Rural Students at Risk in Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas
Appendix
Defining Geographic Terms
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a division of the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), uses U.S. Census terms to categorize communities into seven classifications:
| Large Central City | Central city of a metropolitan area [a metropolitan area generally is any county in the U.S. that has a city or urbanized area of at least 50,000 and a total county population of at least 100,000] with (a) a population of more than 400,000 or more, or (b) a population density of 6,000 or more persons per square mile |
| Mid-size Central City | Central city of a Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) with (a) less than 400,000 population or (b) density of less than 6,000 per square mile |
| Urban Fringe of a Large City | Place within the SMSA of a large central city that is defined as urban by the Census |
| Urban Fringe of a Mid-size City | Place within the SMSA of a mid-size central city that is defined as urban by the Census |
| Large Town | Town not within an SMSA but with a population of 25,000 or more
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| Small Town | Town not within an SMSA with a population between 2,500 and 25,000 |
| Rural | Place with a population under 2,500 and not within an SMSA (Vaughan, Boethel, Hoover, Lawson & Torres, 1989, pp. 20-21) |
These categorical definitions are useful in developing a common framework for understanding and discussing communities of varying sizes and locations, but they have not been universally adopted by educational researchers. Some have similar, though differing definitions; others use the term "rural" to mean everything except urban. Indeed, such terms as "rural communities" and "small, rural school districts" are often discussed without any clear, precise definition. The complexities involved in defining and using such terms have been discussed (Hillman, 1991; Stephens, 1991; Hobbs, 1989; Sher, 1988). Because of these complexities, this synthesis uses the terms "rural," "urban," "suburban," "inner city," "small town," etc. broadly, accepting them as they are used in the reviewed literature.
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