Are there regional issues in education?

Last week, I gave a talk titled “Data Management Tips for Educators” at the 2025 MERC Summit. For those who don’t live in the Richmond metropolitan area – or for those who do but don’t know about MERC – MERC is the Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium. It’s a partnership between VCU’s School of Education and several surrounding school districts, including Chesterfield County Public Schools (CCPS), where I work.

I won’t restate MERC’s mission, principles, and goals, but one of MERC’s primary functions is to conduct research that benefits its members. And recall that MERC’s members are VCU and the surrounding school districts. This got me thinking about to what extent there are distinct regional issues in education, where “regional” refers to a cluster of school districts/counties within a given state. An relevant example here would be the Richmond metropolitan region.

Disclaimer: I like MERC a lot. They produce research that’s both academically rigorous and practically useful. This post isn’t meant to criticize MERC in any way, but rather to explore the provenance of the types of issues we often face in education. MERC’s position as a regional research-practice partnership is merely what got me thinking about the nature of these issues.

To start, it’s probably worth unpacking what I mean by “issues.” I suppose “issues” can manifest in two different ways – as causes or as effects. Or, rather, they manifest as a cause and effect relationship, but depending on the issue, we might start with the cause or the effect. For example – one “issue” plaguing education right now (and since COVID) is chronic absenteeism. In this case, we’re starting with the effect, and then the whole research endeavor is figuring out what factors are causing chronic absenteeism, because once we understand these causes better, we can start to address the issue. We start with the effect and work backwards.

Inversely, we might also say some new piece of legislation is an “issue.” In Virginia, the Virginia Literacy Act (VLA) is a ~one-year-old law that introduced a slew of new requirements that schools and school divisions had to implement, in the hopes that these requirements would improve literacy outcomes for students. If we think of the VLA as an “issue,” then we probably adopt the framing where the VLA is a cause, and we’re interested in understanding its effects (on students, teachers, families, etc.). We start with the causes and work forwards.

To get back to the question at hand, though, are there any causes, effects, or cause/effect relationships that are uniquely regional?

Let’s start by considering policies. Here, the answer is obviously no, at least in Virginia. The policies that dictate what a given school division, school, teacher, student, or family must do come from either 1) the federal government, 2) the state, 4) the school division, or 4) the county/city, and it’s worth noting that in Virginia there’s nearly a one-to-one correspondence between school divisions and counties/cities. State law and Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) regulations will affect everyone throughout the state, and school division policies will affect only that given school division. There’s not any regional political entity that’s situated between school divisions/counties and the state that can adopt regulations that schools must adhere to.

What about sociocultural or socioeconomic issues? Are any of these uniquely regional? Well, maybe?

On the one hand, as our worlds become increasingly digitized and interconnected, geographical location seems less important. To use a non-education example – it’s incredibly easy now to play video games online with people from all over the world, whereas 30 years ago, if I wanted to play video games with my friends, we all had to bike over to someone’s house and hope that person’s parents said it was ok for us all to come inside and yell at the TV and eat their snacks. And it feels like many of the most prominent sociocultural “issues” are related to this digitization. There’s a reason why Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation was so popular last year!  I assume that the effects of digitization are largely the same, regardless of what region people live in. Although I could be wrong!

On the other hand! There are also a handful of prominent phenomena that do seem broadly regional. For example, rural depopulation feels like a distinctly regional issue, particularly for a state like Virginia, which comprises a handful of dense urban/suburban areas (Richmond, the Virginia Beach/757 area, and the gridlocked nightmare that is Northern Virginia) as well as plenty of rural regions. Likewise, deindustrialization could also be a broadly regional issue. 

Now, whether these are “education” issues is maybe up for debate. They are broad social and economic issues that impact the educational system, and educational researchers and practitioners are likely interested in their effects on students and schools…but they aren’t confined to education in the same way that, say, the Virginia Literacy Act is.

The most obvious regional influences on education I can think of are professional organizations. Research-practice partnerships like MERC, or a regional nonprofit (like a United Way), or even a prominent university that produces many of the teachers in a region seem like the most common entities that have some sort of localized effects that cross school division boundaries. An example here might be RTR Teacher Residency, a teacher development program based out of VCU’s Center for Teacher Leadership that partners with 23 school districts across Virginia (most of which I think are in the Richmond metro region).

So maybe the answer to this question, like so many other questions, is “it depends.” There don’t seem to be that many uniquely educational regional problems, but there are probably some, and there are certainly lots of regional organizations to support education and educators. It’s also very possible I missed something very obvious!

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