State Policy Responses to Ensuring Excellent Educators in Rural Schools

U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced in July 2014 that each state educational agency (SEA) must submit a plan describing the steps it will take to ensure that poor and minority children are not taught at higher rates than other children by inexperienced, unqualified, or outof-field teachers, as required by section 1111 (b) (8) (C) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (U. S. Department of Education, 2014). These plans require SEAs to identify gaps in access to excellent educators, and to describe the steps that will be taken to eliminate the identified gaps. In this study we examine how states have responded to this current federal call to action, specifically regarding the extent to which the interests of rural schools are represented in each SEA's plan. We use the parsimonious term equity gap to refer to any disparity in average teacher quality (as defined by states) across students and schools. Since there is strong evidence to suggest that teacher quality is the most important school factor in raising student achievement (Nye, Konstantopoulos, Rivkin, Hanushek, Johnson Johnson, LiBetti Mitchel, & Rotherham, 2014). We argue that federal education policy efforts have focused on a common set of priorities, and that examining critiques of relevant policy reveals that these priority areas do not sufficiently account for rural contexts. We now review germane aspects of two major federal policy moments in education: the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), and the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Both of these packages of federal policy reform have left a considerable imprint on how the education community views teacher quality, and knowledge of this matter is crucial before reviewing the federal call for state teacher plans. Ushering the accountability era, the NCLB provision for highly qualified (HQ) teachers was initially most burdensome to smaller rural schools, where teachers are more likely to teach more than one subject and therefore need to have multiple certifications to be considered highly qualified in all classes. Flexibility provisions were added in 2004 which allowed teachers in eligible rural districts who were HQ in at least one subject area to take up to three years to become HQ in the additional subject areas that they teach. However, roughly three-quarters of rural and small town schools were ineligible for this flexibility provision, including many high-need rural schools (Rural School and Community Trust, 2004). Even if this form of flexibility were extended to all schools, one could argue that in rural schools-where community context is paramount, and teachers must often fill numerous roles for their students-more issues result from an external, homogenous determination of teacher quality (Eppley, 2009). More recently, Race to the Top (RTTT), a 4. 4 billion competitive grant program instituted as part of ARRA, was roundly criticized for having an urban/East Coast bias. States with larger rural populations were less inclined to pursue the favored reforms items in RTTT, as federal priorities such as charter schools and systems of teacher evaluation were deemed incongruent due in part to the lack of capacity and scale for such initiatives in rural communities. The Rural School and Community Trust found that roughly two-thirds of funds in the first and second rounds of RTTT were awarded to states in the lower half of the Rural Importance Gauge, an index variable based on a number of factors including the number and proportion of rural students (RSCT, 2010). In response to such criticisms, the federal government included a preference for rural status in applications for the Race to the Top District program (RTTT-D). …