Harvard Ed School students seek to broaden perceptions of rural America
Of nearly 51 million K–12 students in the U.S., about 9 million attend rural schools. Yet despite being one-sixth of the nation’s student body, rural students, and rural education in general, are often overlooked in debates about education policy, specialists say. Some Harvard-trained educators would like to change that. During their one-year master’s program at the Graduate School of Education, Morgan Barraza ’18, Shane Trujillo ’18, and Julia Cunningham ’18, bonded over their commitment to the issue, working through the Rural Educators Alliance to foreground hurdles faced by students and teachers in rural settings. The group was co-founded by Cunningham and Carlye Sayler ’18. “One of the missions of the group is to challenge the perceptions of rural America,” said Cunningham, who taught at an Oglala Lakota Nation school on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota before enrolling at the Ed School. “Whenever anyone thinks of rural education, the picture that...