Coleman’s Report in China: Understanding the Urban-rural Gap in Academic Achievement and Its Generating Mechanisms

• In Event: 2484 - Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 06. Education in Asia

Abstract

The Coleman report is a seminal study of the impacts of policy disparities, particularly school resources and racial segregation, on the racial gaps in the academic achievement of primary and secondary school students in the United States. Similarly, in China, the hukou system also imposes policy disparities that have resulted in the persistent achievement disadvantage of students with rural hukou. This study applies Coleman’s main analysis to examining the urban-rural gap in middle school students’ standardized achievement test score in China. Based on the China Educational Panel Survey (CEPS 2013-14) and structural equation modeling (SEM), the study finds that rural students are at a disadvantage and the urban-rural gap can be totally explained by family socioeconomic status (SES). Specifically, students with rural hukou even score slightly higher than urban students with comparable SES. Same as the main conclusion in Coleman’s report, family SES rather than policy disparities account for the achievement gap. However, SES can completely account for the hukou gap in China whereas SES cannot fully account for the racial gap in the U.S. A series of robustness tests further strengthen the main conclusion by addressing the possibility of the heterogeneous mechanisms within urban and urban groups and potential bias resulting from model misspecification, measurement errors, and the imputation of missing values. Further decomposition of the SES effect in explaining hukou gap not only verifies the applicability of cultural capital and oppositional culture thesis in China but also reinforces the validity of the main conclusion by demonstrating that the SES effect is due to observable social mechanisms, among which intra-family processes play the dominant role.

Authors

• Yutong Hu, Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Tony Tam, Chinese University of Hong Kong