Survey of Rural Schools and Communities

Editor's Note: Ryan Fowler of TNTP is a good friend of the National Rural Education Association and the Rural Schools Collaborative. He took the lead on the www.ruralsurvey.org project, and we truly appreciate his commitment to rural schools and communities. Ryan recently penned an essay titled, Trombones, Education, and Rural Collective Memory. In it he wrote, "There is something uniquely powerful about the collective memory of a small place."

Survey of Rural Schools and Communities

By Ryan Fowler, TNTP

Through a partnership between NREA, Rural Schools Collaborative, and TNTP, the Survey of Rural Schools and Communities gathered input from rural teachers and community members from across the country to help us gain a sense of assets and opportunities that rest within individuals states and regions. When it comes to recruiting teachers to rural schools, we know that an understanding of individual places matters deeply.

So, we asked rural people to tell us what they love about their communities and what they see as barriers for recruiting teachers to come to their local schools.

The survey was open from February 1, 2019 – April 26, 2019. In the pages that follow, we recap some of the broad highlights from the survey data and also break out the results by state. It should be noted that the survey also gathered a wealth of open-ended comments that are not captured in these results, but that will be used by our respective organizations in the development of efforts and resource development.future rural recruitment.

You can access the entire report here or by clicking on the image below. State by state statistics appear after an overview in alphabetical order.