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Abstract
This article interprets inequality evident at the intersection of three realms: (a) mathematical talent (as a cultural phenomenon); (b) rural place and rural life; and (c) future economic, political, and ecological developments. The discussion explains this outlook on inequality, contextualizes interest in rural mathematics education, presents the conventional view of rural mathematics achievement as deficient, and then elaborates an alternative perspective. Illustrating the alternative, the essay embeds an analysis of a national data set to derive comparisons of the equality of math talent across locales (rural, suburban, and urban), demonstrating the greater equality of math talent in rural places. The essay concludes with principles for (a) making mathematics instruction more responsive to rural context, and (b) reorienting the instruction of gifted teachers in rural schools to an educational purpose that exerts better stewardship over local mathematical talent.
Notes
1. Raymond Williams (1989, 1973) and others (e.g., Corbett, 2007; CitationTheobald, 1997) have demonstrated the stringent domination of national and neoliberal prerogatives in rural places and particularly within rural schools.
2. The construct rural, as we use it, points to ways of living and knowing, for us, and not to geographic coordinates associated with simple residence. It concerns identity, community, and forms of engagement that, at base, proceed from an engagement with the land. Aldo Leopold's phrase “land ethic” applies, if obliquely (Leopold, 1946).
3. The authors live in rural Appalachia, home of great coal, oil, gas, and timber plundering. We do not think that every rural place is the same as Appalachia, but extraction does characterize all rural places except wilderness—where it has not yet begun.
4. Global warming, for instance, is a fact whatever the cause; fossil-fuel depletion is inevitable and the continued supply of cheap energy is uncertain at best; China's and India's economic and population growth (and force as world actors) are simple facts, as is the indebtedness of the United States to China; unlimited growth is the principle of the global economic system for the foreseeable future, and megacities are the latest manifestation of dubious population dynamics.
5. Mathematics educators and mathematicians distinguish school math from the (real?) mathematics that academic mathematicians practice. It is more conventional and less disciplined than the mathematics of the academy. Curiously, though, it engages applications as little as (or even less than) academic mathematics.
6. The poverty level of a student's family does influence achievement, whether that poverty is the student's own or not. We are aware, however, that the ascription of characteristics to subjects does some violence to the idea of agency.
7. Apparently, the overall lowest test scores in large city systems create a national average that masks the rural gap with suburbia (CitationKhattri et al., 1997; CitationStrayhorn, 2009).
8. Advanced-placement courses prepare students for exams that anyone can take without such courses, though few students or parents or even professional educators grasp this fact.
9. The International Baccalaureate, of course, is not a baccalaureate program as understood in the United States, but the name derives from the French secondary diploma, le baccalauréat, which students in the rigorous university track receive.
10. Two more recent nationally representative data sets are the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS) and the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS). HSLS—the most recent—at present provides such limited access to its public-use version that we could not use it to address our questions. The ELS contains far fewer (only half as many valid cases) rural subjects than NELS. Thus, we used NELS because access to public-use data was better and because it contained proportionately more students identified as rural.
11. A rural school for NELS is a school that, in the 1980 census, was located outside of a metropolitan statistical area (MSA). The Bureau of the Census defines an MSA with at least 50,000 people as an urbanized area that shares significant social and economic ties with bordering counties (CitationRicketts, Johnson-Webb, & Taylor, 1998). The empirical findings rest on this definition. A more subtle definition, however, refers to ways of living and knowing associated with engagement with the land (e.g., CitationRyan, 2012; CitationTheobald, 1997). In our overall discussion, then, we have this more expansive definition in mind.
12. Alternatively, one might select, for a different sort of analysis, the talent bands within locale. We ran the data both ways and found similar types of results; we settled on the present analysis based on simplicity of data interpretation.
13. The top 5% corresponds to conventional interpretations of exceptional talent (i.e., two standard deviations in consideration of one standard error); the top 10% is a wider band; and the top 25% represents the 1960s concern with the top quartile of academic talent (e.g., CitationConant, 1959). After running original analyses for all three bands, we found that results for the 10% band were intermediate between the others and thus, for parsimony's sake, we omitted results from the 10% screen after addressing the first research question.
14. Once launched on a discussion of talent as comparative rarity, gaps are endemic. With many reformers, we have in mind a more inviting and more applicable form of math instruction (in our case related to sustaining and defending rural communities in the present and especially the daunting future).
15. In an unreported logistic regression analysis of math achievement with locale, SES, and race as predictor variables, only SES and race were significant predictors. Rural locale, in other words, does not confer an achievement cost apart from the usual suspects.
16. One might also note the slightly larger proportion of rural students in the middle two SES quartiles (51.0% compared to 50.4% of suburban students and 47.8% of urban students).
17. With respect to the findings of , we wondered whether the higher proportion of math talent from the low-SES quartiles in rural areas might be attributed to the skewed underlying SES distribution (larger proportion of impoverished students) in rural areas. After we controlled for the basal proportions, the differences persisted. Of the students from the lower two SES quartiles, and with controls in place, 24.4% of those from rural areas scored among the top quartile on the standardized math test, compared to 22.5% of their suburban counterparts and 17.0% of their urban counterparts (cf., the uncontrolled findings in ). To entertain this possibility, of course, one must bracket the finding that being a member of an impoverished group typically depresses achievement beyond one's individual poverty status. Thus, this analysis imposes a stringent test on the findings reported in .
18. Rural poverty rates historically exceed urban and suburban rates, depending somewhat on the definitions in play. For instance “non-metro” poverty has exceeded “metro” poverty since poverty measures were established in the 1960s (CitationU.S. Department of Agriculture, 2004). At present, fully 41% of rural students live in poverty (Strange, Johnson, Showalter, & Klein, 2012). In light of such facts, and the findings in our analysis, it seems clear that something worthy is going on already in rural schools with respect to the cultivation of high levels of mathematical talent.
19. Exceptions might include Alaska, which is the only state to adopt cultural standards, and Vermont, which has a strong equity provision and has (thus far) tended to sustain its small rural schools. States where schooling is organized on the township model (instead of the county model) also demonstrate a legacy of resistance to the centralizing tendencies of the (small s) state.
20. Rural school consolidation is a durable issue, in part, because local people view it (accurately) as an assault on community itself. For a summary of the national literature on school consolidation, see C. CitationHowley, Johnson, and Petrie (2011).
21. We more often hear another story, however: one of regret for a lost sense of community and local meanings and experiences. See Williams (Citation1973, Citation1989) for classic considerations of the contest between national aspirations and loss of rural community. Many other nuanced considerations exist and most rural scholarship engages these themes.
22. We have described our views of rural gifted education at length elsewhere (e.g., A. CitationHowley & Howley, 2011; A. CitationHowley, Howley, & Pendarvis, 2003). In particular, CitationA. Howley and colleagues (2003) suggested three possible courses of action: (a) ruralizing gifted education, (b) using acceleration almost exclusively, and (c) doing nothing. In this essay, in the context of concern for the future, we are laying out one rationale for ruralization in one discipline (mathematics).