Academic Growth in Rural Schools: A Special Edition of PRiME’s Growth Reports

By : Courtney Vahle, Ed.D.

Published On: July 22, 2025

When we talk about how students are doing in subjects like reading and math, it’s more helpful to look at how much they grow over time rather than just where they stand at one moment. This report continues the PRiME Center’s efforts to highlight Missouri’s excellent schools by examining student growth in the state's most rural schools over the last three years.

In terms of student growth, some of the highest performing schools in Missouri are in rural communities. In our newest special edition growth report, we highlight and celebrate the rural schools that are doing an outstanding job promoting student learning, many of which would not be recognized if we looked at raw scale scores by themselves.

Single point-in-time measures of student achievement are biased against schools that enroll high percentages of low-income students. This is true in rural schools. However, the relationship between economic circumstances and school outcomes disappears when looking at growth. Many of the highest growth schools in rural Missouri serve high percentages of low-income students. 

The Missouri Growth Model is the best growth model in the country. It is the most accurate measure of school impacts on student achievement—and the fairest to schools that enroll high percentages of low-income students.  

The advantage of using the Growth Model to identify effective schools can be clearly seen if we look at how growth and proficiency correlate with student poverty, which we measure using the percent of a school’s students who qualify for public assistance programs like SNAP. In the figure below, we see that student poverty and the percent of a school’s students who score advanced or above in math have a relatively strong, negative, and statistically significant correlation. In other words, knowing only how many students in a school come from a  low-income background allows us to predict a school’s performance levels reasonably well. This indicates that using performance level measures, such as the percent of students scoring advanced or above, penalizes schools that serve the most disadvantaged students while rewarding schools serving relatively affluent students.

Family Poverty and Student Achievement in Rural Schools (Math)

Rural School-Level Direct Certification Percentage (2024) by Percent Scoring Proficient or Advanced in Math MAP (2024)

Family Poverty and Student Growth in Rural Schools (Math)

Rural School-Level Direct Certification Percentage (2024) by 3-Year Average Math Growth Score (2024)

In contrast, when we compare student growth and poverty, as in the second figure above, we see small and statistically insignificant correlations. Visually, the relationship between the share of students from disadvantaged backgrounds and growth scores appears as a flat line. This relationship extends to ELA and to non-rural schools; accompanying figures can be found in the appendix. Knowing how many students in a school are economically disadvantaged tells us almost nothing about the average growth in that school. Growth scores then evaluate schools based only on factors that are within their control—i.e., how much students learn in the course of a school year.

Rural schools often face unique challenges such as geographic isolation, difficulty in retaining staff, financial strain due to higher transportation and fixed costs, and a lack of external economic and community resources. These schools are sometimes overlooked when we think about schools that are doing an exceptional job helping students learn. Traditional measures of “rural” are quite broad and do not fit the Missouri context. Instead, we use a comprehensive measure of rurality to examine student growth in the state’s most rural schools.

Read the full report here: www.primecenter.org/growth-reports-database/rural-growth

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