City mouse, country mouse

Secretary Duncan is out visiting some not-so-like-Chicago parts of our great big country. Yesterday, he spoke in Hamlet, North Carolina, with a population of 6,000 or so. EdWeek's Politics K-12 got some of why location matters:

School leaders I spoke with from Richmond County Schools, in Hamlet, talked about the difficulty in getting young promising leaders to move to, and stay in, such rural, out-the-way places. (There isn't even a movie theater in Hamlet, for example.)
And another hot-button education reform issue that Duncan has championed—charter schools—also wouldn't likely flourish, either, in somewhat remote places where there isn't a big concentration of students, rural educators say. (No one asked about charter schools during yesterday's town hall; however, one man did ask about vouchers—to which Duncan talked up charter schools instead.)

Now, if we can only get him to visit Jones Fork....