Introduction: Current State of the Science in Rural Education Research

Abstract

Public education in the United States must meet the needs of nearly ten million children attending schools in rural communities across the country. This comprises about 20 % of the nation’s student population and over 23 % of state expenditures on education. Since the 1990s there has been an increasing emphasis on examining rural education—policy, practice, and student outcomes—in research and in the programs of the U.S. Department of Education. In this chapter we describe the most frequent rural education issues addressed in recent research literature, and propose a research agenda for the next generation of work on rural issues. This book grew out of the 2013 Connect-Inform-Advance rural conference hosted by the National Center for Research Rural Education that was intended to take stock of what is known about rural education, how we have come to know it, and what will be important to learn more about in the coming years. The chapters of this book represent a natural extension of the conference discussion themes of defining and describing rural context and culture in research, examining influences on student outcomes, the use of interdisciplinary research partnerships, and future directions for conducting and disseminating rural education research results.