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Poor Rural Neighborhoods And Early School Achievement, Teresa R. Eagle, Robert Bickel, Cynthia Smith

Teresa R. Eagle

School consolidation and the search for economies of scale are threatening to render the neighborhood school obsolete. Nevertheless, students and their families do live in neighborhoods. Consequently, education researchers have asked if there are neighborhood-based advantages and disadvantages which influence student achievement. Research has yielded conflicting results. This may be due to failure to properly define and measure neighborhood, acknowledging variation in its nature from place to place. We use ethnographic material to help operationalize the concept neighborhood for use in quantitative research on two very poor, rural counties in West Virginia. We then do a contextual analysis to gauge …