From Rural Schools to City Factories: Assessing the Quality of Chinese Rural Schools

Eric A. Hanushek (), Le Kang (), Xueying Li () and Lei Zhang ()
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Eric A. Hanushek: Stanford University
Le Kang: Nanjing University
Xueying Li: Nanjing University of Finance and Economics
Lei Zhang: Zhejiang University

No 18030, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The changing pattern of quality in China’s rural schools across time and province is extracted from the differential labor market earnings of rural migrant workers. Variations in rates of return to years of schooling across migrant workers working in the same urban labor market but having different sites of basic education provide for direct estimation of provincial school quality. Corroborating this approach, these school quality estimates prove to be highly correlated with provincial cognitive skill test scores for the same demographic group. Returns to quality increase with economic development level of destination cities. Importantly, quality appears higher and provincial variation appears lower for younger cohorts, indicating at least partial effectiveness of more recent policies aimed at improving rural school quality across provinces. Surprisingly, however, provincial variations in quality are uncorrelated with teacher-student ratio or per student spending.

Keywords: migration; school quality; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I25 J6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-07
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