Mara Casey Tieken

Mara Casey Tieken is a college professor, a researcher, a former rural K-12 teacher, and a mother. As a teacher in rural Tennessee, she learned how important rural schools are to the communities they serve--yet how overlooked they are in policy and practice. She became a researcher to help fill that gap.

Currently, Mara lives and works in Maine. She's a faculty member at Bates College, and her research focuses on educational equity for rural students and communities, including rural college access, rural school closure, and rural racial justice.

She is the author of Educated out: How rural students navigate elite colleges—and what it costs them (University of Chicago Press, 2025), which was a 2025 American Educational Studies Association Critics’ Choice Book Award winner and a Silver Winner of the 2026 Nautilus Book Awards. Through the stories of nine rural first-generation students attending an elite liberal arts college, it shows how geography shapes college opportunity, from admission to post-graduation options.

Her 2014 book Why rural schools matter (University of North Carolina Press) is an ethnographic study examining how rural schools define and sustain their surrounding communities.

She is currently working on a multi-year, grant-funded project that documents, examines, and communicates the impacts of school closures on rural Black communities in the Arkansas Delta. She is also involved in the work of the National Rural Higher Education Research Center; she is co-Principal Investigator on a study of rural-serving college access organizations. Her work has been published in Review of Educational Research, Rural Sociology, Harvard Educational Review, American Educational Research Journal, Peabody Journal of Education, and Sociological Focus, and she is an associate editor of the Journal of Research in Rural Education. Her op-eds have appeared in The Washington Post, Washington Monthly, Inside Higher Ed, and The Hechinger Report, as well as a wide variety of local venues.

Mara is the 2024 recipient of the Bates’s Kroepsch Award, which acknowledges excellence in teaching and the 2016 recipient of the Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement for Early Career Faculty. She designed and maintains a web-based toolkit for rural communities fighting school closure. In 2011, she received her Doctorate of Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.