Rural education nonprofits attempt to balance student outcomes

Michael Achterling
Mon, 11 Mar 2019 14:01:55 +0000
Rural Outlook

If the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus wants to attract more talented rural students, the first step might be perception—quickly followed by tackling inequities in education around the state.

That’s the view of those who are leading nonprofit organizations across the state and elsewhere who have been using networking and legislative advocacy to help rural students become more successful in high school and prepare them better for college.

“There is, simply, a perception among Greater Minnesota that some kids think the University of Minnesota, the city, is just too big and they are more comfortable in a smaller community, so they go to Southwest Minnesota State University or Moorhead,” said Fred Nolan, executive director for the Minnesota Rural Education Association. The MREA consists of 231-member school districts from around the state, which educate about 245,000 students per day.

Nolan said these rural students also tend to focus on more alternative post-secondary options like community college and vocational programs because they are mindful of student debt and want to stay closer to home.

But inequities are also a big part of why even the most competitive rural students may not be applying to the Twin Cities campus, he said. It’s simply more difficult for students coming from rural schools with fewer resources to be competitive with wealthier, metro-area school districts, which tend to have more staffing and programs available for their students.

“The opportunities for students in the [Twin Cities] metro, especially the wealthier metro, are so much greater than in Greater Minnesota,” Nolan said.

Those inequities also cause rural students to choose different career paths after graduating high school, he said.

According to a 2016 study of more than 3,600 post-secondary institutions by the National Student Clearinghouse, 59 percent of rural students enrolled in college immediately after their high school graduations. By comparison, 67 percent of suburban students pursued those college options.

Students from high poverty areas with low income schools fare even worse: More than 15 percent were less likely than students from low poverty areas going to high income schools to enroll in college immediately following graduation.

Nolan said one of the priorities of the Minnesota Rural Education Association is to address the inequality of education across the state’s school districts. By advocating the state Legislature to provide more balanced funding across the state, he said, the outcomes may improve.

The MREA also uses a member discount program aimed to give teachers the tools for better student ACT preparation and math instruction courses, Nolan said. The organization also has more than 2,500 teachers, administrators and board members who receive a weekly electronic newsletter that includes the state’s education news and different MREA priorities, like broadband access.

Allen Pratt, executive director of the National Rural Education Association, based in Chattanooga, Tenn., said broadband access in rural communities, while slowly improving, is still an obstacle for some rural students and schools to achieve equity with their major-metro counterparts.

“I think that divide is shrinking,” he said, “it’s not where it needs to be, but it’s better than it was before.”

Georgia Heyward, a research analyst for the nonprofit Center for Reinventing Public Education, said rural areas have an opportunity to leverage the strengths of their small-town bonds into helping their students succeed.

Heyward said creating a “college-going culture” within school districts and small towns, setting up a variety of social networks that link with their communities back home, getting local churches involved, and continuing support for local teachers could create the type of social identity to encourage more rural students to attend college and beyond.

“There is much greater social cohesion in small towns,” she said. “If high schools and colleges were able to leverage this stronger social cohesion that exists…and able to leverage that into college-going and persistence rates, that could be an interesting way to go.”