Tuesday, April 24, 2007

An Open Letter to John Edwards

Dear Senator Edwards,

Your Rural Recovery Act proposal is an important first step toward addressing the issues facing rural Americans. The only issue it fails to address is that federal agencies tend to operate in their own silos rather than collaborating with other agencies working on related issues.

For instance, there is ample evidence that the U.S. Department of Education lacks an understanding of rural schools and communities. As a result, rural schools have been forced to adopt educational reforms that were designed for urban schools, while the needs of rural communities have gone largely unnoticed.

A solution to the problem is to use an interagency approach that brings together the Departments of Education, Agriculture, and Health and Human Services, and others to develop policy initiatives that improve outcomes for students and communities. Bringing these agencies together to address the needs of rural Americans will be more successful than the piecemeal laundry lists proposed by others.

Michael

Monday, April 23, 2007

John Edwards' Rural Recovery Act

In the 2004 presidential election, John Edwards was the only candidate in either of the two major parties to talk coherently about how to address the challenges facing rural America. Edwards has taken the lead again with his Rural Recovery Act proposal. You can find the full plan on his website, but here are some highlights of what the plan will do:
  1. Restore economic fairness to rural America by helping small businesses thrive and grow.

  2. Create a new energy economy in rural America by establishing the New Energy Economy Fund to jumpstart renewable energies.

  3. Create fairness for family farmers by supporting strong antitrust enforcement, capping farm subsidies for corporate farms and supporting the packer ban and a national moratorium on new and expanded hog lagoons.

  4. Strengthen rural schools by improving pay for teachers in rural and other hard-to-staff schools to help attract quality new and experienced teachers, and by creating digital learning opportunities.

  5. Improve health care in rural America by rewriting the unfair Medicare and Medicaid funding formulas that punish rural states and communities, and supporting investments in telemedicine.

  6. Rid rural America of methamphetamines by investing in the enforcement of drug laws in rural areas, help states make meth ingredients more difficult to get and expand programs that successfully treat addicts.
Regardless of your party affiliation, you should take a close look at Edwards' ideas. If you're not inclined to support him after reading them, you'll at least have some ideas to suggest to the candidate you support.

Saturday, April 21, 2007

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.