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Session Submission Summary

Education implications of internal migration: a global perspective and lessons from the Chinese case

Thu, April 18, 8:00 to 9:30am, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Bay (Level 1), Bayview B

Group Submission Type: Refereed Round-Table Session

Proposal

Buried under the headline emphasis on refugees, climate and conflict displacement, and international migration, internal migration forms the bulk of migratory activity around the world. Migrations for employment opportunities or family ties are common historical processes that accompany industrialisation and urbanisation within countries. Rural to urban migration is a current dominant demographic trend in many low and lower middle-income countries, most evident in the Chinese experience. Relatedly, rural populations are projected to continue declining worldwide, except in sub-Saharan Africa. Climate change increasingly plays a role in motivating internal migration, for instance due to lower agricultural production in rural areas.
Census based analysis estimate that 763 million internal migrants lived outside their region of birth in 2005, more than three times the number of international migrants. Despite the scale of the phenomenon, internal migration issues receive limited political and research emphasis. At the global level, major data and definitional challenges constrain the quantification of internal migration or cross-country comparability. The lack of a unified source of information and definitional challenges requires triangulating insights from different datasets to compile a strong narrative around the nature and extent of internal migration and education linkages.
The three presentations in this panel aim to focus the attention on education of internal migrants, as it is one of the core challenges for the sustainable development objective of leaving no one behind.
The first presentation, ‘Education and Internal Migration: Select Findings from the Global Research Base, Data and Policy implications’ focuses on a chapter of the Global Education Monitoring Report which includes a global synthesis of the evidence base and new census and case study based analysis. The existing evidence base on education system issues, such as the education situation of children left behind, teacher attitudes towards migrant students, policy efforts such as boarding schools – are dominated by the analysis on China. While the Chinese case represents the most dramatic modern challenge of internal migration, challenges of administrative and legal constraints, economic constraints, and teacher qualifications, and policy solutions dealing with migration are present and growing in many of the poorest countries of the world, especially in Africa and Asia. The lessons from the Chinese case should be used to reflect on any new research and policy efforts on internal migration around the world.
The other two presentations analyze two key issues of internal migration, where quantitative analysis is possible due to extensive data in China. The second presentation, ‘Testing the effect pathways of parental absence on girl and boy children’ analyses the long-term educational outcomes of children of labor migrant fathers in Gansu, China. Using data from the 2000 and 2015 rounds of the Gansu Survey of Families and Children, it identifies the mechanisms linking father absence to long-term educational outcomes. The core outcome is that father-absent children have worse educational attainment, and worse physical and behavioral problems, which is offset about a third by the positive economic effects of the father absence. The remittances from father-absent households are especially beneficial for girls’ educational attainment and father absence affects poor boys the most.
The final paper, ‘Who teaches and how do they view different groups of students and parents? The case of China’ analyzes the teacher qualification and treatment differences between different groups of students and parents. The paper uses a nationally representative study of adolescents and a large-scale study of migrant and urban first-graders in Shanghai to analyze the differences in teacher qualifications and perspectives of different groups of students and related parents. It finds limited differences between urban and rural youth in terms of the qualifications of the teachers they experience in recent years, but worse perceptions of the migrant, left-behind and rural youth compared to urban youth. Education policy and teacher education programs can better train future teachers to work with China’s diverse student population to address biases that can perpetuate rather than eliminate existing inequalities.

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