Networks and Clusters in the Rural Challenge: A Special Report to the Rural School and Community Trust.

An important feature of the Annenberg Rural Challenge (now the Rural School and Community Trust) was the insistence that all funded projects be organized around networks and clusters. These networks/clusters aimed to help overcome the isolation of rural schools and communities and to multiply possibilities for sharing resources and enlarging the work on place-based education. This report synthesizes information gathered on network and cluster formation, structure, and function over the 4 years of the Rural Challenge grant. An introduction discusses theories on networks in educational settings, the Rural Challenge's vision of rural school reform, earlier rural reform movements, and the Rural Challenge's networking strategies and goals. The 35 distinct projects of the Rural Challenge are then sorted among three types of networks/clusters: large statewide networks that serve as intermediary organizations to smaller clusters of schools and communities; specific program networks that develop and implement fairly well-defined programs in clusters of rural schools; and small clusters that are geographically contiguous, frequently within one county. The three types of networks/clusters are discussed in terms of networking tools and strategies for communicating among members; network evolution; specific missions related to place-oriented curriculum development, community economic development, revitalization of languages and cultures, educational policy reform, and social justice advocacy; their effects on school-community relationships; and implications for the future of the Rural Challenge/Rural Trust. An appendix details 29 projects/networks. (Contains 23 references.) (SV)