Kooky Idea #1: Rural School Data on the Rural School Data Website

This post kicks off an occasional series on kooky ideas to help rural schools.

Kooky Idea #1: The National Center for Education Statistics should put data on its Navigating Resources for Rural Schools website that disaggregates data by locale. NCES generally does this, but there are some exceptions. Two examples are found on the Teacher Section of the site:

Average salaries for full-time teachers in public and private elementary and secondary schools, by selected characteristics: 1999-2000, and

Estimated average annual salary of teachers in public elementary and secondary schools, by state or jurisdiction: Selected years, 1969-70 to 2002-03

If NCES is going to have a site devoted to rural education statistics, the data ought to be about rural schools. Disaggregating salary data by locale would be particularly helpful since it is commonly claimed that teachers leave positions in rural schools to take higher paying jobs in nonrural schools. A first step in testing that claim is knowing the degree of pay differential between rural and nonrural schools.