The State of Student Achievement: Release of the 2003 Brown Center Report on American Education

Transcript

TOM LOVELESS: ...Every year we also like to try to focus in on a particular subgroup. We've done this with racial and ethnic composition in the past. We've done this by looking at urban schools in the past. This year, we looked at rural schools and wanted to take a closer look at achievement in rural schools.

Let me start by just showing you some basic statistics comparing urban, rural and suburban schools. The percentage of students, you can see rural schools have 27 percent of the students. They have 42 percent of the nation's schools, however—42 percent of the nation's schools—so they are much smaller schools. Here's the mean enrollment of a rural school, 392. You can see urban and suburbans are quite larger.

Rural schools in terms of poverty, this is the percentage of students on free and reduced lunch. You can see that urban schools have more kids in poverty. Rural schools fall somewhere in between suburban and urban schools.

The ethnic mix of rural schools is quite different from both suburban and urban schools. Eighty percent of the kids in rural schools are white. You can see the nonwhite percentages are all in single digits, which is not true for suburban schools and certainly not true for urban schools. So their ethnic racial makeup is quite different.

For people expenditures, you can see the rural schools are the lowest-funded schools in the nation. Urban schools, contrary to conventional wisdom, are the most heavily funded schools in the country. Fifty-three percent of rural schools get their revenue from the State, and I think this is especially important to think about right now because of the state of state budgets.

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