Navigating Resources for Rural Schools

I hadn't been there for awhile, so I was surprised to see a new look for the U.S. Department of Education's Navigating Resources for Rural Schools site. It's a definite improvement over the look of the old site, which included a lot of stock photographs that had been used in other online and print publications.

At first glance it doesn't seem like there's much data on the site. Then again, is there ever enough? It seems like I can never find the exact information I'm looking for in the tables generaqted by the National Center on Education Statistics. Actually, there is a fair amount information available on the site and I could always get the data and make my own tables.

One downside is that some of the data is old. For example, the data posted on student achievement in civics on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) is from 1998. My sense is that NCES is overflowing with data that could be used to generate information on rural schools. Should we expect NCES to do all the work and have all the fun? I don't think so.

Creating a rural education databank would be a nice project for an organization wanting to support rural education research. Anybody interested?