First, a caveat is in order. Rural America is many realities. Rural New England differs geographically, climatically, and culturally from the rural areas of the Midwest, the High Plains, the Piedmont, the Deep South, and Pacific Northwest to say nothing of rural Puerto Rico, Hawaii or Alaska. Within these regions exists a marvelous diversity of cultural heritage, values, aspirations, and socio-political forms-all of which have implications for education as well as for social services in general. To overlook that diversity is to risk the fallacy of local generalizing in which we assume that all rural is like our rural. Although this paper focuses primarily upon rural/nonrural distinctions, it is equally important to explore systematically the differences among the many realities that are rural in the United States.