NCES Blog

NCES is excited to announce the release of five Education Across America indicators that focus on education in rural areas. These indicators—which summarize data patterns and provide analyses of the rural education experience—focus on the following topics:

• Rural Students’ Access to the Internet
• Early Childhood Care and Education Programs in Rural Areas
• Staff in Rural Public Elementary and Secondary School Systems
• Postsecondary Enrollment Status of Youth From Rural Areas
• Educational Attainment in Rural Areas

For example, Rural Students’ Access to the Internet highlights the percentage of students in rural areas who had no internet access or only dial-up access to the Internet in 2019 (7 percent or 663,000 students). This percentage was higher than the percentages for students in towns (6 percent), cities (5 percent), and suburban areas (3 percent). In addition, compared with students in other locales, it was less common for students in rural areas to have fixed broadband internet access at home and more common for them to have only mobile broadband internet access at home. 

Figure 1. Percentage of 5- to 17-year-old students with no access to the Internet or only dial-up access to the Internet at home, by home locale: 2019

[click to enlarge image]

NOTE: "No access to the Internet or only dial-up access to the Internet" includes households where no member accesses the Internet at home as well as households where members access the Internet only with a dial-up service. Data are based on sample surveys of the entire population residing within the United States. This figure includes only students living in households, because respondents living in group quarters (e.g., shelters, healthcare facilities, or correctional facilities) were not asked about internet access. Excludes children under age 15 who are not related to the householder by birth, marriage, or adoption (e.g., foster children) because their family and individual income is not known and a poverty status cannot be determined for them. Although rounded numbers are displayed, figures are based on unrounded data.

SOURCE: U.S. Department of Commerce, Census Bureau, American Community Survey (ACS), 2019, Restricted-Use Data File. See Digest of Education Statistics 2020, table 218.70.

These indicators are currently available through the Condition of Education Indicator System. To access them, select Explore by Indicator Topics and then select the Education Across America icon.

Stay tuned for the release of additional indicators in early 2023. Then, in spring/summer 2023, check back to explore our highlights reports—which will explore key findings across multiple indicators grouped together by a theme—and our spotlight on distant and remote rural areas and the unique challenges they face.

Explore the Education Across America resource hub—including locale definitions, locale-focused resources, and reference tables with locale-based data—and watch this video to learn more about the hub. Be sure to follow NCES on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube and subscribe to the NCES News Flash to stay up-to-date on Education Across America releases and resources.

By Xiaolei Wang and Jodi Vallaster, NCES

Bullying remains a serious issue for students and their families, as well as policy makers, administrators, and educators. NCES is committed to providing reliable and timely data on bullying to measure the extent of the problem and track any progress toward reducing its prevalence. As such, a new set of web tables focusing on bullying rates at school was just released. These tables use data from the School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which collects data on bullying by asking a nationally representative sample of students ages 12–18 if they had been bullied at school. This blog post highlights data from these newly released web tables.

In 2019, about 22 percent of students reported being bullied at school during the school year (figure 1). This percentage was lower compared with a decade ago (2009), when 28 percent of students reported being bullied at school.

Students’ reports of being bullied varied based on student and school characteristics in 2019. For instance, a higher percentage of female students than of male students reported being bullied at school during the school year (25 vs. 19 percent). The percentage of students who reported being bullied at school was higher for students of Two or more races (37 percent) than for White students (25 percent) and Black students (22 percent), which were in turn higher than the percentage of Asian students (13 percent). Higher percentages of 6th-, 7th-, and 8th-graders reported being bullied at school (ranging from 27 to 28 percent), compared with 9th-, 10th-, and 12th-graders (ranging from 16 to 19 percent). A higher percentage of students enrolled in schools in rural areas (28 percent) than in schools in other locales (ranging from 21 to 22 percent) reported being bullied at school.

Figure 1. Percentage of students ages 12–18 who reported being bullied at school during the school year, by selected student and school characteristics: 2019

¹ Total includes race categories not separately shown.
² Race categories exclude persons of Hispanic ethnicity. Data for Pacific Islander and American Indian/Alaska Native students did not meet reporting standards in 2019; therefore, data for these two groups are not shown.
³ Excludes students with missing information about the school characteristic.
NOTE: “At school” includes in the school building, on school property, on a school bus, and going to and from school. Although rounded numbers are displayed, the figures are based on unrounded data.
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, School Crime Supplement (SCS) to the National Crime Victimization Survey, 2019. See Digest of Education Statistics 2020, table 230.40.

Not all students chose to report the bullying to adults at school. Among students ages 12–18 who reported being bullied at school during the school year in 2019, about 46 percent reported notifying an adult at school about the incident. This percentage was higher for Black students than for White students (61 vs. 47 percent), and both percentages were higher than the percentage for Hispanic students (35 percent).

For more details on these data, see the web tables from “Student Reports of Bullying: Results from the 2019 School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey.” For additional information on this topic, see the Condition of Education indicator Bullying at School and Electronic Bullying. For indicators on other topics related to school crime and safety, select “School Crime and Safety” on the Explore by Indicator Topics page.

By Ke Wang, AIR

NCES is excited to announce the release of a resource hub that focuses on data by geographic locale—Education Across America: Cities, Suburbs, Towns, and Rural Areas—using a three-phased approach. Released today, Phase I of this new resource hub involves the consolidation of locale-focused data across NCES surveys and programs and makes updates to the latest data available. The result of this work is 140 tables with data disaggregated by all four locales (i.e., cities, suburbs, towns, and rural areas). These tables cover a wide range of topics grouped into broad themes: family characteristics, educational experiences, school resources and staffing, and educational outcomes. Phases II and III will focus on rural areas and involve summarizing findings in text.

To make these data more relevant and useful, NCES adopted a pyramid approach¹ to attend to various user segments with tiered products (exhibit 1). Source tables containing data disaggregated by locale form the base of the pyramid. These tables, which contain the most detailed statistical information about education in each locale, target data-savvy users such as researchers.

Exhibit 1. Tiered Approach to Products in Education Across America Resource Hub