Five State-Level Rural Organizations Launch Rural Equity Collaborative -- Rural Policy Matters, Volume 4, Number 8 (August 2002)

The Rural School and Community Trust, with five state-level rural organizations, has recently launched the Rural Equity Collaborative, a pioneer effort to strengthen grassroots-level involvement in public school funding policy.

The Rural Equity Collaborative will focus on equal educational opportunity as a school funding goal. The groups maintain that equal educational opportunity requires a school funding system that is both adequate and equitable for all schools. A funding system that supports every school equitably, but inadequately, denies opportunity. Conversely, a system that guarantees every school the same minimum funding, but allows wealthier communities to spend as much as they want, denies equality.

The five state partners in the Rural Equity Collaborative will conduct their own work and will also work collaboratively the Rural Trust on specific state-school funding problems. Some of the broader goals they hope to accomplish:

Define rural school finance issues nationally from a rural perspective
Develop skills, practices, and tools supporting rural organizing on school finance issues.
Demonstrate the use of these skills, practices, and tools in a diverse group of leading rural states.
Communicate effectively with urban education activists
Build a national rural constituency for school finance reform

The Collaborative member groups will address a wide variety of issues, but the most prominent include:

Competitive Adequacy:
Many of the most important educational resources needed for all to meet high academic standards (especially good teachers and administrators) are in limited supply and schools compete with each other for these resources. State funding policy should assure that local variations in wealth do not deprive the poorest communities of the funds necessary for them to compete in the market for these resources.

Equity in Place -- "Educate Them Where You Find Them":
Kids go to school in real places, and "equity" can only occur in a place where they feel safe, wanted, needed, and expected to do well. Funding systems that deprive kids of friendly schools close to home are both inadequate and inequitable.

Fiscal Efficiency and Accountability:
State policy should assure that the resources available for equal educational opportunity are used competently. No amount of funding for a school is adequate if the funds are not used in the most cost-effective way. Fiscal inefficiency produces educational inequity. Rural citizens need the skills necessary to understand school budgeting and accounting; to analyze how much spending should be adequate to meet academic standards when competently managed; and to identify policy choices that encourage best fiscal management practices.

Over the next several years, the Rural Equity Collaborative hopes to grow and add new state partners. The inaugural five state partners are from prototypical rural regions are Appalachia, the Delta, the Great Plains, northern New England, and the Southeast, and consist of the following groups:

Challenge West Virginia
Nebraska Coalition for Educational Equity and Adequacy
North Carolina Justice and Community Development Center
Southern Echo (Mississippi)
Vermont Children's Forum

Initial major support for the Rural Equity Collaborative comes from the Ford Foundation.