Internal Migration Systems, Local Policy Variations, and Rural Migrant Students in China's Compulsory Education

• In Event: 61.055 - Inequality in Educational Opportunities: Evidence From China

Abstract

China has undergone the largest single migration in the world's history, having transferred 221 million people to urban areas, accounting for 16.5% of China’s total population (Census 2010). The number of migrant children aged 0-17 reached 36 million (Duan et al. 2013). This trend has witnessed both large influxes of children brought along by their parents to attend urban schools and a large proportion of student body in rural schools left behind by their parents. How children of rural migrants fare has received wide media coverage. Yet the growing empirical literature has a serious limitation – most research studies left-behind and brought-along children separately – thereby failing to offer a complete picture of emerging forms of educational inequality.

To fill in this gap, our paper develops a framework that reformulates theories on international migration systems (Massey et al., 1998) to fit China’s rural-urban migration and theories on maximally maintained inequality, MMI, (Raftery and Hout, 1993) and effectively maintained inequality, EMI, (Lucas, 2001) to fit China’s problem in educating children of rural migrants. This reformulation seeks to explain the degree to which access to learning opportunities is limited for children from rural migrant families. Our unique theoretical thrust is to relate the origin-destination rural-urban migration systems with the variations in local policies pertaining to the education of rural migrant children. We argue that this linkage is key to a better understanding of the institutional sources of the distribution of educational inequality in the midst of the population process of large-scale rural-urban migration.
The paper’s objective is three-fold. First, we identify rural-to-urban migration systems initiated by migration gravity forces and maintained by migrant networks and describe the distribution of brought-along vs. left-behind children of rural migrants. Second, we analyze the evolution of provincial policies pertaining to the education of rural migrant children within the identified migration systems. Third, we examine the intended and unintended consequences of the local policy variations, conditional on migration systems, for differential access to learning opportunities and educational outcomes.

We will exploit the newly available data from the China Education Panel Survey, Junior-High Cohorts (CEPS:JH), of which the lead author is a co-principal investigator. The CEPS:JH selects a school-based, nationally representative sample of approximately 22,000 students in 448 classrooms of 112 schools. The CEPS:JH administers five different questionnaires to (1) the sample 7th and 9th graders, (2) their parents, (3) their homeroom teachers, (4) their main subject teachers, and (5) their principals, providing rich data on student backgrounds and school processes. This study will use data from the baseline survey, which will be available by the end of July 2014. We will also utilize the 2010 China Census data to measure rural migration and hukou policy stringency. Provincial education policies will be collected from official sources. The paper will apply latent class analysis to model how multiple categories of learning opportunities are sorted by policy variations conditional on migration systems and 2SLS to model educational outcomes with an instrumental variable approach to handle the endogeneity of learning opportunities.

Authors

• Lingxin Hao, Johns Hopkins University

• Xian Zhang, Renmin University of China