The Lives Of White Students Living In Rural Education

When compared to urban education, rural education has received little attention in the research literature. Moreover, much rural education research has been approached by a deficit perspective and has mostly examined the lives of White students living in rural America. Rural America, however, is not a monolithic place. In fact, rural America, which comprises approximately 51 million nonmetropolitan residents, spans from Native American communities in the West to small fishing villages in New England. Rural America also encompasses Midwestern farm towns with burgeoning Latino populations and African American communities in the Deep South. Thus, rural America is vast, and diversity is increasing in the majority White spaces.
Although rural

Inputs, for example, refer to teacher quality, curricular options, and student assignment patterns, whereas outputs refer to college attendance and job attainment by recent graduates. James Coleman posited, “Education is a means to an end, and equal opportunity refers to later in life rather than the educational process itself.” One reason the debate concerning equal educational opportunity continues is that “equal educational opportunity” cannot be standardized, and the phrase varies depending on how inputs are accessed by student populations. For example, students of a higher socio-economic status (SES) have access to an array of educational opportunities relative to low SES counterparts. That same claim manifests along racial lines. Thus, when one considers the intersection of being African American and poor, the threat to receiving equal educational opportunity widens. Moreover, residing in the rural South, being African American, and living in poverty furthers the distance to equal educational opportunity. African Americans who live in the rural South often have a direct lineage to former slaves and a denial of public education. Thus, the chapter highlights three eras that have shaped educational opportunities for African American students in the rural South: post-Reconstruction (1865–1954); post-Brown (1954–1980); and post-desegregation

These two pivotal moments in the post-desegregation era led education researchers to further engage in debates and conduct studies that examined factors related to student achievement outcomes. Moreover, scholars began to examine issues of race, social class, teacher quality, parent engagement, etc. to determine why the achievement gap widened and why re-segregation