About

Mara Casey Tieken’s research focuses on racial and educational equity in rural schools and communities. Her book Why Rural Schools Matter (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), an ethnographic study of two rural Arkansas communities, examines how rural schools create community and shape the racial landscapes of these towns. She has a second book, Educated Out: How Rural Students Navigate Elite Colleges and What it Costs Them (University of Chicago Press), that will be released in spring of 2025; it focuses on the college experiences of rural, first-generation students. She is currently working on a project, funded by the Spencer Foundation and the Reed Foundation, that examines the impacts of school closure on rural Black communities, and she has designed a website with tools for communities threatened with school closure. Tieken also writes about rural demographics, race and rural politics, and community organizing for education reform (see her chapter on Southern Echo in A Match on Dry Grass: Community Organizing as a Catalyst for School Reform. Her work has been published in Review of Educational Research, Harvard Educational Review, American Educational Research Journal, Peabody Journal of Education, and Sociological Focus. She is also an associate editor of the Journal of Research in Rural Education.

Tieken was the 2016 recipient of the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement for Early Career Faculty and the 2024 recipient of Bates’s Kroepsch Award for excellence in teaching. Before receiving her doctorate in education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, she taught third grade and adult basic education in rural Tennessee.