Chapter 11: Rural Talent Management: Recruiting and Retaining Teachers in Rural Hard-to-Staff Schools

We have seen an unprecedented amount of education policy reform, research, and attention focused on urban schools across the United States in the past few decades. Yet despite the fact that half of all U.S. school districts and one third of all schools are located in rural areas (Johnson et al., 2014), rural education has not received near comparable attention to their urban counterparts, relegating it to the periphery of educational improvement efforts (Corbett & White, 2014). Given that underrepresented students of color from low-income backgrounds are already neglected in the education system, the urban bias doubly marginalizes those from rural communities (Cuervo, 2016). From a teacher staffing perspective, rural neglect is extremely problematic given that rural schools experience higher educator turnover than schools in any other geographic space (Goldring et al., 2014; Ingersoll, 2019). While data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) 2012–2013 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) shows that annual teacher turnover in low-poverty suburban schools averaged 11%, high-poverty urban schools averaged 19%, and high-poverty rural schools faced even higher overall teacher turnover at an average of 25% per year (Ingersoll, 2019). Repeated turnovers are costly both from an academic (i.e., more turnover is related to lower student achievement scores; Ronfeldt et al., 2013) and financial perspective (i.e., teacher replacements in high-turnover, resource-constrained districts can cost schools upwards of $20,000 per teacher; Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017).