December 2005 Share this page

Other Issues  Subscribe  Unsubscribe

What's inside...
Assistant Secretary's Page
Director's Page
Announcements
News and Anlysis
Contacts at the Center

Assistant Secretary's Page

I am pleased to announce that the Secretary's Task Force on Rural Education, which I will chair, has been relocated to the Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE). The Task Force will coordinate the U.S. Department of Education's (department) efforts designed to improve education in rural America. I welcome the responsibility for ensuring that rural schools continue to receive attention in the department's efforts to improve pre-K - 12 education for all America's students. I look forward to working with all American interested in improving rural education and committed to this important mission.

The Secretary has recently established the Center for Rural Education (CRE) in OVAE, with Dr. William Smith serving as director. The Center will support the Task Force, take a leadership role in advancing the cause of rural education, and serve as a resource for local, state, and national entities to further educational achievement in rural communities. I am honored to have the opportunity to aid the Center in its mission to disseminate vital information on a broad range of topics to schools and communities in rural America.

As a young student, I attended rural schools. The dedicated people at those institutions made a difference in my life. This experience convinced me that all educators, parents, and students, especially those in rural areas, are part of a vital goal to ensure that no child is left behind. We must guarantee that every child achieves the skills essential for facing the economic challenges of the 21st century. Succeeding at this will take all the diligence and cooperation we can bring to the task but we must succeed. We are off to a good start. Now we must follow through on our initial efforts to build a better and more inclusive system of rural public education. I am optimistic that we will meet the challenge of ensuring that no child is left behind, and I look forward to working with you as we strive to achieve this goal.

Beto Gonzalez
Acting Assistant Secretary

Director's Page

I am extremely pleased to have the opportunity to serve as the director of the new Center for Rural Education. Our mission is to work as an objective advocate for the fostering of rural education in the United States. In support of the department's Task Force on Rural Education, our first major effort will be to reexamine the current conditions in rural schools. We also will survey the financial investment in rural education by the department and other federal agencies.

We wish to be one of the strong voices attempting to help schools in rural communities meet the challenge to ensure that no child is left behind and that every student has access to all the resources available to achieve a substantive and meaningful education. In addition to exploring the condition of education in rural schools, we will be searching for empirical data on the successes of rural schools that can be shared with other rural educators. This newsletter will be our instrument for transmitting that information. We are excited by the prospect of what this has potential to become.

William L. Smith

Announcements

Rural Education Task Force: Secretary Margaret Spellings has re-invigorated the dormant Task Force and realigned membership to match the organizational structure of the department. The Secretary's Rural Education Task Force (Task Force) was initially established in April 2003 to help identify challenges faced by rural states and school districts and to work on finding solutions. As noted above in the Assistant Secretary's comments, acting Assistant Secretary Beto Gonzalez serves as the Task Force chair, assisted by Linda Hall, the Task Force executive director.

Numerous challenges face rural educators from the delivery of educational services (teacher recruiting and retention, compensation, curriculum) to the economic and social factors affecting rural school districts (aging population, loss of economic base, funding of basic infrastructure)

The purpose of the Task Force, supported by the Center for Rural Education, is to:

• Serve as the voice of rural education both within the department and in the rural community;
• Coordinate and implement outreach efforts to rural constituents;
• Develop a dissemination plan targeted to rural communities;
• Facilitate working groups that examine both challenges and promising practices of rural education; and
• Produce policy documents and publications that address issues in the rural community.

The Center for Rural Education: The Center has hosted or participated in several meetings. These meetings will be summarized in the next edition of this newsletter. The meetings include:

• Rural Schools and Community Trust (Baltimore; September 13)
• CRE "mini-summit" (ED; September 29)
• Secretary's Rural Education Task Force (ED; October 14)
• CRE Focus Group #1: Demographics of Rural America (ED; October 20)
• National Rural Education Association (NREA) meeting (Arizona; November 7 - 10)

Rural Education Achievement Program: The Rural Education Achievement rogram (REAP) administers initiatives designed to help rural districts that may lack the personnel/resources to compete effectively for federal competitive grants. These rural districts often receive grant allocations in amounts that are too small to effectively meet their intended purposes, and REAP initiatives - specifically the Small Rural Schools Achievement (SRSA) program and the Rural Low-Income Schools (RLIS) program - enable eligible rural districts to supplement the funding they already receive to facilitate student achievement.

The department issued over 4,150 Small, Rural School Achievement (SRSA) grant awards in FY 2005. SRSA awards are made directly from the Department to eligible school districts, and these districts also receive flexibility in the use of certain federal formula funds to more effectively meet their unique needs.

In addition, the FY 2005 RLIS program awards have been announced. RLIS authorizes formula grant awards to eligible local education agencies (LEAs) in their respective states. A total of $84,458,880 will be distributed among 40 states with RLIS-eligible school districts.

The department maintains an informative Website, http://www.ed/gov/programs/reapsrsa/index.html, that provides detailed REAP program guidance, application/eligibility information, and award data for the SRSA and RLIS programs. The department's REAP team (composed of program officers who provide technical assistance, program information, and outreach services to educators, state officials, and school districts nationwide) stands ready to provide information upon request. Contact the REAP team at (202) 401-0039 or via e-mail at REAP@ed.gov.

News and Analysis

This introductory issue will provide an update on some of the Department's recent initiatives and programs affecting rural education.

• The Rural Education Achievement Program (REAP), described immediately above, is both a source of funding for rural education and provides needed flexibility for rural schools to use federal funding more effectively. Secretary Spellings has recognized the need for flexibility as schools, school districts, and states strive to meet the expectations of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, while at the same time ensuring that the department does nothing to compromise the intent of the legislation. Secretary Spellings addressed this need when she commented:

  I have pledged to take a common-sense approach to the implementation of No Child Left Behind, allowing flexibility where possible and necessary. But this approach is conditioned on one overriding factor: ensuring that real annual progress is made toward getting every single child to read and do math at grade level. The only way to achieve that goal is to adhere to the law's bright lines of annual testing and breakdown of data by student subgroups. Without that information, parents will not know how their children are doing, and educators won't know what to adjust to best help their students. Quite simply, what gets measured gets done.

  Following the spirit of this common-sense approach, the department has already made adjustments to NCLB, and discussions about additional flexibility are underway. The funding in this legislation supplements other federal funding for which rural districts and schools qualify - especially Title I.

  Title I continues to be a major source of funding for rural education. According to the U.S. Census Bureau's public elementary-secondary finance data, Title I was one of the primary sources of federal funds for rural education. More than 60 percent of rural district superintendents reported this source of funds as being very helpful for implementing NCLB.

• The department recently entered into an agreement with the University of North Carolina (UNC)- Chapel Hill to support a research center focusing on rural education. UNC is well known for addressing issues of concern to rural educators, with collaboration from their School of Education, the Center for Developmental Science, The Frank Graham Porter Child Development Institute, NC Learn, and others. The research center will focus on promoting academic achievement in rural schools through two complementary research programs. The major research initiative will focus on the implementation and evaluation of professional development strategies designed to enhance teacher quality in elementary and middle schools so as to enable greater academic success by at-risk youth. A second initiative will investigate the use of distance learning programs - an issue of vital concern for rural communities and schools in their efforts to provide advanced opportunities for their students. We trust that these research activities will abet rural communities and their schools in their efforts to provide a high quality education to their students that will prepare them for success in the 21st century.

Contacts at the Center

Dr. William L. Smith serves as the director of the Center for Rural Education. Linda Hall is deputy director of CRE, and also serves as the Executive Director of the Secretary's Task Force on Rural Education. The Center is currently staffed by Cassandria Blair (on leave), Lincairn Preston, Annie Thompson, and James B. Williams. Please contact us with any questions, suggestions, and comments at 202-245-7701 or at RuralED@ed.gov.OVAE/CRE.

The Center for Rural Education newsletter and Web site may contain links to other Web sites, studies, and news articles. These links are to assist our readers in accessing information that is pertinent to the continuing dialogue about improving pre-k - 12 education in the United States. The opinions, analyses, conclusions, and policy recommendations of these external links do not necessarily represent the policies or positions of the United States Department of Education. The references to this information should not be construed as an endorsement of these opinions, analyses, conclusions, and policy recommendations by the U.S. Department of Education.