Welcome to Mile Markers, a bimonthly newsletter about rural higher education. I’m Nick Fouriezos, an Open Campus national reporter who grew up at the crossroads of suburban Atlanta and the foothills of Appalachia.

Today’s Roadmap

01: Postcards: Education imbalances in the South
02: Roadside Attractions: A deeper look at elections in Mississippi

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01: Postcards

Education is rarely a major focus in presidential elections, but it has taken a bit more of the limelight in a cycle where one campaign is running a former teacher as their VP candidate and the other is promising to abolish the Department of Education. 

The last four years have given Americans plenty of reasons to think about what happens in the classroom — universities have grappled with the murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests; attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion on campus, and student activism related to the war in Gaza.

However, for rural Americans, a number of recent reports suggest that the greatest impact won’t come from the White House — it will actually come from education policies a bit closer to home. 

Consider the rural South, which is seeing rising rates of student segregation and racial isolation in schools, with negative implications for all students, and particularly, Black youth, according to the latest research from the Southern Education Foundation. 

That reality has major implications for rural students of color, since 8 of the top-20 most rural states in America are in the South. 

The report found that school segregation leads to less access to experienced teachers, less supportive school climates, and fewer resources, challenges that tend to be exacerbated in rural schools. 

Racial segregation in K-12 schools may be linked to lower four-year college enrollment rates for Black students, according to the SEF report. (We’ve explored this trend before — by the time they are set to graduate high school, Black men in particular don’t see themselves as college material.) 

An absence of Black teachers doesn’t help: A number of researchers have found that having a Black teacher helps all students, regardless of race. They perform better on standardized tests and are less likely to be absent. In rural areas, Black teachers make up just 3.3% of public school teachers, compared to 6.1% nationally.

Finally, rural students of color are much less likely to have access to childcare and pre-school education, which puts them behind their urban and suburban peers early on. "Research shows high-quality early childhood education has so many positive outcomes that it almost seems they can't be real," says Max Altman, SEF's director of research and policy and lead author of the report.

The answers to addressing those obstacles, according to Altman, lie in a greater emphasis on funding postsecondary education options that often also serve as vital local support systems in rural areas.

“Community colleges and other two-year institutions have massive potential to support their students in ways that are more flexible, more rooted in their communities, and more responsive to their needs — and they aren’t able to do so right now because they are so under-funded.”

Proximity is especially important when considering that two studies released this October showed that distance plays an outsize role in academic outcomes for rural minority students.

In Texas, researchers found that living far from the nearest community college led Black and low-income students to skip higher education altogether (this was different than for white and Asian students, who were more likely to attend a four-year institution as a result). 

In California, another study found that being further away from a four-year institution made community college grads less likely to transfer to a university, with more choosing to enter the workforce or pursue other opportunities instead.

In short, the opportunities available in their own backyards matter greatly to rural students — which is why local issues may affect their education and career outcomes more than who wins the White House. 

“Rural students have their own unique needs that are often greatly ignored in the broader educational conversation,” Altman says. 

That’s a theme that Jon Valant, Director of the Brown Center on Education Policy, stressed in a recent interview with the Daily Yonder. 

For instance, Republican state leaders have been more forceful in pushing their rural colleagues to support universal school vouchers this election. Such programs allow families to redirect state education funding from public schools into private institutions of their choice — which may present a particular challenge in rural areas where there are few private choices.

“You can give somebody out in the country a voucher and they can use it to go nowhere,” Greene said, and if states are “pulling money for vouchers from general education funding, then rural schools lose funding even as their families get no use from them.” 

In addition to vouchers, state and local races could determine everything from school funding formulas to civil rights protections for rural students. For Altman, the path forward lies in recognizing that improving educational resources at the community level isn't a zero-sum game that would only help students of color. 

“While many of the programs we recommend will increase equity, they aren’t only beneficial to some students, but to all students.”

02: Roadside Attractions

• Balancing books and voting booths. It can be difficult to cast a ballot in Mississippi, where state voting laws are among the strictest in the nation — and the challenge can be even greater for the state’s tens of thousands of college students who are often voting for the first time and juggling a host of responsibilities, writes my Open Campus colleague Molly Minta in this piece co-published with Mississippi Today. 

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