Abigail Swisher, Rural Impact Fellow at FAS, served in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. She was part of the team who developed the policy strategy, Raise the Bar, Lead the World.
We are pleased to announce the release of three new policy briefs from the U.S. Department of Education: Raising the Bar for Rural. These briefs outline key policy levers that state and local education leaders can use to make a difference on critical issues for rural students, as well as highlighting bright spots from rural communities nationwide. Organized around the Department’s Raise the Bar, Lead the World agenda, the briefs cover strategies to accelerate learning, end the educator shortage, increase access to comprehensive & rigorous coursework for all students.
- Accelerating Learning for Every Student
- Comprehensive and Rigorous Education
- Eliminating the Educator Shortage
While rural schools are used to being scrappy and doing more with less, without state and federal support, districts will be hard-pressed to close teacher workforce gaps on their own.
Without trusted mechanisms to ensure privacy while enabling secure data access, essential R&D stalls, educational innovation stalls, and U.S. global competitiveness suffers.
tudents in the 21st century need strong critical thinking skills like reasoning, questioning, and problem-solving, before they can meaningfully engage with more advanced domains like digital, data, or AI literacy.
We need to overhaul the standardized testing and score reporting system to be more accessible to all of the end users of standardized tests: educators, students, and their families.