Rural education should be targeted as a national priority as it affects urban and suburban populations with increasing directness. Policymakers, officials, and education researchers need to examine all existing programs, policies, regulations, and guidelines from the rural schools' point of view. Those elements that inhibit local initiative and…

Discusses three kinds of factors likely to affect school funding in the 1980s, including the national economy; demographic trends in school-age populations, geographic shifts, and aging; and state and local developments involving educational and other expenditures, federal aid, fiscal capacity, tax revenues, political and social contexts, and…