Howard High School (South Dakota) is part of the Annenberg Rural Challenge, a privately funded national effort to strengthen rural schools and their communities. Rural Challenge schools create curricula specific to community history and resources, aiming to help students become active knowledgeable citizens. Student projects and the positive and…

The Rural Education Bureau of the New Mexico Public Education Department has established a program to address the special needs of schools and communities in the extensive rural areas of the state. High poverty rates, depopulation and a general lack of viable economic opportunity have marked rural New Mexico for decades. The program underway aims…

Describes the structure of the Chinese rural school system and its operational ties to the communes, which provide the "productive labor" component of Chinese education, various resources and facilities for schools, and governance of agrotechnical education at the middle and secondary level. (SJL)

Describes problems in rural education and highlights reform programs in rural schools. Many reform programs combine school improvement with rural economic development. Barriers to reform include the One Best System Model and consolidation. Local control of schools is a key to successful reform. (KS)

School at the Center, a U.S. place-based educational initiative, was successfully trialed in North Queensland (Australia). For place-based education to take root in Australia, place-based educational strategies must be taught in preservice teacher education programs. However, to be seriously considered by teacher education programs, place-based…

Describes two Tanzanian reform programs: Education for Self-Reliance and Decentralization. The first supports programs to make education relevant to rural life, correct elitist biases, and improve students' attitudes toward rural living. The second, already instituted in primary and adult education, seeks to promote community participation in…

Programmes of education for farmers in the form of Winter Schools, in the early 19th century, were gradually broadened into agricultural education for employment in farming or as preparation for higher education. In the 20th century, vocational education was developed at Apprenticeship and Secondary Schools to meet the needs of large-scale state…

The idea that education is connected to economic development and that the economy can be strengthened by strengthening education has become a cornerstone of the 1980s educational reform movement. The basic idea linking education and the economy is not new. Americans have invested in education with the expectation that it would yield substantial…

This brief reports on the Ford Foundation's establishment of the Rural Community College Initiative (RCCI) for selected institutions in economically distressed areas of the Southeast, Deep South, Southwest, Appalachia, and western Indian reservations. This is the fourth report in a series by the RCCI Documentation Team. The RCCI program challenges…

This chapter describes a community development project in Siete Pilas (Spain), a village whose economy is based primarily on small family farms and unskilled labor. The project grew out of the Sierra Education Program, which in 1980 sent adult-education teachers to five villages in the Sierra de Ronda region. The goal was to stimulate a socially…

Jilin is a rural province in northeastern China, known for its forests and forest products such as ginseng. In the past, Jilin's schools focused on preparing students for higher education and offered little of relevance to most rural students. In addition, the schools were understaffed and were managed by a remote, centralized bureaucracy. In…

"Teachers' Schools and the Making of the Modern Chinese Nation-State" is an innovative account of educational and social transformations in politically tumultuous early twentieth-century China. It focuses on the unique nature of Chinese teachers' schools, which bridged Chinese and Western ideals, and the critical role that these schools…

Rural Amrica has been experiencing dramatic changes in the transition toward a socially and culturally diverse society. This study is a first effort to explore multicultural reform in rural schools. Multicultural education is the process by which the school environment is modified to accommodate cultural differences as well as to teach the role…

Addresses Australia's changing economic structure and the increasingly important role of adult education in rural economic development. Adult programs that positively impact rural development include training for employment, small business training, enterprise education, community awareness programs aimed at promoting understanding of how money…

This report on the educational systems in China and South Africa compares the policies and processes of the two countries as they attempt to expand and improve rural education. Both countries experienced a major political upheaval, and even though there is a 50-year time lag between these events, political changes ushered in radical educational…