Confronting Spatial Injustice: The Role of Leadership in Improving Equitable Rural Educator Recruitment and Retention

Abstract

Introduction “Ruralism” is often applied as a pejorative descriptor, motivated from a deficit perspective, that results in discriminatory action infringing upon equal educational opportunity for rural children (Bassett, 2002). Although an awareness of the challenges facing rural schools is growing among education scholars, there remains a paucity of research on rural teachers and leaders. Furthermore, the vast majority of that research has been constrained to an extremely small number of rural-centric journals. Over one-half of all US school districts and one-sixth of all students are in rural contexts (Johnson et al., 2014), yet these constituents are often left behind or forgotten in debates on important educational issues, resulting in the continual undercutting of support for their teachers and educational investments. The authors of the collective of studies published in this special section of Educational Administration Quarterly (EAQ)-argue that specialized focus in a mainstream and non-rural specific academic journal will serve to validate and affirm the importance of research in this understudied area to a broader audience. Our collective work is motivated by a spatial injustice framework that speaks to the uneven geographic distribution of social, economic, and