HomeAbout the Challenge
The Challenge Sites
EvaluationPublicationsContact Us
Annenberg Institute

......................
To Order
Publications:

• Go to our on-line
order form

• Call us at
(401) 863-3833.
......................



Preface:
Who We Are


Overview: Multiple Paths with Multiple Strengths
Matching Grants

Promoting Urban School Reform

Large Urban
Grants:

- Bay Area
- Boston
- Chicago
- Detroit
- Houston
- Los Angeles
- New York
- Philadelphia
- South Florida


Special Opportunities:

- Atlanta
- Chattanooga
- Chelsea, Mass.
- Salt Lake City
- West Baltimore


 Linking Rural Schools and Communities

 Spotlighting Arts Education

- Minnesota Arts
- National Arts Consortium
- New York City Arts


 Highlights of 1997


Outright Grants


Grant Terms, National Coordination, and Ongoing Evaluation of Progress


Appendix: Tables


 Linking Rural Schools and Communities

Although the difficulties of urban schools may be better publicized than those facing rural educators, a unique set of challenges for rural schools nonetheless does exist - and they present considerable obstacles to the effective schooling of our country's rural youth. In a 1994 report on rural education issued by the U. S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement, Joyce Stern summarizes the conditions contributing to the decline of rural communities and the effects of that decline on rural schools:

The family, the church, and the school have been at the heart of rural communities since this country was settled. These three institutions have provided the standards of behavior, circles of personal interaction, and a variety of social activities that collectively shape community ethos and identity... In recent decades, powerful forces have been undermining this traditional sense of belonging. Because economic restructuring has led to a widespread deterioration in most traditional rural economies simultaneously, rural communities throughout the country find themselves in a precarious situation. Indeed, circumstances largely shaped by national and international forces have led to worse-than-average poverty, unemployment, underemployment, malnutrition, inadequate housing, inferior or nonexistent health care facilities, diminished social services, and emigration. These had the effect of undermining the economic and social stability in much of Rural America, disrupting not only cohesiveness in many of its communities, but rural culture itself... These conditions affected education as well. Local communities rely heavily on the use of property taxes to fund education. As property values erode with the declining fortunes of rural communities in many states, there is generally less to spend. The result for much of Rural America is underfunded schools, declining enrollments, limited curricula, aging facilities, and persistent pockets of illiteracy.

- Joyce D. Stern, The Condition of Education in Rural Schools

For these reasons, when the Rural Challenge was launched during the summer of 1995, it represented a timely and compelling addition to the Challenge portfolio of urban grants.

The Rural Challenge
The Rural Challenge, supported by a $50 million, one-for-one matching grant, represents the single largest private investment ever made for the reform of the nation's rural schools. Like their urban counterparts, schools participating in the Rural Challenge operate in networks with external partners experienced in promoting K-12 educational reform. By uniting schools with each other and with community organizations, the Rural Challenge aims to overcome the isolation and marginalization that characterize so much of rural education. So far, thirty-two projects, serving approximately 300 schools in thirty states, are involved in the Rural Challenge. It is hoped that more than 500 schools eventually will join the project and plant the seeds of a substantial and lasting rural school reform movement.

The Rural Challenge works with schools and communities to develop a "pedagogy of place" that promotes "genuinely good, genuinely rural" schools. These are schools in which learning experiences are grounded in the local culture and context; where students address real problems in an interdisciplinary fashion and create products useful to others; and where learning often takes place beyond the school walls, in the laboratory provided by the surrounding environment. Organizers also hope to reverse the recent trend that equates success with moving away to an urban setting. Genuinely good rural schools, therefore, are expected to prepare students to stay, to leave, or to go for a while and later return to rural communities that they value and that value them.

Not coincidentally, the Rural Challenge has attracted allies from fields other than education: natural historians, anthropologists, environmentalists, ecologists, health workers, community developers, and others who all share a common concern for the future of rural places. This affinity is most likely due to the Rural Challenge's belief that the boundaries between school and community are not only artificially drawn but also inevitably harmful. Instead, schools and communities need to be mutually engaged; schools (and students) should play an active role in community revitalization, while the entire community must participate in the education of its youth. The Rural Challenge promotes this reciprocity by searching out and supporting schools that serve and are served by their communities, and in so doing, contributes to the renewal of both schools and their communities.

The Rural Challenge is governed by a national Board of Directors and administered by a staff of four, with headquarters in Granby, Colorado. A cadre of eight stewards, based throughout the country, assists the national staff in identifying and supporting rural schools, communities, and organizations already operating in accordance with the Rural Challenge's vision or on the threshold of doing so.
- Previous | Next