Separate and Unequal: Hukou-based School Segregation and Educational Inequality in Urban China

• In Event: 435 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. School Context: Composition, Disruptions and Discipline

Abstract

Using a school-based national survey on junior high school students in China, this paper studies the effects of hukou-based school segregation on students’ academic achievement. Two dimensions of segregation----unevenness and exposure----are examined separately. Two major findings emerge from our analysis. First, although migrant children perform significantly worse in general, in highly segregated regions, the achievement gap between migrant and local children is substantially enlarged due to the uneven distribution of migrants into low quality schools. Second, school fixed-effect models and IV estimations further suggest that high level of migrant exposure has an adverse effect on students’ academic achievement, which also contributes to migrants’ underachievement. Findings in this paper call for new research and new policies to address educational inequalities result from hukou-based school segregation in China.

Authors

• Duoduo Xu, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

• Xiaogang Wu, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology