The Forgotten Many: Rural Gifted Learners

Introduction

Rural communities are characterized by many strengths. Not only do rural communities provide energy and food resources for those across the United States, they also provide respite and a place to enjoy the natural beauty of their mountains, rivers, and forests. Moreover, rural communities can be close-knit, where the benefits of knowing your neighbor can outweigh the allure of urban amenities. Rural people tend to consider home and place to be integral parts of their identities.

However, for all the positives associated with rural life (and there are many), one consistent challenge has been contending with educational inequity for rural students. The high incidence of poverty among rural communities (Tieken, 2014), often due to dwindling opportunities for work, results in a lack of resources for educational and social support. This is evidenced, for example, by a century-long struggle to staff rural schools (Biddle & Azano, 2016) and to provide high-quality programming for rural gifted students. Economic inequities further intensify these challenges. For example, rural Appalachia’s well documented economic reliance on the coal mining industry was upended by environmental policies, globalization, and the pressure for clean energy, resulting in higher than average regional unemployment (and economic underdevelopment, see Peine et al., 2020) when compared to the national average (Appalachian Regional Commission, 2015). Similarly, a shift in the global economy has caused the closure of factories in rural places all across the United States as companies have sourced labor overseas at lower costs. Historically, these economic factors have had negative effects on rural schools.

Geographic isolation exacerbates the economic challenges facing rural schools, and rural schools have historically had difficulty recruiting teachers to districts that are unable to provide competitive salaries and that may not afford the amenities teachers seek when choosing where to live. Further, due to funding structures that privilege students in urban and suburban places (Sutherland & Seelig, 2021), rural schools often lack resources like access to computers, library books, updated curriculum materials, professional development for teachers, and reliable internet. These factors present a significant challenge for the nearly 20% of U.S. students (Showalter et al., 2019) who attend schools that are considered rural by the National Center for Education Statistics (n.d.), which bases its determinations on a community’s population density and proximity to metropolitan areas (i.e., cities with populations of over 50,000).

With decreasing availability of local funds for education because of increasing poverty and inadequate state and federal funding (Showalter et al., 2019), school district resources are stretched. As a result, gifted education is often not prioritized in rural schools (Lewis & Boswell, 2020a) for many reasons. First, if the overall performance of a district’s students on high-stakes standardized testing fails to meet benchmarks established by the federal government, it could result in punitive measures (Sutherland & Seelig, 2021). As a result, district leaders and boards of education may deem it necessary to allocate a large proportion of resources, both personnel and instructional materials, to remediation. Moreover, there is no federal mandate for providing specialized programming for gifted students (as there is for students protected by Individuals with Disabilities Education Act [IDEA] and the Americans with Disabilities Act [ADA], for example). While most states have guidelines in place, the absence of federal regulations and low levels of funding at the state level for gifted programming (often none; Rin et al., 2020) communicates a message about the value of gifted education. Although rural districts may employ teachers and/or coordinators to serve gifted students, these teachers and coordinators often split their time between gifted programming and other responsibilities (e.g., coordinating special education services), or they may have to travel long distances to reach geographically widespread schools (Matthews et al., 2021; Miller & Brigandi, 2020).