A Definition of Rurality: A Sequential Quantitative Analysis Aligning Education to Geography

Abstract

The dissensus on what rural is at the Federal level changes the designation of any given place from rural to urban or vice versa, impacting decisions about allocating resources to communities. Legislative codes conceal heterogeneity and sensitivity to local variations in rural sites, contributing to a growing concern about applying historical approaches to defining rurality and urbanism. This sequential quantitative, descriptive, and correlational study aimed to capture an essence of place as it pertains to rural and evaluates the alignment between the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) classification of school districts and the communities they serve. The geospatial analysis aligns the boundaries of the NCES to the United States Census Bureau (USCB; p > 0.05), and the agencies disagree on the rural designation of 2,176,937 people within Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. A random forest model of 500 trees is trained on 65 variables in the correlational phase. A sample of 10,000 observations from a test dataset resulted in an accuracy of 98.6% with a No Information Rate of 0.1657 and Cohen’s Kappa 0.99. When the classification of the places a school district administrates is compared to the classification of the district, the correlational phase determined that the composition of the places school districts administrate does not align with the classification of the entire district (p < 0.05). This research concludes that the conditions of rural will manifest anywhere, regardless of distance from an urban center. The distinguishing factor of rurality is how its circumstances manifest due to mobility, educational and technological access, economic practice, or symbolic ethnicity.