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Mch 1, 2006

The rural-urban gap

in education

Lessonsin Learning

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The rural-urban gap in education

Canadian Council on Learning | Lessons in Learning2

Students in rural Canada are alling behind their urban counterparts.

High-school dropout rates are higher in rural areas: during the 2004/2005

school year, the rural dropout rate (16.4%) was nearly twice as high as the urbandropout rate (9.2%).1

Achievement is also lower in rural areas: in the 2003 Programme or InternationalStudent Assessment (PISA) urban students outperormed rural students in math,reading and science. These rural-urban dierences in achievement persist acrossall the provinces (see Figure 1).

Figur 1:PISA 2003 Math, Reading & Science Scores by Province

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Canadian Council on Learning | Lessons in Learning 3


Furthermore, educational attainment is lower in rural Canada. The proportion o25- to 54-year-olds who have some post-secondary education is slightly higherthan 60% in urban areas and just under 50% in rural areas. Despite recent gainsin educational attainment, the rural-urban gap has persisted. Between 1981and 1996, the proportion o Canadians with some post-secondary educationincreased rom 44% to 58%, but this increase occurred uniormly in both urbanand rural areas. Thus, despite their gains, rural areas are no urther aheadrelative to urban areas.2 These adverse educational outcomes limit the rangeo employment options available to rural youth and reduce the talent poolavailable within rural economies.

Rural-urban dierences in education can be ound in many dierent countriesaround the world. However, Canadians should be particularly concernedbecause, among OECD countries, Canada has the worst rural-urban gapwith respect to levels o education in the workorce.3 Canadas rural areas areexperiencing out-migration, higher unemployment and lower incomes.4

A well-educated workorce is a necessary pre-condition to a regions economicgrowth. Thereore, it is crucial or rural communities, and Canada as a whole,to nd ways to narrow the rural-urban gap in education.

What accounts for rural-urban differences ineducational outcomes?The available evidence suggests that two dierent actorsschool conditionsand economic conditionscombine to discourage rural students romeducational achievement.

School Conditions

Rural schools tend to be smaller than urban schools and this carries a numbero benets or rural students. Class sizes tend to be smaller, students enjoymore individual attention rom their teachers, and teachers oten know most,i not all, o the students. There is also some evidence that small rural schools

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can be more eective in helping their students learn better, behave better, andparticipate more in civic lie. Rural students express a clear awareness o andstrong attachment to the benets o attending small schools.5

Despite these advantages, small rural schools ace challenges that can lead tounavourable educational outcomes or their students.

One problem is that it is dicult or small rural schools to attract and retainqualied teaching sta. Stang issues, in turn, oten result in related problemsrevolving around high turnover rates. Small rural schools have to compete withlarger urban schools in recruiting and hiring teachers. Given the widespreadshortage o and demand or specialty teachers,6 rural schools oten have to lltheir vacancies with younger, less experienced teachers. These teachers areunlikely to remain in the positions or more than a year or two, contributing tohigh sta turnover rates.7 Beyond their lack o experience, these young teachersace a number o obstacles to eective teaching. They are oten burdened with

heavy workloads, routinely teaching courses in our or ve dierent subjectareassome o which all outside o their teaching specialties.8 New teachers inrural settings have little or no access to mentoring9 and may not receive adequateadministrative and classroom support.10 Further, new teachers may struggle tobuild productive relationships with students who are wary o strangers who dropinto their communities only to leave again within a year or two. 11

Rural schools that are unable to attract and retain specialty teachers are unableto regularly oer the same range o courses ound in larger urban schools.12Rural students consequently have ewer opportunities to take certain kinds ocourses, particularly the senior science courses oten required or admission topost-secondary institutions. When rural schools do oer these courses, the lacko specialized teachers in rural areas sometimes means that they are taught by

non-science specialist teachers. As a result, rural students may be limited in theirability to pursue certain areas o post-secondary education.

Rural schools are also at a disadvantage relative to urban schools with respectto access to and use o inormation and communication technology (ICT).13According to the available data, over 97% o Canadian schools have computersand are connected to the Internet. This high rate o connectivity holds or bothurban and rural schools; however, urban schools may be better able to makeuse o this connectivity. Rural schools are still hampered by slower internetconnections: more than 20% o rural schools still use dial-up connections, whileless than 5% o urban schools do so.

In addition, ewer rural schools have strategies or helping teachers learn howto use ICT and ewer rural schools include ICT learning in teacher development.These acts are particularly problematic given that ICT can provide eectivetools or counteracting the diculties small schools encounter in trying tosupport their teachers and oer a ull range o courses.

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Economic Conditions

Educational outcomes may be more positive in urban areas simply becauseurban economic conditions provide greater returns on investment in education.14

Thus, urban students have greater incentives to stay in, and work hard at,school. In rural areas, unemployment rates are higher, bouts o unemploymentlast longer, and labour orce participation is lowerlargely because thereare ewer job opportunities.15 Job growth is generally much higher in urbanareas: in Canada, 75% o all job growth is concentrated in just 10% o censusdivisions.16 Managerial, proessional and other knowledge economy jobs areconcentrated in urban areas, while unskilled occupations are more concentratedin rural areas.17 This is partly because the astest growing sectorbusinessservicesis primarily situated in urban centres, partly because rural economiestend to be too small and not diverse enough to oset changes in the globaleconomy,18 and partly because o the limited opportunities or employeeretraining in response to those changes.19

Rural youth are well aware o the opportunities (or lack thereo) that will beavailable to them when they nish school. I staying in school, working hardto excel and pursuing post-secondary education are unlikely to be rewardedwith good jobs, then ewer young people will invest their eorts in gaining aneducation. This tendency or rural students to have lower educational aspirationsis well documented,20 as is the dearth o solid employment opportunities.21 Ruralyouth earn lower wages, take longer to nd paid employment, and are less likelyto nd ull-time, year-round employment than their urban counterparts.

Clearly, some rural youth have very high educational aspirations and maintainhigh academic standards. However, these best and brightest are most otenpulled away rom their rural communities in pursuit o educational andoccupational opportunities. The loss o smart, educated young people to big

cities can urther contribute to the low educational aspirations o rural youth byleaving behind ew highly educated role models.

A recent analysis o the rural-urban gap in reading achievement demonstratesthe strong link between community economic actors and educationaloutcomes.22 According to this analysis, the explanation or rural-urbandierences in reading perormance is not to be ound in dierences betweenrural and urban schools. Rather, the rural-urban gap is best explained bydierences in the kinds o jobs available in dierent communities and in theamount o education required by those jobs.

In communities where the proportion o workers whose jobs require universitytraining is lower, reading perormance among 15-year-olds is correspondinglylowand rural communities tend to have ewer jobs requiring a universityeducation. Achievement in school is infuenced by any number o actors,including personal aptitude and amily circumstances. However, when all o theseactors are held constant, the role o community economic actors becomesclear. For example, the smart child o well-educated parents will likely be quite agood reader, but she is likely to be an even better reader i she lives in an urbanenvironment where a good proportion o jobs requires a university education.

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Finally, rural economic conditions can contribute to negative educationaloutcomes by pulling students (particularly males) out o the classroom andpushing them prematurely into the workorce. Rural amily incomes are lower

than urban amily incomes and rural youth are more likely than their urbancounterparts to be called upon to leave school and nd work to make up orshortalls in their amily budgets.23 The short-term economic benets gainedrom leaving school in order to work are oset in the long-term by the limitedemployment opportunities available to high-school dropouts.

What can be done to improve educational outcomesfor students in rural Canada?

School Conditions

In order to address their stang issues, rural schools will need to improve boththeir recruitment and their retention strategies. To successully recruit teachers

or rural schools, administrators should concentrate on candidates who areinclined to stay in their new communities or some time, such as candidates withrural backgrounds or a genuine interest in living in a rural area.24

In their study o rural teachers in British Columbia, Murphy and Angelski 25 oundthat teachers who accepted positions in rural communities expressed three typeso reasons or remaining in those positions: positive working relationships withtheir principals, employment in the community or their spouses, and satisactionwith the rural liestyle.

Most schools will have little to no control over spousal employment or liestyleissues, but principals can oster conditions that encourage teachers to remain intheir positions. This can include being careul in assigning new teacher course

loads, establishing an encouraging and non-threatening environment, andproviding opportunities to interact with experienced colleagues and parents.

Proessional induction programs can also help encourage new teachers to stickaround by easing them into their new positions.26 Proessional induction involvesproviding novices with extended training, development and mentoring as theygradually take on the responsibilities o ull proessionals. In particular, theemotional support aorded by a good mentoring relationship can signicantlyincrease teacher retention rates.27

Small rural schools may not be able to provide all aspects o good inductionprograms, and oering proessional development or specialist teachers maybe particularly challenging. Based on their research on rural schools in Australia,Herrington and Herrington28 argue that proessional induction might beimproved by targeted use o the Internet to support proessional groups ingeographically and proessionally isolated placements. For example, web-based discussion boards can link isolated teachers to distant peers and mentors.Videos o procedures such as innovative classroom teaching strategies can bedownloaded, as can critical resources such as lesson plans.

Even with improved retention rates, small rural schools may not be adequatelystaed with specialist teachers to regularly oer courses such as senior sciences.

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Here again, Internet-based resources may provide a workable solution.According to a recent study o rural high-school students access to seniorscience courses, students do not eel that distance education is an appropriate

ormat or the delivery o such courses.29

Students express concerns that seniorcourse material is too dicult to learn on their own and that the isolatedlearning environment o traditional distance education does not provide themwith enough external motivation to get through the courses.

Nonetheless, web-based distance education can provide some improvementsover traditional paper-based orms o distance education and alleviate a numbero the problems inherent to distance education. Web-based distance learningcan address these issues by incorporating real-time interactions with courseinstructors. Additional orms o support, such as tele-mentoring or e-mentoringwhere knowledgeable adult volunteers use telecommunications technologyto orm mentoring relationships with students, can make web-based distancelearning a viable approach to education in rural contexts.30

The Vista School District Digital Intranet allows students in rural Newoundland& Labrador to take advance placement courses in mathematics, chemistry,physics and biology through web-based distance education. Four instructors(one or each content area) are shared by all the schools in the district andprovide real-time instruction to geographically scattered students through theuse o Microsot Netmeeting and a reeware program called MeetingPoint.On-demand instructional resources are also available via WebCT. Theseresources include course outlines, lesson notes, homework, assignments, andlabs; a bulletin board that allows students to communicate publicly with eachother and their instructors; private e-mail; and tests and quizzes or studentsel-assessment. Knowledge Forum, another collaborative Internet learningtool, acilitates the development o a virtual classroom that allows instructors to

remotely monitor and participate in the activities o their students. This programhas proven to be particularly useul in helping students make eective use oclass time that would otherwise be unsupervised.

Successul web-based learning depends, at least in part, on students ability andwillingness to ask questions in open electronic classes; however, many studentsnd this very dicult. The Vista Digital Intranet project includes social occasionsor students to get to know each other and, ater participating in these socialoccasions, most students are able to overcome their discomort with askingquestions on-line.

Numerous other valuable on-line resources are available to rural teachers andstudents. For example, the Curriculum Resource Bank, developed by TVOntarioand the Education Network o Ontario, contains over 20,000 dierent learningobjects covering most areas o K-12 education. The learning materials includevideos, teacher guides, lesson plans, and interactive modules. All materials areavailable at no ee or students and educators in Ontario; some materials areavailable to schools in Quebec through a Tl-Qubec pilot project.

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Economic Conditions

To lessen the eects o negative community economic conditions, rural schoolsneed to make special eorts to demonstrate the long-term value o education.

A school-to-careers approach to connecting workplace experiences withclassroom learning may be an eective strategy; however, the rural contextpresents particular challenges or implementing such a strategy. The economicconditions in rural areas allow or ewer opportunities or cooperation betweenschools and industry, and transportation between school sites and work sites canbe particularly problematic.

In the United States, the National Employer Leadership Council has documenteda number o innovative school-to-careers programs implemented in ruralregions.31 For example, a sheet metal manuacturer in Minnesota works withschool districts, nonprot organizations, and employers to provide high-school students with apprenticeships, job shadowing, and extensive academicexploration activities. A bank in Iowa, working in partnership with the local

elementary school, opened a bank within the school to help students developtheir mathematical and nancial literacy skills. Students run all the bankoperations. A company in Oklahoma started a program to teach local studentsabout occupations other than arming, although many o the skills would also beuseul in a arm enterprise. Student interns are assigned mentors in engineering,accounting, purchasing, or communications, and the mentors give their studentsprojects based on their academic interests.

The Role of Government

Governments also have a role to play in improving educational outcomes orrural students. The Social Research and Demonstration Corporation (SRDC) iscurrently evaluating three Access to Post-Secondary Education pilot projectssupported by the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation (a ederally

unded organization) in partnership with three provincial governments.

In Manitoba and New Brunswick, the Future to Discover project is designed toaddress the low rates o post-secondary participation among students rom low-income amilies and amilies with little post-secondary educationstrugglingrural students requently all into these categories. The project includes aninormational strategy in which students learn about the options available inand the advantages conerred by post-secondary education. It also includes anancial strategy in which students receive substantial nancial support or theirpost-secondary education. SRDC is evaluating the relative eectiveness o thesetwo strategies, individually and in combination.

In British Columbia, the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) projecttargets students who achieve average grades and will likely benet rom post-secondary education but who rarely receive the type o support available to themost gited and the most challenged students. Many rural students t this prole.AVID works to motivate these students to pursue post-secondary education byhelping them acquire the skills and habits that promote academic success.

A key component in all three pilot projects is the rigorous evaluation undertakenby SRDC. This evaluation will inorm policy decisions concerning how best totarget unding to improve educational outcomes or struggling students.

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The research on the rural-urban gap in education indicates that there is nothingintrinsic to rural settings that precludes successul educational outcomes. In act,small rural schools carry a number o benets o great value to students, their

teachers, and their parents. Rural schools and communities that take advantageo innovative strategies or recruiting and retaining teachers, or providing a ullrange o courses, and or smoothing the transition between work and school canhelp their students bridge the rural-urban gap.

References1 Bowlby, G. (2005). Provincial dropout rates trends and consequences.

Education Matters: Insights on Education, Learning and Training in Canada.Statistics Canada Catalogue number 81-004-XIE.

2 Alasia, A. (2003). Rural and urban educational attainment: An investigationo patterns and trends, 1981 1996. Rural and Small Town Canada AnalysisBulletin. Statistics Canada Catalogue number 21-006-XIE.

3 Organisation or Economic Cooperation and Development (1996). TerritorialIndicators of Employment: Focusing on Rural DevelopmentParis: OECDPublishing.

4 Bollman, R. (1999). Human capital and rural development: what are thelinkages? Statistics Canada, Agriculture Division Working Paper #39.Statistics Canada Catalogue number 21-601-MIE1999039.

5 Nielsen, W., Nashon, S. M., & Mutonyi, H. (2005). Oering senior science insmall rural British Columbia schools: Perceptual expectations o students.Conference Proceedings CD of the National Association for Research inScience Teaching (NARST), Dallas. (# 206078).

6 Grimmett, P. & Echols, F. (2000). Teacher and administrator shortages in

changing times. Canadian Journal of Education, 25, 328-343.7 Looker, D. (2001). Policy research issues or Canadian youth: An overview o

human capital in rural and urban areas October 2001. Applied ResearchBranch, Strategic Policy, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada.

8 Nielsen, W. (2004). Accessing senior science courses in rural BC: A culturalborder crossing metaphor. Paper presented at the annual meeting of theCanadian Society for Studies. Winnipeg, May 2004.

9 Moir, E. & Gless, J. (2001). Quality induction: An investment in teachers.Teacher Education Quarterly, 28, 109-114.

10 Westing, D.L. & Whitten, T.M. (1996). Rural special education teachers plans tocontinue or leave their teaching positions. Exceptional Children, 62, 319-335.

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Nielsen, W. (2004). Accessing senior science courses in rural BC: A culturalborder crossing metaphor. Paper presented at the annual meeting of theCanadian Society for Studies. Winnipeg, May 2004.

12 Nielsen, W. (2004). Accessing senior science courses in rural BC: A culturalborder crossing metaphor. Paper presented at the annual meeting of theCanadian Society for Studies. Winnipeg, May 2004.

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13 Ertl, H. & Plante, J. (2004). Connectivity and Learning in Canadas Schools.Connectedness Series. Statistics Canada Catalogue number 56F0004MIE,No. 11.

Plante, J. & Beattie, D. (2004). Connectivity and ICT integration in Canadianelementary and secondary schools: First results rom the Inormation andCommunications Technologies in Schools Survey, 2003-2004. Education,Skills and Learning Research Papers. Statistics Canada Catalogue number81-595-MIE2004017

14 Alasia, A. (2003). Rural and urban educational attainment: An investigationo patterns and trends, 1981 1996. Rural and Small Town Canada AnalysisBulletin. Statistics Canada Catalogue number 21-006-XIE.

15 Looker, D. (2001). Policy research issues or Canadian youth: An overview ohuman capital in rural and urban areas October 2001. Applied ResearchBranch, Strategic Policy, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada.

16 Organisation or Economic Cooperation and Development (2005). Regionsat a Glance Paris: OECD Publishing.

17 Alasia, A. & Magnusson, E. (2005). Occupational skill level: The dividebetween rural and urban Canada. Rural and Small Town Canada AnalysisBulletin. Statistics Canada Catalogue number 21-006-XIE.


19 Halseth, G. & Ryser, L. (2004). Service provision in rural and small townCanada: Cross-Canada summary report. Building Rural Capacity in the NewEconomy.

20 Hu, S. (2003). Educational aspirations and postsecondary access and choice:

Students in urban, suburban, and rural schools compared. Education PolicyAnalysis Archives, 11(14).

21 Alasia, A. & Magnusson, E. (2005). Occupational skill level: The dividebetween rural and urban Canada. Rural and Small Town Canada AnalysisBulletin. Statistics Canada Catalogue number 21-006-XIE.

22 Cartwright, F. & Allen, M. (2002). Understanding the rural-urban reading gap.Education, Skills and Learning Research Papers. Statistics Canada Cataloguenumber 81-595-MIE2002001.


24 Collins, T. (1999). Attracting and retaining teachers in rural areas. ERICClearinghouse on Rural Education and Small Schools. Charleston, WV.(ED438152).

25 Murphy, P. & Angelski, K. (1996). Rural teacher mobility: A report rom BritishColumbia. Rural Educator, 18, 5-11.

26 Canadian Association o School Administrators (2001). Promising Practices inTeacher Recruitment and Retention.

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27 Odell, S. & Ferraro, D. (1992). Teacher mentoring and teacher retention.Journal of Teacher Education, 43, 200-204.

28 Herrington, A. & Herrington, J. (2001). Web-based strategies or proessional

induction in rural, regional and remote areas. The Australian Association orResearch in Education.

29 Nielsen, W., Nashon, S. M., & Mutonyi, H. (2005). Oering senior science insmall rural British Columbia schools: Perceptual expectations o students.Conference Proceedings CD of the National Association for Research inScience Teaching (NARST), Dallas. (# 206078).

30 ONeill, K., Abeygunawardena,H., Perris, K. & Punja, Z. (2000).The Telementors Guidebook: A Field Guide to Supporting Student InquiryOn-Line. Oce o Learning Technologies, OISE, University o Toronto.

31 NELC (2002). Best Practices in School to Careers: The Rural Challenge.Eric Digest #469 214.

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