Closed, Bused, Mixed: A Literature Review on the Impact of Rural School Closure; Effects of Busing on Rural Students; and Student Performance in Small Schools and Mixed-Age Classes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2000, Lauzon and Leahy completed a literature review on rural schools and educational reform, concluding that rural schools were indeed worth saving. In 2017, I conducted a literature review with the goal of offering an update to that article, investigating the post-2001 research on the impact of rural school closures; the effects of bussing of rural students to/from school; and student performance in small schools and mixed-grade classes. The results were mixed and contradictory, equal in their puzzling to the complexity of defining what is “rural” and what is “small school”. While some of the researchers continue to point out the unique place of local schools in rural settings, many also note the lack of large-scale studies into the impact of rural school closures, especially the impact on students – even "who pays and the price they pay, is always of interest" (bell hooks)… or is it?
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".