ABSTRACT

Rural education encompasses everything from a one-room schoolhouse in an Appalachian hollow to a western school district responsible for education within a several hundred square mile region. It includes both units having lots of students but very little money, and units with lots of money but very few students. The fastest growing school districts in the nation are in rural areas, but so are the ones experiencing the most rapidly declining enrollments. Educational attainment has been another major problem within rural schools across the country. The traditional heritage of pluralism has had three implications of profound importance to the formulation of rural programs and rural policies. First, rural initiatives must always be based upon the primacy of local circumstance. Second, today the term "rural" has little political currency. Third, definitions of rural America are destined to be both population-based and arbitrary.