Designing Rural School Improvement Networks: Aspirations and Actualities

Rural school educators are often isolated and have few opportunities to learn from neighboring schools or colleagues. This is an especially daunting challenge for low-performing rural schools faced with implementing significant reform efforts (e.g., turnaround approaches, educator effectiveness systems, college- and career-ready standards and assessments). This paper discusses the design and start-up of a large-scale project to connect “like with like” rural and remote schools within the northwest region of the United States to identify and share promising and innovative school reform practices. The authors present a network design framework based on previous work supporting and studying similar educational networks for innovation and improvement in the United States and beyond. They also present lessons learned about designing and launching a network that others might consider when initiating a school improvement network.