| Summary: | In the Icelandic educational debate, it is a discursive theme that students achieve less if they live in the part of the country defined by the educational authorities as rural, or outlying regions, compared to the capital area, defined as urban. For a long time, the educational authorities have presented the results of national examinations and the OECD PISA programme in such a way that rural versus urban residence and gender are key parameters for explaining learning outcomes. This has fuelled a national imagery (Roberts & Green, 2013) of a uniform, deprived, and powerless rural area, calling for corresponding inferences on education. Conversely, it has been known all along inside the educational establishment that diverse variables in students’ social background explain the difference to some extent and they have called for caution in inferring about this divergence. The research question of this article is whether there is a rural-urban difference in learning outcomes between students living in rural and urban regions when the social status of students is accounted for. Research on rural-urban differences in learning outcomes varies in definitions of spatiality (residency) and measurements of student performance. The very definitions of rural and urban are debated, and the importance of precise definition is clear with regard to how research pictures the subject matter. The pragmatic, functionalistic and untheorized approach by the bureaucracy of educational authorities is, in this article, contrasted to theories on symbolic violence and cultural capital (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990), and theories on the production of oppressive social space (Lefebvre, 1991). The theme of social background of students for the purpose of explaining a ruralurban difference in education emerges in the research literature. Variables such as family position on the job market, parental education, immigrant status, and gender are widely used, often applying multivariate statistical methods. Some of the research finds that ...
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