The lion's share of writing about education improvement for the past two decades has focused on improving urban schools. Given the yawning gaps between the low-income and minority students that populate those schools and their suburban counterparts, this makes a great deal of sense. Unfortunately, this focus has neglected the tens of millions of students who attend schools in rural areas. Many of the issues that they face, from the impact of the opioid epidemic to deindustrialization to a lack of infrastructure, take on a unique character in rural schools. And many of the reforms that have proven so successful in urban areas do not translate so easily to rural contexts. This volume looks at both the macro-factors affecting rural schools (like deindustrialization and the opioid crisis) as well as the specific steps rural schools have taken and can take to improve. Chapters include: (1) Rural Poverty and the Federal Safety Net: Implications for Rural Educators (Angela Rachidi); (2) African-American Education in Rural Communities in the Deep South: "Making the Impossible Possible" (Sheneka M. Williams); (3) From Basketball to Overdose Capital: The Story of Rural America, Schools, and the Opioid Crisis (Clayton Hale and Sally Satel); (4) The Power of Place: Rural Identity and the Politics of Rural School Reform (Sara Dahill-Brown and Ashley Jochim); (5) A Statistical Portrait of Rural Education in America (Nat Malkus); (6) School Finance in Rural America (James V. Shuls); (7) Staffing America's Rural Schools (Daniel Player and Aliza Husain); and (8) Right Place, Right Time: The Potential of Rural Charter Schools (Juliet Squire).