Fall 2019 - Lumina Foundation

FOREWORD

In rural America, too few roads lead to college success

Here’s a surprising fact: Students from America’s rural communities graduate from high school at rates higher than the national average. Fully 80 percent of them finish 12th grade, just a shade below the 81 percent who graduate from more prosperous suburban schools. Making up about 14 percent of the school-age population, rural students also score better on the National Assessment of Educational Progress than do students in cities.

Navigating the North State

California’s far-northern tier belies the state’s image as a mecca of wealth and privilege. In fact, with adult poverty rates above 20 percent, this vast rural expanse faces a host of social problems—including poor health, housing insecurity, and drug addiction. But community leaders across a five-county area see the path to progress, and they’ve teamed up to broaden that path for northern California residents. As one leader of North State Together points out: “It all came down to education.”

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Standing tall in Texas

The Rio Grande Valley of Texas is the fastest-growing region of a booming state—and that presents challenges. Among the biggest: preparing residents for skilled jobs that are cropping up too fast to be filled. This education challenge is particularly acute in south Texas, where the distances are vast, the heritage rural, and the people quite poor; nearly 90 percent of valley residents are considered economically disadvantaged. But an area network called RGV FOCUS is attacking the problem in force.

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From ‘The Corridor’ to Clemson

The rural regions along Interstate 95 in South Carolina have long been called the “corridor of shame.” The name stems from a 2005 documentary that showed how decades of grinding poverty and governmental neglect essentially doomed area residents to a Third World education. Progress is still slow along the corridor, but it’s occurring—and a Clemson University program called Emerging Scholars is part of the change.

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Climbing the Hoosier hills

In tiny Switzerland and Crawford counties in southeast Indiana, only 17 percent of adults have earned associate degrees (compared with 38 percent for the state overall), and a significant number lack even a high school diploma. Until recently, there were few places where area residents could go to advance their learning. But that’s changing, thanks to a coalition of organizations working to expand educational opportunity in the region: the EcO Attainment Network.

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PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

We’ve all heard the phrase “flyover country,” the dismissive term often used by coastal elites to describe the vast middle parts of the nation that they tend—or choose—to ignore. Those two words encapsulate a troubling view—the idea that the nation’s less populated areas are somehow less important or less valuable, that the people there can rightly be overlooked. No idea could be more wrong—or more dangerous to America’s future.

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Clemson nurtures Emerging Scholars

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Indiana program helps felons forge a future

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Additional Links

Nonprofits and other organizations focused on rural issues:

The stories in this issue of Focus were reported and written by Susan Headden, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and communications professional with many years of experience covering education issues. Headden, a former staff writer at The Indianapolis Star, worked nearly 16 years at U.S. News & World Report, ultimately serving as a managing editor. She later held senior positions at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She now works as a communications consultant based in Washington, D.C.