Rural schools are a vital part of the American public education system, serving over 30 percent of the nation’s students. The National Rural Education Advocacy Coalition encourages Congress to take into consideration the unique needs of rural schools as one-size-fits-all policy can have devastating effects.

NREAC believes that responsibility for determining educational methods and strategies should lie at the state and local level and therefore advocates a fundamental transformation of the federal role in education.

• The focus of the federal role in education should be to improve outcomes for low-income children.

• The function of the federal role in education should be to help states and school districts develop capacity, provide leadership, and provide resources, supplementing and supporting state efforts rather than dictating state and local activities.

• The terms of the basic agreement between school districts and the federal government should be clearer and fairer, taking the form of a contractual agreement with the federal government providing services based on the cost of activities.

• Congress should create a subgroup for students served by Title I programs that would serve as the sole trigger for federal intervention. However, all students should still be assessed and student achievement data should still be disaggregated by subgroups.

• Accountability under Title I should focus on meaningful support to improve schools rather than one-size-fits all sanctions or required set-asides that fail to consider the unique needs and challenges of geographically isolated school districts.

• It’s time to find out just how well children, and particularly poor children, in our rural school districts are performing, as has been done for urban districts. Congress should authorize and fund a rural NAEP study.

• States should have the flexibility to use assessment and accountability systems that measure academic progress of individual students and include multiple measures.

• The progress of special education students and English language learners should be measured based on individualized needs, without arbitrary limitations that are difficult to implement in small/rural school districts.

• Schools are partners in the efforts to overcome and help mitigate the effects of poverty with other agencies and efforts, such as health care and housing.

• The NREAC reaffirms the important role of parents in ensuring the success for each child and supports parental involvement that encourages and allows district innovation.

States, not the federal government, should set standards to ensure quality instruction.

• Federal definitions for teacher quality do not adequately consider the unique teaching circumstances of rural schools and such definitions should remain at the state level.

• Congress should expand the definition of high-need local education agencies in the Higher Education Act to include geographically isolated school districts.

• The NREAC does not support the requirement of voluntary or any other national standards and believes that standards and curriculum should be determined at the local level.

• Funding should be driven to school districts through formula grants, rather then competitive grants. Formula grants are the only way to ensure that rural districts receive their fair share of assistance.

• Title I resources should be targeted to concentrations of high-poverty students based on percentages. Targeting resources based on raw numbers of students hurts rural schools.

• Funding for rural districts continues to decline but the Rural Education Achievement Program recognizes and helps alleviate the unique challenges of geographically isolated and high-poverty rural districts. Rural school administrators support continued funding for REAP and the current flow of funds directly from the federal government to local districts.