America’s Rural High Schools: Challenges And Opportunities For Success

Participants (in alphabetical order)
Gene Bottoms, Senior Vice President and Founding Director, High Schools That Work initiative, Southern Regional Education Board
Greg Darling, Superintendent, Humboldt Community School District (Iowa)
John Hill, Executive Director, National Rural Education Association
Steven Means, Special Assistant, U.S. Department of Education
Lori Meyer, Vice President, Collaborative Communications Group
Elizabeth Schneider, Vice President, State Advocacy and Outreach, Alliance for Excellent Education
 Bob Wise, President, Alliance for Excellent Education

High schools are a cornerstone of America’s rural communities. When they are strong, rural secondary schools provide twenty-first-century students with the high-level knowledge, skills, and technology they need to succeed in college, careers, and life. In too many rural communities, however, high schools are in trouble. In fact, more than one fifth of the nation’s two thousand lowest-performing high schools are located in rural areas. Despite progress in overall rural educational attainment, rural high school dropout rates are still too high and college enrollment rates are too low. With more than 3.4 million American students currently attending rural high schools, these troubling outcomes are more than a “local” problem; they are a national crisis.

Given the local and national implications of the rural high school crisis, practitioners, education leaders, and policymakers need to understand the challenges facing rural high schools as well as the inherent assets that rural schools bring to the national education reform debate. On February 5, 2010, the Alliance for Excellent Education released its latest report, Current Challenges and Opportunities in Preparing Rural High School Students for Success in College and Careers: What Federal Policymakers Need to Know. During the webinar, a brief presentation of the report was followed by an interactive conversation with panelists using questions submitted by participants from the around the country.

EVENT-DAY MATERIALS
Event-day Agenda PDF
Speaker Biographies PDF
Current Challenges and Opportunities in Preparing Rural High School Students for Success in College and Careers: What Federal Policymakers Need to Know Report (PDF)  
Is Your Local High School Making the Grade? Ten Elements of Successful High Schools: A Guide for Rural CommunitiesBrochure (PDF)
A PowerPoint presentation by Lori Meyer, Collaborative Communications Group PDF