For this podcast series, three of my classmates and I examine how the election of 2016 continues to shape key issues in the field of education. My episode focuses on rural education: specifically, rural demographic trends and the effect of President Trump’s school voucher proposal on rural schools.
The other three podcast episodes are linked at the bottom of the transcript.
Podcast Introduction
Quote: Donald Trump: “Every American child should be able to grow up in a safe community, to attend a great school, and to have access to a high-paying job.”
Taylor: Welcome to Pod Save Education. I’m Taylor
Margaux: I’m Margaux
Hannah: I’m Hannah
Jenna: And I’m Jenna. Each episode, we’ll consider the state of education in Trump’s America.
Hannah: We’re diving deep into our nation’s political and cultural landscape, and examining how the election of 2016 continues to shape key issues in the field of education.
Margaux: Together, we’ll look at the evolving educational issues of teacher diversity, rural education, campus sexual assault, and school climate.
Taylor: We hope that our discussions spark further conversations on some salient issues regarding education in the current administration. We’re glad you’re here!
Rural Education in Trump’s America
Taylor: My name is Taylor. On today’s episode of Pod Save Education, I’m going to look at rural education–specifically, the changing demographics of rural communities, the key issues facing rural schools, and how President Trump’s proposals will affect students in some of our neediest areas. I’ll start with some background on rural education, and then my classmates and I will discuss President Trump’s voucher plan and the general state of rural education in America.
So, why my focus on rural schools? It really starts in the fall of 2014.
*Audio from my students at recess*
After I graduated college, I taught for two years at a small, rural elementary school in Lamar, South Carolina called Spaulding Elementary. I watched as my 50 students grow over those two years, they grew as learners, as individuals. Being their teacher brought me joy like I’d never known, but it also introduced me to a world of inequity that I’d never before experienced.
And I want to dive a little deeper into those inequities faced by rural schools and students. News outlets like the Washington Post, New York Times, and CNN have proclaimed that “Rural America lifted Donald Trump to the presidency.” And it’s true: rural communities overwhelmingly voted for our current president. They bought into his promises to create jobs and strengthen our country’s borders.
Yet in many pockets of the country, rural America looks very different from those communities visited by our current president on the campaign trail. And while most face the common problem of fading job opportunities in an increasingly technological world, diverse rural communities also face a host of unique and different problems.
First, a little bit about the trends and demographics of rural schools. Although student populations continue to grow in urban and suburban districts, 1 out of 5 students in our country still attends a rural school. But, rural districts make up 50% of school districts nationwide. So, why so many districts for only 20% of the nation’s students? There’s a few reasons. In 1940, there were over 100,000 school districts in the United States, many of which often had only one or two schools. As the decades wore on, most of these districts consolidated to save money, and today the U.S. has around 14,000 districts. For many rural districts, however, consolidation wasn’t and still isn’t alway feasible or wanted. Consolidation often means lost jobs for teachers and staff, something that communities with already high unemployment want to avoid. Rural districts also often cover large geographic areas, making consolidation a logistical challenge for student bus transportation.
So now that we’ve addressed the number of rural districts, I want to offer some background on rural demographics. If you’ve pictured the rural student population as overwhelmingly white, you’d be right… in some states. In reality, the racial makeup of rural schools is a bit more complicated. Nationally, students of color make up approximately a quarter of the rural school population. If you break those percentages down by state, some stark divides appear. Almost 70% of all rural minority students are found in just 13 states–and nearly all of those states are found in either the Deep South or West. And rural districts with the highest poverty rates are also more likely to have schools where students of color make up a majority of the population.
All of this is to say, rural communities in some states are very different than the picture painted of rural, white, Midwestern America.
So, let’s bring this back to Trump. During the 2016 race, Trump’s main education proposal revolved around a single key issue: school vouchers. His plan called for $20 billion to expand school choice through vouchers–an incredible sum of money. Trump’s 2018 budget proposal is a little more modest–it calls for $250 million toward the study and expansion of school choice vouchers.
While Trump’s voucher plan may benefit choice proponents in urban and suburban districts, it is unworkable for a large majority of the country. Researchers at the Center for American Progress estimate that vouchers are either logistically impossible or very difficult in 85% of school districts in the country.
I want to explore this voucher plan, and to talk more about rural schools in general, with my classmates. We’ve got Jenna, Hannah, and Margaux here. Are you guys excited to chat today?
Jenna: So happy to be here!
Hannah: I feel like I have so many questions about rural education. It’s something we don’t think about.
Taylor: Yeah, I always like to frame it as, rural students sometimes are the forgotten students, because so many of our policies and discussions nationally or on the state level deal with students in cities or in the suburbs.
Jenna: I feel like even if they don’t directly say “this policy is for students in suburbs or cities”, we have these overarching policies that are supposed to cover rural students but they just don’t.
Taylor: Right.
Margaux: I’m intrigued by what you mentioned about what poverty looks like in rural districts. You saw this in the campaign debates, presidential debates, you see this in conversations we have in class–at every level, particularly in education but also across the board, in a lot of policies, we use poverty as a proxy word for urban and for racial minorities. Those kind of, all policies affecting one are targeted at all of them. I’m wondering if you could speak to, how does poverty look different in rural districts than in urban ones? Do you see those same links we make between those words, clearly urban isn’t relevant to rural education, do we see those same links between interpreting poverty as racial minorities in rural places?
Taylor: One thing that’s a big difference when it comes to poverty between rural and urban communities is the idea of persistent poverty. Under the Obama Administration, the Department of Ed looked at communities that had been listed as having poverty levels at or above 20% since 1980, since the 1980 census. They found a little over 300 communities that were in persistent poverty for those past over 30 years. Twenty of those areas were metro areas and cities, but 300 were rural counties. So what that’s basically saying is that there are some metro areas where poverty has always been a struggle, but it’s often a shifting landscape, whereas with rural communities you have entrenched poverty among families for generations.
It often isn’t by color in the same way we think with urban communities, because there is such a large white population in rural communities. But like I said earlier, if you have a rural community in poverty or high levels of student poverty, usually those schools have more minority students than rural schools with low levels of poverty. That’s especially true when you think about the Deep South, where a lot of the racial makeup of schools in the Deep South are students of color. And I want to throw this back to what Jenna and I talked about earlier. Jenna, describe for me what you think of when you think of rural Western Massachusetts where you’re from, or the North in general.
Jenna: Yeah so a little context, I’m from Western Massachusetts. We have a lot of small towns, a lot of rural New England areas. I think that my conception of rural schools growing up was very different than what you’ve been describing in the rural South. For one thing, in Western Mass, it is primarily a white population, so you don’t see those racial and economic divides on those lines. I’d say definitely lower poverty in some of the rural areas, but that’s not across the board in Western Mass. It’s probably a little higher income.
I think one thing I think about with rural schools is an issue of jobs in our area, or I should say lack thereof. That’s a big issue in my area. We have some really great schools and we’re educating students to a high level, but what ends up happening is they’re leaving these areas because we’re not near cities, there’s no jobs. General Electric used to be in our town and they moved out 15 years ago. They were the primary holder of all jobs for people. So our kids are leaving, I’m an example. I left and here I am in Nashville now. I’m not going back to my town to work because there aren’t jobs there for me to have. Our over-65 population has far outpaced our under-18 population. We’re particularly lacking in people ages 20-40, there just aren’t jobs to keep us. To throw it back to you Taylor, is that something you see that’s common to rural areas, that people are leaving because there aren’t jobs, or are people still staying?
Taylor: It’s kind of a mix. That issue of lack of jobs is what binds so many rural communities together, regardless of the demographics of those communities. They’ve done studies the past few years that show that rural students are achieving in line with students in suburban and urban districts, they’re all rising. But, the number of students who get post-secondary education isn’t rising at those same levels. It’s just like what you said–there aren’t opportunities. I always think back to my own students in Lamar. The closest post-secondary opportunity they had was a technical college that we got to visit my first year teaching. It’s 25 miles away, which isn’t a huge distance, but when you have young students who rarely leave a community, 25 miles is a pretty long distance to think about your first and best option at post-secondary education. In some parts of South Carolina, it’s up to 50 or 60 miles from even a technical college, much less a four-year institution.
Margaux: That’s what I immediately thought of, Jenna, when you brought up job availably and people leaving is that education plays such a vital role in creating these huge divides between students in a rural school who will go on to college and those who wont. There’s certainly huge divides across the board for students who achieve a post-secondary education and those that don’t. I can certainly imagine the very stark distinction in terms of where you live and what you can do. And rural schools even conceptually are very different because you have to change everything about your life in these remote rural places to even just access, to be in a place where there is the possibility of attending a post-secondary institution. You can’t continue to live in the community that you’re already in. Which is not to say that there aren’t huge barriers for students in urban schools, but that may not be one of them.
Taylor: Right. Some people are optimistic about how you can use virtual schooling, both for K-12 and post-secondary to bridge those gaps, but the reality is that virtual schooling, quality-wise, has not caught up anywhere near to the quality of actually attending a good K-12 school or a good college.
Margaux: I have a good question in there that you may or may not be able to answer. I saw, I can’t say I watched it unfortunately, I saw an advert for a documentary on communities without access to the internet. This documentary series was really highlighting that and that was certainly not something I have thought about. If you asked me if I thought there were communities here, I would have said yeah, sure, but it’s not something given importance. I saw a program that was advertised that showed students and families, and how constrained they are by simply lack of access to an internet connection.
Taylor: Yeah, they estimate that there are millions of students that don’t have stable internet access at school or at home. I always think about the middle school we were connected to. They had an iPad program where every students gets an iPad. They use it during school and return it during the day. Which makes sense, that you don’t have a bunch of middle school kids taking iPads home. But also part of that is because a lot of them don’t have internet access at home. A lot of the ways they would use the iPad for education purposes can’t be done. I thought, if I were a middle school teacher, there would be cool ways to do homework assignments or out-of-classroom work on these iPads that aren’t a reality when you know that a majority of you students are going back to a house without internet access.
Margaux: I found the place where I found this, it’s on EdWeek, it’s called Without a Net: The Digital Divide in America. It’s about the digital divide in the United States, specifically in high poverty schools and with high poverty students. It is produced by Verizon, so take it with a grain of salt. They certainly have an agenda to push.
Taylor: I wrote my blog post about this for Bellwether over the summer. There are some school districts that are doing some interesting things to bridge this gap. I don’t want to get too deep into this because it’s in the weeds with federal policy. In the 1980’s, they gave the bandwidth internet infrastructure control to school districts through legislation. School districts had the opportunity to sell off this internet capacity to private companies. A lot of school districts did this because, it’s the 80’s, you don’t really have a need for this technology. And, money, capital, is better than holding onto it. But, there are a few rural places where they never did this. Some school districts are now able to work with local cell towers and basically building up some of the material infrastructure and taking back this essentially free internet to be used not just at the school, but the community as a whole. That’s really interesting. It’s not possible in a lot of places because school districts sold them off, but in the places that didn’t or where the lease is about to expire, that could be something that brings it community wide that’s interesting.
I also want to talk a little bit about, thinking about framing this with our current context and thinking about something like vouchers and what Trump proposes. Obviously, it’s just not going to work in rural communities where you already only have a few schools. The idea is that if you have vouchers, then high-quality charters or private schools will pop up to accept these vouchers and fill this gap. This may be a reality in a place like Nashville or outside of here, but in rural districts you don’t have the student population to do it, and it would likely force schools to close. I think that’s one big issue thinking about how his policy might affect students.
Another thing, he has a quote that I will play for you guys.
Quote: Donald Trump: “Millions of African-Americans in our inner cities remained trapped in poverty, joblessness, and failing schools. And these are the worst schools you’ll ever see.”
Taylor: So, I want to think about, what does this Trump quote say about the relationship between race and his idea of vouchers and school choice? His rhetoric around vouchers is very much like, we are helping poor African-Americans. What do you think about this? Hannah, especially with you thinking about school choice, have you seen that in your own research with this? Do you think that hurts the conversation?
Hannah: Yeah, definitely. I was just having a conversation with someone from Denver two days ago about how there really needs to be a major shift in separating how we talk about school choice into talking about vouchers and the expansion of high-quality charters, because simply what you’re talking about with vouchers not being widely supported in the education reform community. Specifically, this matters with regards to how it would impact rural education, and how it seems to be a proxy for how to address inequities for poor black children.
So, what do we do with that? I think, I don’t have a good answer, other than that more people are going to want to participate in a conversation as soon as we continue to move away from the discussion of reform being in the form of a voucher.
Taylor: There’s also this sense of, “we need to help save these minority groups”, and then framing it as, white people who live in the suburbs or in rural communities, they’re fine. The reality is that a lot of failing schools are in rural commentates, both communities of color and communities that are overwhelmingly white. It’s almost like there’s a distrust that cities in particular that have high minority populations can handle it on their own, whereas there is a trust given to rural communities that they know what they’re doing. I think you see that beyond education. You see, oh, “rural America knows what they’re doing, but we need to come in and help cities and people of color because they don’t.”
Hannah: I also think when you talk about the concept of innovation, you think of a city. You think of hustle and bustle, human capital. People who are currently investing in these initiatives or foundations involved in philanthropy, they want to see a return on their investment, and doing it at a larger scale is much more attractive. They might just not know about investment in a rural community. The potential I see in this is tying in what you and Jenna were saying about job creation, especially in Appalachia, thinking about all of these people involved in coal mining industries that no longer exist anymore and the high levels of poverty. Seeing that as an investment or an idea, perhaps, that’s a way to entice the innovators in reform communities to focus their efforts more on rural education away from this voucher idea that will be detrimental to students.
Margaux: For me, it comes back to what I see as a lack of information and a lack of voice from the correct people. I will say that I personally have a lot of difficulty taking some of Trump’s comments seriously. You think about who his base was and who the people were that were voting for him, and for him to come out and promote charters, I read that more as his ignorance to what the policy is rather than representing his base. But those ideas certainly are there. Trump is not the only person saying this, Trump is not the only person pushing vouchers in the educational field. I think we have a lack of people from rural communities that have a voice to come out and to make policy and make change. We have Betsy DeVos at the Department of Ed, not from a rural environment, also very much pushing vouchers as a way to fix issues that she very obviously has no experience with.
It’s hard for me to talk on these issues because I feel like the figureheads like Trump and DeVos who are pushing this, they’re separation from the issues is so very obvious that it’s hard for me to take what they’re saying seriously. I know that same sentiment, that same emphasis on vouchers exists. They’re not in a vacuum. This is part of a party wide, or bipartisan even, focus on this. But there still is a black hole of voices from rural communities, saying we face these same issues, here’s how those won’t help us, so we need to think of something new. I think you just don’t hear that being said because policy making happens in a city. We see that replicating now, even in our courses, where we don’t talk about rural education. All of our policy conversations are centered around policies that affect urban and suburban districts.
Taylor: I just think it’s interesting thinking about all of this together, and thinking about how rural America went so overwhelmingly for Trump last year, but yet when you turn to the education conversation, seeing how little he has to offer for them. I think we’re going to reach a point where that just becomes more apparent to those voters. I hope… I hope, but maybe not.
Jenna: I think we all hope.
Taylor: Well thank you guys for chatting with me about this interesting topic today, and hopefully we maybe over the next few months might see some rural voices magnified in this voucher conversation.
Other episodes in the series:
The Trump Effect: The Current State of School Climate
Trump’s Choice: Charter Reform
Title IX Changes and Campus Sexual Assault