Askwith Education Forum Centers Rural Student Success and College Access

The latest Askwith Education Forum shined a spotlight on rural education and the leaders improving outcomes for children and families in communities often overlooked in policy conversations.

Featuring a panel of four cradle-to-career experts with decades of experience in rural America, the 90-minute event featured stories of personal perspective, proven examples of system change, and hopeful insights about the future of education in rural communities.

“College Access Starts at Birth: Lessons from Rural America” was the latest Askwith Education Forum to highlight the work of the EdRedesign Lab, which specializes in creating place-based partnerships in communities that extend beyond the traditional schooling system to help catalyze educational attainment and economic mobility.

“This movement is animated by a conviction that a schools-alone strategy is too weak an intervention to interrupt declining economic mobility and reverse economic disadvantage,” said Paul Reville, the founder and faculty director of the EdRedesign Lab, who moderated the evening’s panel. “The challenge to create real equity is greater than school optimization and must attack the root causes: the social determinants of inequality.”

The panel included Dreama Gentry, CEO and president of Partners for Rural Impact; Christina Grant, executive director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard (CEPR); Tauheedah Jackson, deputy director of the EdRedesign Lab and director of EdRedesign’s Institute for Success Planning; and Suzy Diaz, director of Collective Impact for Yakima Valley Partners for Education.

The panelists shared their own stories of navigating the educational waters to find their calling within the cradle to career movement. They also highlighted the impact community college can have on rural communities, how best to support first-generation college students, and what policy changes could best aid rural America.

Gentry noted her own upbringing in rural Kentucky and spoke of how attending a summer learning program while in high school sparked her own path to college access. Many stories echoed a similar path: a “caring adult” helping guide them to academic opportunities or recommending scholarships or a unique opportunity. In many cases, a stroke of luck that those on the panel hope to make much more common with their work.

“What we’re trying to create in this moment in time is a system that doesn’t depend on you being lucky. Because I’m a lucky one,” said Gentry. “How do we actually invest in communities and build a support system to ensure that holistic support ensures that you don’t have to be the lucky one in that place. And that’s the journey of the cradle-to-career field.”

Grant, who served as the District of Columbia’s State Superintendent of Education before joining CEPR, noted that rural voices are often not heard when making major policy decisions.

“We have forgotten a whole section of our children. I want everyone to sit in the gravity of that,” said Grant. “When we talk about academic recovery, we talk about the current state of affairs, we actually don’t have voices that could put a face, a narrative to these children.”

Jackson noted everyone on the panel mentioned the impact a “caring adult” had on their own academic journeys and stressed the importance of learning what makes communities unique to build successful partnerships in rural spaces.

“What brings me to this work is not only the promise of rural and also the value and the beauty of what rural means, and that sense of community,” said Jackson. “I think sometimes we underestimate the fact that people take care of each other.”

Diaz, whose work centers on indigenous populations in Washington state at Heritage University, stressed that connecting with and providing opportunities for families to learn about academic opportunities is key for success.

“It’s important to ensure that we create and foster relationships within the family unit,” said Diaz. “And that we as practitioners or joint service providers stop treating parents as transactions and a means to an end to something.”

Gentry, who noted that just three cents of every philanthropic dollar is spent in rural communities, urged others not to forget the millions of students in rural America.

“This nation will not rise until rural America rises,” said Gentry. “So everyone should be concerned about rural America and rural children and leaning in to ensure that those communities are invested in and not written off.”