ask, what collaborative processes will the district or school leader use in identifying community development needs that mutually accomplish the goals of school and community? The fifth standard, acting with integrity, fairness and in an ethical manner, how will the district or school leader demonstrate integrity and fairness in collaborative community development activities that involve parents and multiple community organizations? And lastly, understanding, responding to and influencing the political, social, legal and cultural context. So we might ask, how will the district or school leader seek to understand the local rural culture in ways that influence positive school community collaboration? So given this information and these examples, I think there are a number of questions here and I apologize if I'm giving you more questions and more answers, but perhaps these questions will conspire to some answers that you might be able to come up with. But we can ask, what are the implications for how to proceed when working with rural districts? What are the possibilities for partnership opportunities? What are the possibilities for articulating the connection between the quality of rural education and the quality of rural communities? And I think that this in particular is often really overlooked in the current education policy environment. How do we re-establish that linkage between building academic quality and at the same time strengthening the communities where students live? And lastly, I guess this goes back to the theme I've been sort of reiterating throughout this presentation, how can we understand rural educational improvement and rural community improvement as complementary rather than competing priorities? So how can state educational agency leaders work with local school districts and local educational leaders so that local leaders don't feel compelled to say if it doesn't raise test scores, then it's just not relevant to my job. And so that's what I have to share with you and I'd be certainly interested in hearing any reactions or comments or questions that you may have. And if you have questions, I'll certainly do my best to answer them, I'd also be curious to hear whether some of you have answers to some of your questions. Thank you very much, Kim. My brain kind of hurts now, but anyway. I'm going to unmute everybody's phone line just a second. We'd like to invite you to make comments or ask questions or sort of explore with us how what you heard today relates to some of your own work with rural districts. So I'm going to unmute the phone lines now. All guests have been unmuted. So please feel free to speak up or if you'd prefer, you can type comments or questions in the chat box. Please don't be shy. I see that somebody is typing a message in the chat box. So I'll relay that to you, Kai, once it's completed. Sure, I guess one of the things I would just say is that going back to the theme of the diversity of rural contexts and the diversity of the context of rural communities and the diversity of needs and assets and resources that they may or may not have, it really is very difficult to sort of suggest blanket solutions to some of the challenges that rural schools and communities face. But I think that in the spirit of blanket solutions, one solution is really to sort of reestablish a focus on exactly what these contexts are and how those contexts may affect the ways in which rural school districts and educational leaders interact with their state level partners. I think that's a really well made point that there are no silver bullets but it's sort of the mindfulness that's required and that's work. And it's too bad that there's no silver bullets, right? I mean, that would be easy. Right, exactly. But that's not how it is. Yeah. We have a question here from Sarah Seiko. She has, what difference does this any, do you see between rural student achievement needs in general and that of American Indian or Native Alaskan students? Well, that's a really good question. You know, I think that, you know, while overall, as I said, academic achievement in rural areas tends to not be so bad at the secondary level in comparison to metropolitan areas. But of course, this is going to vary quite a bit with the economic status of both the students and of the community. And we know that poverty concentrates in rural areas and in areas where there's concentrations of poverty, there are going to be issues with student achievement. And some of the poorest areas in the country are in Indian country. And so that is, that's a particular concern. So this is something that certainly disproportionately affects American Indian students and Alaska Native students. At the same time, I think that at the post-secondary level, there are some really interesting models that are provided by the tribal colleges. And I'm not an expert in tribal colleges, but I know a little bit about them. And one of the main goals of these tribal colleges is to connect rural realities and local community realities and cultural realities with higher education outcomes. So that, you know, the transition to post-secondary education is not a severing of ties with the home community, but in fact, is both a reinforcing of those ties while at the same time building new connections not only nationally, but globally with other indigenous communities. But the academic achievement issues for Native American students are quite serious. Yeah, and I think there are issues as well of linguistic loss, loss of native languages, and also the lack of representation in curriculum. Although I know that there's some interesting stuff going on with the Yupik Indians in Alaska, refacing of math curriculum to reflect context better. Yeah. I've given another question, Kai. Many of the, well, we have two additional questions. Many of the rural districts in our region are among the persistently low-performing schools. I'm convinced we need innovative instructional approaches to increase the achievement of these schools. Are you aware of any studies currently being conducted around innovative approaches, particularly in rural schools? Well, that's not an area that I tend to do a lot of work in, actually. So there is nothing that I can point you to right off the top of my head, but I would throw that back on the group. Is there anything out there that any of you all know about that fits that bill? I can't think of anything. The only suggestion I might have is to direct you to the National Center for Research and Rural Education. Although I couldn't speak to what they're looking at exactly. I think they've been doing things on literacy and early childhood education. Right. But I don't know if I'm characterizing you what they're looking at as innovative. In the sense, it's a dramatic break from the conventional. Right, right. I would recommend looking to the Rural School and Community Trust. That might be a resource. And also possibly the Regional Educational Laboratories. Hi, we have one more question from Jessica. How do you see rural districts adapting to the adoption of the Common Core Standards and computer-based testing, whether it be PARC or the other ones, smarter or balanced? Well, I think that, you know, this is, I think probably rural districts are adapting in all kinds of different ways. I know that the conversation out in Idaho last week was about how to negotiate with different factions of the community that are very against the Common Core. And people within the community who see that as one more reason to pull their kids out of public education and into homeschool. So I think that there's that, you know, that aspect of dealing with that change. But you know, the Common Core Standards, I don't think this comes as a surprise to anyone. This is consistent with the kinds of educational reforms that we've seen over the last 10 or 15 years. And rural schools are, for the most part, doing the best job that they can to, you know, to essentially to serve two masters, right, to, on the one hand, ensure that, you know, their students are achieving in the ways that they're being told they should achieve and that they're following curricula that they're being told they should follow. But at the same time, you know, they're also trying to serve the needs of the communities in which they're based. And in some cases, that's easier than others. You know, again, from Idaho, one of the things that they were doing there was the State Education, the State Department of Education was with a state level business organization to work with local businesses in an effort to advocate for the ways in which, following these Common Core Standards would create graduates from rural high schools that would be well-qualified to take positions within local employment. So that was one way that they were dealing with that out there. Very, thank you, Kai. Well, unfortunately, we're about out of time, so thank you very much, Kai. I appreciate your insights and your thoughtfulness about these issues. As we prepare to draw to a close here, I'd like to sum up some of the major themes of what we've heard today from Kai. I think, first of all, an important point was that rurality is defined in a variety of ways, both institutionally in terms of how we measure it and work within it, and symbolically. What does it mean to people kind of on the ground and culturally and emotionally? And that those definitions have a variety of implications. Second, the importance of recognizing that rural schools and the communities that they serve are very interdependent for a host of reasons. A third point that I thought was especially interesting is that some of the rural resistance to education reform may stem from disparate views on the purposes of education. For whom are we educating? To what ends? And then finally, there's no silverable or clear prescriptions for easing rural skepticism, but there are some things that SEAs can do, such as linking state reform efforts to local goals and priorities, which of course means knowing the districts you serve. Secondly, by engaging multiple local partners and change efforts. Before we go, let's know how we did. Please complete our very brief survey. There's only three questions at the link on your screen, www.research.net backslash s, backslash arc space webinars, basically. All of the information you provide will be kept anonymous, but it's very helpful to us as we prepare for the future. And then finally, we invite you to connect with us, however you'd prefer. We offer a variety of services and they're all customized to your needs. You can connect with us on the web, on Twitter. We have a YouTube channel as well. But if you'd prefer, feel free to just mute the session way and give us a call. Thank you very much for joining us and Ty, thank you again very much. Take care everybody.