Different Worlds: Rural and Urban Poverty

The author shares the empirical differences and their implications for school leadership in the two sectors

I notice patterns. As a researcher, it is what I am trained to do. So when I began collecting data in low-income urban and rural schools, it was not surprising that I noticed differences between the two types of schools.

In impoverished urban schools, I often passed some form of security at the entrance — a buzzer, a security guard, a metal detector. I saw long halls, high ceilings and small classrooms with young teachers. In impoverished rural schools, the buildings were smaller, the ceilings lower, the class sizes tinier and the teachers older. These were all differences I expected. I did not, however, expect to notice some less-visible differences, such as the ways low-income urban and rural families become involved in their children’s education.

To help me better understand the less-visible differences, I did what researchers do — I dove into the extant research.

I quickly learned little quantitative educational research has been published about rural poverty and almost none directly compares and contrasts rural poverty with urban poverty. It is as if the students living in rural poverty live too far away for their voices to be heard. Consequently, the research driving school reform often draws exclusively from urban populations. This means that school administrators in impoverished rural areas must attempt to tailor urban-based interventions and programming to fit their schools.

A few of the less-visible differences between rural and urban poverty can be identified from the empirical studies. How should school administrators interpret the findings when thinking about optimally tailoring interventions and programming for their schools?

Parental Involvement

Across grade levels, low-income rural families are less involved in their children’s education than low-income urban families. However, it isn’t that low-income rural parents don’t want to be involved in their children’s education, but instead they don’t know how to be involved.

One study found more than half of rural parents report being unsatisfied with the way that school staff communicates with them. Meanwhile, urban parents are more likely to report being satisfied with school communication, even when the levels of communication are low.

Considering this, low-income rural school administrators may want to think about novel ways to invite parents to become involved in their child’s education, as such efforts may be more successful than they might be in a low-income urban setting. Notably, the U.S. Department of Education offers online resources for family involvement techniques, with specific recommendations for rural schools.

One success story comes from Hueco Elementary School, located on the rural outskirts of El Paso, Texas. The school, which enrolls about 500 students, 97 percent of them Latino, formed a program to help rural parents support their children’s learning at home. In order to accommodate families’ lack of transportation, meetings were held at students’ homes. Furthermore, the school boosted parents’ comfort with math and technology by offering a family math program and by lending laptops to families.

Hueco’s principal reported the number of parents involved in at least one school-related activity increased from 30 percent to 80 percent as a result of these efforts.

Teacher Characteristics

What low-income rural schools may lack in parental involvement, they often make up for in increased teacher support. In general, rural teachers are more aware of individual student progress than urban teachers, allowing them to better predict students’ educational problems and intervene.

Rural teachers also report being emotionally closer to their students, are more likely to run into their students outside of school and play a greater role in their life than urban teachers, who describe having greater anonymity in their schools.

This anonymity leads low-income urban teachers to report poorer staff relationships and administrative support than rural teachers. Low-income urban teachers also exhibit higher levels of stress and burnout, perhaps explaining the finding that low-income urban districts have lower retention than low-income rural districts.

Despite these seeming advantages for low-income rural teachers, they still face obstacles not faced in urban contexts, particularly related to science education. Rural teachers, in general, have fewer science materials and fewer community role models in science fields than their urban counterparts. Additionally, many rural schools rely on only one science teacher per school, limiting the time available to oversee hands-on and experiential lab work, which has been shown to be a particularly effective pedagogical approach for science. As a result, low-income rural students score lower on measures of science achievement and motivation and perceive science as less relevant to their lives than low-income urban students.

Some low-income rural administrators have sought to address these obstacles by partnering with local businesses, which may offer resources that poor rural schools lack. Tennessee’s Rural Communities STEM Initiative has excelled at this, partnering nine rural school districts with local companies so that students can apply what they learn in class in a real-world context.

Admittedly, some rural districts may be too isolated to find appropriate business partners. Administrators in such locations may find it cost-effective to implement mobile laboratories that students from different schools can share and use at different times. In rural parts of Texas, students have begun bringing their science projects into the STEAM Express, a mobile science lab that is shared across multiple grade levels and schools.

Cognitive Differences

Low-income rural students trail behind in science, but fare similarly to their low-income urban counterparts in math and reading achievement. My own work suggests, however, that even when the academic performance of students living in rural and urban poverty is similar, their underlying cognitive profiles are different.

Students growing up in rural poverty seem to especially struggle with tasks related to visual processing. Their visuospatial working memory and inhibition are both less developed than those of children living in urban poverty. However, students growing up in rural poverty have stronger verbal processing abilities than those growing up in urban poverty. Because of these cognitive differences, low-income rural and urban students actually approach certain academic tasks in different ways.

As a result, it is important for school leaders to note these cognitive differences between children in rural and urban poverty, especially when considering the myriad interventions being created and marketed that aim to improve cognitive abilities. Many of these interventions have no empirical support. But for those that do, schools serving impoverished rural communities may benefit the most from those that focus on improving visual processing.

Alternatively, schools serving children in rural poverty should consider how to capitalize on students’ verbal processing strengths. For instance, math and science typically require a high visual cognitive load. It might be particularly beneficial to offer additional verbal support to students in low-income rural contexts.

Unique Needs

Many more differences exist between schools serving low-income rural and urban students, but few others have been formally researched and documented. Fortunately, low-income rural districts are finally starting to receive attention from policymakers.

The Rural and Low Income School Program, run by the U.S. Department of Education, now provides rural schools with flexibility to allocate funds in a most fitting way for their unique local needs. Allocating funds appropriately in rural schools is especially critical because Title 1 distributions are not equitable, and low-income rural schools are at a disadvantage. As a result, school administrators in low-income rural districts have a particularly challenging job. They must decide if and how programs can be catered to be efficacious for their student population, and they have less money to do it with.