Technology Teacher 07/17/2016

• 3 Ways to Help Rural Schools | US News Opinion

  • Tax bases in many rural communities are small, which makes it difficult to provide adequate funding for good schools.
  • States and the federal government should increase funding for rural students, to help offset the disadvantage that currently exists.
  • Cutting down on long and arduous journeys from a rural student’s home to her school; virtually attending classes taught by a subject matter expert in another city; linking students who share similar interests but attend schools great distances apart – online learning can make all this and more possible.

• Education World: Rural Children, Real Challenges

  • More rural children (18 percent) than urban children (15.5 percent) live in poverty.
  • A single parent heads 24 percent of all rural families.
  • One in 12 rural children is born to a mother under 20.
  • One rural child in six is born to a mother who has less than a high school education.
  • Though fewer rural high school students drop out of school than the state average, only 18 percent of these dropouts plan to get a GED.
  • One rural infant in five is born to a mother who used tobacco during pregnancy.
  • There is one primary care doctor for every 358 rural children.
  • Benso believes that effects of the poverty, poor health, and detrimental family situations that appear to be common in rural communities land squarely in the classroom

• Urban School Challenges | RTI Action Network

  • Unlike suburban and rural school districts, urban school districts operate in densely populated areas serving significantly more students.
  • urban school districts are frequently marked by higher concentrations of poverty, greater racial and ethnic diversity, larger concentrations of immigrant populations and linguistic diversity, and more frequent rates of student mobility
  • broader social and economic inequities facing such populations that invariably frame the work of urban schools
  • Alternatively, cultural challenges are those policies, practices, and sets of beliefs that contribute to dysfunctional perceptions of students’ intellectual abilities—particularly those students who are culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD)—due to limiting predictors of school achievement (Noguera, 2003).
  • Given the sociodemographic backgrounds of the urban school population, students attending urban schools enter at varied levels of academic readiness and oftentimes with particular stressors that challenge students’ ability to perform at high levels.
  • Moreover, negative stereotypes about families often misinform educators and lead to negative views about students (Harry & Klingner, 2006; Harry, Klingner, & Hart, 2005).
  • Urban schools are bombarded with so many instructional initiatives and approaches that they can become fragmented, or indeed contradict one another.
  • Given the diversity of their student populations’ needs, urban school districts require a variety of initiatives, but these need to target specific and identified needs that are aligned within a broader vision of student success and academic standards.
  • issue of teacher quality is considered central to growing efforts to understand and reduce performance gaps in achievement between students of color and their White and Asian peers
  • Experienced teachers, however, are not equally distributed across low- and high-poverty schools
  • demonstrated that teachers are drawn to schools with low concentrations of poverty, low minority populations, and high levels of student achievement, thus framing the problem of teacher quality as one related to professional mobility.
  • Urban schools often fail to provide environments of high academic expectations
  • While also a persistent cultural challenge, urban school districts have structural challenges that either produce or perpetuate low expectations of students.
  • Low-income and racial/ethnic minority students are often viewed by school practitioners as not “ready” for school

• The challenges facing struggling rural schools | The Thomas B. Fordham Institute

  • The report focuses on two of the most challenging issues: recruiting and retaining teachers and increasing parental involvement.
  • Long commutes dissuaded teachers willing to teach in a rural school but wanting to live in a town or a city
  • The geographic isolation of many rural communities can mean limited housing options and even more limited job opportunities for teachers’ spouses
  • As for parental involvement, work schedules were the largest barrier to engagement and attendance at events such as parent-teacher conferences, report card pickups, and volunteer activities.
  • more than half of the schools also believed that “parents don’t value education.”
  • public and private transportation in rural areas and the distance between home, work, and school also prevented parents from becoming more involved.

• Dropout Nation » The Myth of Differences Between Urban and Rural Schools

  • most-enduring myths in the debate over the reform of American public education is the idea that urban school districts and the kids who attend them are somehow different than those in suburban and rural communities.
  • While big-city districts are home to half of the nation’s dropout factories — high schools with graduation rates of 60 percent or lower as defined by Johns Hopkins researcher Robert Balfanz —  one out of every five persistently failing high schools are located in the nation’s rural communities.
  • Just 54 percent of black ninth-graders attending rural high schools graduated during the 2005-2006 school year, according to the Alliance for Excellent Education, just 8 points higher than the graduation rates for their counterparts in big-city schools.
  • The low quality of math instruction endemic in many urban districts are also problematic in rural schools: Twenty-six percent of rural fourth-grade girls performing Below Basic proficiency in math on the 2009 NAEP, just seven points below the percentage of urban fourth-grade peers struggling with low math literacy.
  • We have to stop looking at children through the location of the schools they attend and just look at them for who they are: Young men and women who deserve a high-quality education no matter where they live.

•  - The Future of Children -

  • each face particular challenges in attracting, retaining, and making the most of their teacher workforce.
  • Most of the lowest-performing schools and students in the United States are in urban districts, where poverty is highly concentrated and large shares of students have limited
  • English proficiency and perform poorly on achievement tests
  • Higher wages in other occupations make it more costly for schools and districts to hire workers; space is often expensive; and high crime rates increase facilities requirements and tend to make upkeep more expensive.
  • manage their many schools, large urban districts often institute unwieldy bureaucratic systems that slow the pace of operations.
  • Urban districts thus face challenges both in attracting teachers to their schools and in optimizing their hiring, transfer, and retention policies so that they are able to bring the best available teachers into their classrooms and retain them.
  • small size, sparse settlement, distance from population concentrations, and an economic reliance on agricultural industries that are increasingly using seasonal and immigrant workers to minimize labor costs.
  • Classes in rural schools tend to be small, and teachers often report good working conditions and relatively few discipline problems.
  • Moreover, rural areas often have a smaller pool of college-educated workers from which to recruit teachers.
  • Relatively large shares of students with special needs and of highly mobile children of low-income migrant farm workers can also complicate recruiting and retaining teachers.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.