This book presents a critical analysis of the anti-democratic and pro-authoritarian ideologies that exist in rural communities in the United States. The author book also explores and recontextualizes existing research in rural education within this anti-democratic framework, as well as theorizing the consequences of this ideology as it takes place in the rural United States, specifically in regards to the physical and ideological shaping of rural communities to meet the needs of capitalist accumulation. Finally, it discusses the ways rural youth can reclaim the public sphere within their communities through critical education.

This book examines the current and future state of rural education in North America through the lens of Franco Berardi’s Futurability. Through critical examination of examples and current trends toward corporatization and privatization of rural education, the volume highlights how future possibilities and social imagination in rural spaces have been limited by neoliberal forces, capitalist interests, and workforce education. Cervone demonstrates how Berardi’s concept of creating future can be embraced to foster critical thought, challenge injustices, and open opportunity. With this line of analysis, the book ultimately supports an ethos of a return to education for the common good. Bringing an important perspective to the field of rural education scholarship, this work will be of interest to scholars and researchers in sociology of education and education policy.

This handbook begins with a foundational overview of rural education, examining the ways in which definitions, histories, policies, and demographic changes influence rural schools. This foundational approach includes how corporatization, population changes, poverty, and the role of data affect everyday learning in rural schools. In following sections, the contributors consider how school closures, charter schools, and district governance influence decision making in rural schooling, while also examining the influence of these structures on higher education attainment, rural school partnerships, and school leadership. They explore curriculum studies in rural education, including place-based and trauma-informed pedagogies, rural literacies, rural stereotype threat, and achievement. Finally, they engage with issues of identity and equity in rural schools by providing an overview of the literature related to diverse populations in rural places, including Indigenous, Black, and Latinx communities, and exceptional learners. Importantly, this handbook applies theoretical tools to rural classroom experiences, demonstrating the potential of work centered at the intersection of theory, rurality, and classroom practice. Each section concludes with a response by an international scholar, situating the topics covered within the broader global context.

Originally published in 1991, essays discuss and analyse rural schooling in its historical, social, and political contexts as well as its educational mission. Collections covering rural education in the United States are relatively rare, particularly texts that focus on available research literature in context, and many existing texts are written by educators outside of the University. This book covers historical and social factors, rural education in the field, and the future of American Schooling. The chapters comprise not only an airing of issues, concerns, and findings, but also a guide to scholarship in the areas covered. Included is a resource guide to information specific to rural education and rural special education.

Using case studies and an auto-ethnographic study of rural education history in New York State, Casey Thomas Jakubowski provides an introduction to recent events in state-level educational policy implementation. Rural Education History: State Policy Meets Local Implementation argues that rural communities are subjected to urbanormative policy, especially in their schools, and provides voice to an understudied phenomena in an under researched region. The chapters combine sociology, policy, and rich case studies to demonstrate the realities, and nearby history, in rural America.

The forces associated with globalization, whether economic or social, have conditioned the ways educators operate, and have profoundly altered peoples experiences of both formal and informal education. Globalization, as a multidimensional, multilevel process, is unequivocally, but not exclusively, based on the economics of neoliberalism. This book chronicles new sites of tension in education that are a result of an ever-globalizing economy and its accompanying neoliberal practices in the United States, Costa Rica, and the US territories in the Caribbean. The contributions are grouped into two areas: institutionalized schooling practices and non-formal educational practices that focus on identities and language.Each chapter questions the neoliberal market mantra that education must be rebranded into a marketable product and consumed by individuals, making a complex and compelling ethnographic argument that the market mantra is bankrupt. The authors argue that globalization produces liminal subjects and leads to the destruction of social institutions like education that are essential to democratic governance. The aim of each article is to uniquely disentangle the dynamics of the process, so as to resolve the mystery of how globally inspired paradigms and policies mix with locally defined structures and cultures. In assessing globalizations relationship to educational change, we need to know how globalization and its ideological packaging affect schooling, from transnational paradigms, to national policies and to local practices.This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.

Indifference has not always characterized American attitudes toward rural children, nor has neglect always been the cornerstone of state and federal policy toward rural education. Indeed, for nearly a century there was an avid and influential—though ultimately ineffective—rural school reform movement in the United States. But in recent years, rural education has become a "skeleton in the closet" of the education profession. More than 14 million children attend rural schools that receive only minuscule amounts of the nation s financial resources and professional attention. The authors of this book carefully analyze the beliefs, assumptions, policies, and practices that have shaped and continue to shape education in rural America, concluding that conventional wisdom in rural education has proved to be considerably more conventional than wise. They offer pragmatic suggestions for changes in rural schools, in educational policy, and in programs designed for rural communities. As Robert Coles tells us in his Foreword to the book, they "give us clear, strong, uncluttered prose—a good sign that they are able to offer sensible, honest, unpretentious suggestions and useful ideas. They give us. . .a social history that enables perspective . . . and [they give us] practical, well-argued suggestions for a public policy both humane and capable of realization for our rural areas."