Rural education finance and achievement among southern black belt school districts

Abstract

The state of Tennessee is part of the United States that houses a special set of school districts known as the Black Belt. Named for the black fertile land, utilized for the agricultural industry for hundreds of years in the south, these school districts have the lowest levels of achievement among the one hundred and thirty six school districts in Tennessee. The purpose of this study is to identify just how extensive these achievement discrepancies are between Black Belt school students and non-Black Belt school students by answering the following research question: are Black Belt school students disproportionately scoring lower on college admittance exams (ACT) than students in non-Black Belt school districts? The data for this study was gathered from the Tennessee Report Card for Education over a period of ten years. Pooled time series cross-sectional regression analysis was the datatesting device employed in the study. The findings suggest that Black Belt students are disproportionately scoring lower on college admittance exams compared to non-Black Belt students. Policymakers need to use caution when generalizing this study because it only represents those Black Belt school districts in Tennessee.