What's Rural?
Ever wonder what makes a place rural?
Ever get in a "discussion" about it?
I once argued with a friend that her town—population somewhere around 1,800—wasn’t rural, couldn’t be, I said, because it was the county seat in a southern state. And the largest town for miles around, to boot.
My rationale was that towns—even those with fewer than 2,500 people, the census definition of rural—which control the economic and political resources of a county should not be considered rural. I beefed up my argument by pointing out that these towns often pull in more resources from surrounding rural areas than they return to those areas. And, I added, towns generally have some taxing authority and, therefore, more avenues through which to generate revenue than unincorporated areas usually do.
Maybe I’m a purist on this matter—most people don’t argue with the census definition.
But a lot of people don’t know it either.
Ever heard a tv or radio journalist describe a town you know has 17,000 people as “tiny,” or, worse in my book, a small city as “this rural" community?
I have. And it bugs me. Not out of any sense of cultural righteousness. I hate to see an opening for driving any of the tiny portion of public resources our country reserves for rural places toward influential regional “towns” instead of the surrounding areas that often need the resources (and/or a fairer return for their contributions)--and really are rural.
Which brings us back to the original question: what is rural?
There are a variety of technical definitions of rural. (We’ll take up cultural descriptions in a later post.) These efinitions matter because they determine how resources get directed to "rural" places, including schools. And, they influence which places get "rural" resources.
A new paper spells out the six most commonly used official definitions of “rural.”
The brief is: “How the government defines rural has implications for education policies and practices.” It was produced by REL Southwest and the Institute of Education Sciences. It’s helpful and easy to read.
Most technical definitions of “rural” that are used in American public policy start with the census definition: open country and settlements (not necessarily incorporated towns) of 2,500 or fewer people. Then they layer on additional dimensions.
These definitions are residual. That is, they define rural as what’s left over when everything else is accounted for. The more layered definitions usually add some measure of proximity of a rural place to an urban one. The result is that some places are rural in one definition and not in another.
Interesting examples are the “locale codes” used by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) for schools and districts.
One of them, the “metro-centric” locale code, originally developed in the 1980s, assigns schools and districts to one of eight locations, two of which are rural. A newer “urban-centric” local code, developed last year, identifies 12 locales, three of which are rural and vary by how close the rural place is to more urbanized areas of different sizes.
Some schools and districts changed “locales” with the newer system.
The school district in the town in which I live changed locale codes. It is a Locale Code 7 in the metro-centric code; that’s “rural, outside a core-based statistical area.” In other words, the town is less than 2,500 people and outside a metropolitan area of 10,000 or more people. In the newer urban-centric code, we’re a “32--town, distant.” Our locale code did not change because our area is growing. We're actually shrinking, like many other small towns and rural communities. No, the change is all in the definition.
Our county has some other strange examples of how the definition affects whether a school is “rural” in the NCES locale codes. For example, in the urban-centric code, the high school in one small town, population 2,300, is a 32 and the elementary school is a 41--rural fringe. Both schools are situated inside the town limits. In another community, population 1,100, the situation is reversed; the high school is a 41 and the elementary is a 32. Again both schools are in the town limits.
It must have something to with how the crow flies…
to a city.
All four of these schools are Locale Code 7 in the metro-centric system. And—just for the record—neither of the two communities is the county seat.
You can look up the metro-centric Locale Code for your school or your district through NCES’s Common Core of Data.
Getting your code in the newer urban-central code is tougher and requires downloading a big data set. But you can see a map with color codes for districts that changed locales. Scroll to the bottom and click on your state name.
And, if you really want to know your locale code in the urban-centric code, email Rural Matters and we’ll look it up for you.
Check back for more discussion of "What’s Rural?"