The Definition of Rural and How It Effects Our Culture

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The United States Department of Agriculture gives this as a definition of rural: “open countryside, rural towns (places with fewer than 2,500 people),” this is a very specific definition that gives us actual numbers to base our set categories on. However, there are many towns in South Georgia for example that have many more people than two thousand five hundred, but are still considered rural. Take Cochran Georgia, my hometown, for example. Cochran is a small town in Middle Georgia that few have heard of, and those that have only know about Cochran because of the college in our town. In our town, we have hundreds of acres of farm land and cattle fields, but because we have ten thousand people in our county we are not considered rural. Despite that being the category that most who live in Cochran would put us in.

These definitions use almost the same wording, but there are differences that need to be considered. The use of the word agriculture, for example, is used in only one definition, but it is one of the first things people think of when they think of rurality. The Oxford Dictionary uses the words “countryside rather than the town”, but as shown with the example of Tifton that is not always the case. The U.S. Census Burau classifies rural as “anything not urban” these differences aren’t wrong, but they all bring into play different aspects of what we know to be rurality.

In Todd Kettler, Jeb S. Puryear, and Dianna R. Mullets “Defining Rural in Gifted Education Research: Methodological Challenges and Paths Forward” Kettler et al. looks at how the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) determines what school systems are in rural areas and which are in urban, and if the way that they make the distinctions are helping or harming our school systems. According to our authors “10 million children or twenty percent of schools are classified as being rural.” There are many research centers and Academic journals that look at rural schools and how they are defined by state and national governments. The article goes on to state that “It is important to define rural not only demographically and geographically, but culturally as well” definition for rural when it comes to the school system. In the first part of the article they give an example of two schools in Texas, one with less than two hundred children and the other has a little under forty-thousand but, both are considered rural.

This just goes to show the complex way we do locale-bases research. NCES has different categories for rural areas. These categories are Fringe, Distant, and Remote. One study that was mentioned in the article found that, when you look at schools in the fringe districts they operate more like suburbs then other schools from the other two districts mentioned. In the article, it says that one of the reasons that this is so difficult is because as an area grows it becomes more urbanized and changes in a way that a 10-year census cannot catch.

Research that goes into Rural Education is often research about group differences. Where groups are created on a pre-existing variable. This research is only as important as the groups are valid representations of the grouping variable. These inferences are taken out of group differences inside the group.

Casual-comparing puts subjects in categories based on the individual characteristics and they look at the differences that are behind the fact that these groups are put into categories. The study that Ketller Et. Al. used was a systematic review methodology to look at other ways besides using just the NCES codes to determine groups in rural education. Through the study the authors recommended a group assignment technique that was made to filter groups by school size. They then looked at the differences that using the techniques brought.

Just like there are many types of definitions of rural, there are also different definitions of the people that live there. These definitions come from both people living in the rural areas and from those in urban areas. In this article, they used different sources to narrow if the way the NCES used their group codes to generate groups in rural areas was effective. They concluded that ten percent of the districts that were in their test group didn’t meet the common standard of what rural is thought to be.

In the article, they quote Howley, Theobald, and Howley who state that having a single definition of rural is difficult to come about and it might be an unrealistic expectation. They say “we should not seek consensus on a single definition of rural but we should ask that rural education researchers carefully describe the contexts of their (putatively) rural investigations” Howley et al. continues to say that trying to find a simplistic definition of rural is unlikely.

Unless group are clearly defined group comparison isn’t very meaningful. In the article, they give the example of a study that examines gender differences in science achievement and the study said that ten percent of the male group were female. They make the observation that anyone who read the study would laugh and look at the results as less then valid. One finding of the study that the others did was that only using the NCES codes alone for group assignment showed that the test made a group of rural districts were ten percent of the districts didn’t meet the standards that were thought to mean rurality, and the state education systems placed these ten percent in the urban/suburban categories. The NCES codes assign rural codes that after having been looked at more closely they determined that they didn’t fit into the rural category that has been the basis of the study.

The implications of this study suggest that we cannot just use the NCES codes to determine what schools should be rural or not. We can take the same approach that Texas has taken, and put a cap on the number of students that a school can have enrolled to be considered rural, along with NCES codes, to make the best educational system for our young people.

In the study above in the working definition that I believe they use for rural is; A small town with few people and limited resources. This is another reason that people who live in urban areas have different opinions then people who live in rural areas. This also looks at the way they view rurality and see different things. People who live in an urban setting view our lack of resources as bad and a reason to stay away from rural areas in America. However, people who live in these rural areas don’t look at what we have as a lack of resource they view it as a freedom to live in whatever way they deem moral and acceptable. For example, When it comes to a lack of resources in our schools, in a rural town we who live