Poor University Access of Rural Students in China: A Review on Rural Parents’ Involvement

• In Event: Creating an (un)equal playing field: parenting practices and educational strategies among China’s emerging middle- and affluent classes

Proposal

In contemporary China, receiving university education remains the essential channel for rural people to upgrade their life. As higher education becomes popularized in China, growing numbers of rural youths have been admitted to universities. Still, research indicates that rural youths continue to lag behind their urban counterparts in terms of their opportunities to enter universities, particularly prestigious ones (Liang & Li, 2012; Liu, Wang, & Yang, 2012). Some studies point out that economic poverty is not the only obstacle that prevents rural students from entering university (Hannum, An, & Cherng, 2011; C. Li, 2010). Some studies suggest that rural parents depreciate school education (T. Li & Wu, 2015) or they hold low expectations on their children’s education (Xie, 2017).
In the mainstream discourse, parent-school cooperation is increasingly perceived to be essential for children to achieve school success (Epstein, 2011; Lareau, 2011). It seems convenient to argue, from a social capital perspective, that rural students frequently fail at school because their parents do not support state schooling at all, or they do not support their children’s education in effective ways (Xie, 2016; Xie & Postiglione, 2016). Inspired by Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1979), this paper explores how rural parents cannot be excessively blamed for having contributed to rural students’ poor university access. In specific, this research examines how rural parents, stuck at the bottom of the social hierarchy, actually support their children to do well at school, and how they fail to fulfill the ideal expectation of parental involvement by school teachers.
In this paper, cultural capital is operationalized as: 1) certain types of parental involvement strategies which teachers considered to be effective to improve students’ academic attainments; 2) parental education level, the major precondition for parents to employ these effective parent involvement strategies (Bourdieu, 1977, 1997). Highlighting the precondition for parent-school cooperation, this paper aims to specify: 1) rural parents, due to their minimum education, are unable to meet the expectations by school teachers; 2) schools, a liberating force for rural people, have to be realistic about their expectations on rural parents. This paper challenges the ideal portrait of parental-school cooperation, which prevails in the educational reforms of many developed and developing countries. This papers also illustrates how cultural capital theory, initially developed from the French context, could be employed to investigate the educational disadvantages of lower-class teenagers in different countries.
Method and data
This paper resorts to a qualitative research approach. Two senior high schools, one in Dongxiang and the other in Labrang, were selected as the field sites for a study on rural students’ poor university access. Both Dongxiang and Labrang, located in Gansu Province, were continually poverty-stricken counties. Unable to sustain their livelihoods by means of agriculture and animal husbandry, adults in both counties had to seasonally migrate to urban centers and take up various menial jobs. In September 2014, a group of graduate students at Northwest Normal University were selected and trained to conduct surveys and semi-structured interviews at the field sites. The team conducted 18 interviews with final-year rural students and 8 interviews with teachers. Each interview lasted about an hour. Moreover, three focus-group interviews with final-year rural students were conducted. While interviews with teachers focused on their professional identify, teachers frequently complained that they were frustrated by rural parents who seemed reluctant to support state schooling. Unlike those teachers, rural students oftentimes shared stories how rural parents, eager to see their children to live a decent life in urban areas, desperately supported rural children’s education in various ways. This paper was thereby developed to investigate the contradictory accounts between school teachers and rural students and to illustrate how rural parents were actually unable to support their children’s education in effective ways. It is noted that these student interviewees were exceptionally high-achievers as the majority of their rural peers were already excluded from entering senior high schools. The parents of these students were probably more enthusiastic about supporting their children’s schooling than the bulk of rural parents. This paper discloses how rural parents are unable to meet the professional expectation of parental involvement, which contributes to rural teenagers’ poor university access.
Research findings
When talking about rural students’ low educational attainments, school teachers conveniently complained that rural parents did not support state schooling. They were probably correct when they specified that many rural parents in Dongxiang and Labrang were not keen on state schooling. However, the parents of rural students in this study actually made great efforts to support their children to achieve academic success. Provided that these students were already exceptionally admitted to senior secondary schools, their parents highly expected them to enter universities. Despite stuck in financial poverty, they were ready to cover the expenses related to their children’s schooling. They usually prevented their children from watching TV and asked their children to do homework when their children returned from school. Like the bulk of parents in rural China, these parents came to school only if the school held a meeting with parents. However, school teachers, as well-educated professionals, usually depreciate these types of practices employed by rural parents. Due to recent reforms on school curriculum and university entrance examination, all parents were expected to provide their children with diverse learning opportunities such as selective readings, choice entertainments and tour trips. These types of practices generally fit in well with the cultural tastes of the well-educated parents. Unfortunately, rural parents were disinclined and unable to mobilize these types of practices as most of them were merely graduates of junior high schools or primary schools.
Implications
This paper suggests that school teachers could improve rural teenagers’ university access if they, instead of demanding too much from rural parents, could guide rural students to learn from selective readings, choice entertainments and tour trips.

Authors

• Xiaoliang Li, Northwest Normal University, China

• Xie Ailei, University of Hong Kong