Gee, rural schools are in trouble….
Instead of beating a path to an urban school to try to make sense of these abysmal graduation rates, Time instead highlighted Shelbyville High School, about 30 miles outside of Indianapolis. There, an estimated 100 kids from the entering freshman class four years ago dropped out. Almost all of the dropouts interviewed by the Time reporter said “teachers and principals treated the ‘rich kids’ better.”
These were not voices echoing across gritty street corners. The students featured in the Time article were poor white kids, many of them from chaotic family backgrounds. Like the estimated 80 percent of Chicago Public School kids who qualify for free lunch, these students from small-town America fit the profile of kids who give up on earning a high school diploma.
There are some problems with the methodology by the Manhattan Institute, but the general issue is addressed decently–IOW, the got to essentially the right place with not the best way to get there.
Rural schools are in very serious trouble—it’s not by accident that the meth problems are so heavy in rural areas, the lack of jobs and increase in poverty is serious in those areas. As farming has changed, good paying jobs in the local communities are leaving–those that don’t leave are more likely to be left behind in the same kind of spiral we have seen in many urban neighborhoods.