Governmental sources sometimes provide enough money to discourage people from working at traditional occupations but not enough to lift them from poverty. There is a lot of conflict for kids, being pressed to do well in school on one hand and families who don't want them to go because they want them to stay in the village. It's hard to straddle two worlds. If they complain, you have to leave. If you want to stay, you lower your standards.
Observers agree that the quality of rural schools varies enormously, often from year to year.
Rural schools suffer from significant teacher turnover and thus have inconsistent policies and curricula. In a school with two or three teachers, if they are imaginative, they can provide a fine education. As for the test scores, educators note that it is hard to do well on standardized tests written for the American mainstream when you have never seen a street light, a fire hydrant, or an elevator. Still, the state's educators say, the scores are improving. When I got here in the early 1970s, kids were scoring at the first percentile in everything.