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"About the only thing I agree with this woman about is the quality of education in these areas."

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and postulate that you haven't actually been to all that many of "these areas". Not all small towns are Appalachia, and there are alot of places in Appalachia that have cleaned up their act significantly in the last 30 years or so.
I grew up in a town of 1,000 people in a very poor and rural county in Colorado. The graduates our HS turned out were some of the finest in the state at a time when Colorado was regularly ranked top-5 in the country for K-12 education.

Part of it was the way the district was set up. Rather than each town having its own little parochial high-school, the towns in about half the county decided to pool resources and send all the kids to one school. It was still a 'small' school by most standards, but that gave them the budget to do some things that normally can't be done in small town schools. We also had a very active and involved PTA basically calling the shots for the district rather than some disinterested bureaucrats and making sure the budget got spent in the classrooms where it belongs.

As a result, we had PhD's teaching our math and science courses, and one of the better HS computer labs in the state for the time. The subject material and expectations in our normal math/science courses were roughly the same level as AP courses in most Denver schools. Our knowledge bowl team made it to the state competition twice - a big accomplishment considering KB was not segregated by school size so we were competing against schools with 4-10 times as many enrolled students. My graduating class of 100 includes high-level execs at big name tech companies and defense contractors, as well as 2 service academy appointees.

We also had many like the people you described in some respects. I had 3-4 friends who had kids on the way when they graduated HS. They all stayed married to the same women at least until the kids graduated, and were/are generally stable, productive (and happy) tax-paying members of society - which is quite a bit more than I can say for most of the feral youth in the inner-cities.

The meth problem you speak of has indeed crept into my hometown as well as many other rural areas. The last 25 years have not been kind to small town America. Attitudes like that of the lezbot in the article and yours along with pretty much zero economic opportunity have led to widespread problems with self-esteem and hard drug use. Despite all that, there are still plenty of good talented hard-working kids graduating from the schools, but most of them have to leave their families, friends, and homes behind if they want even a small shot at ever putting their talents to use and making a decent living. There's no opportunity there for them - unless you want to count being a lower-cost alternative to already low-paid call center workers in the city. Corporate America doesn't think the math adds up to invest, and the gov't has laregely turned their back on rural USA for partisan political reasons.

Also - getting decent talent into call centers isn't strictly a rural problem. Call centers attract lowest-common-denominator employees because they're uniformly lousy places to work. I had the misfortune of working in several of them after I runn-oft to the city, and the average length of employment for people in them was under 6 mos. The pay and working conditions were atrocious in all of them, and they eventually run themselves through the people willing to actually work there no matter how large the city/town. So your opinion of the average rural worker is probably clouded by the fact that the ones with the traits you're looking for already either had stable jobs or left for the city, and weren't in the 'available' pool for call-center employement.

I ran a small call center myself for awhile. I had no illusions about the quality of people I was going to attract with what the company could afford to pay. I adjusted my management practices accordingly, and was able to get passable results out of them. A poor carpenter blames his tools for shoddy work - no different than results of poor/lazy management practices are often blamed on employees.