It has been argued that cities are the future. In recent years, there has been an uptick in highly educated individuals moving from non-urban areas to America’s major cities. Scholarly, political, and social interest in theories about “brain drain” has infiltrated many interdisciplinary fields, analyzing why there seems to be an unspoken agreement among aspiring professionals that rural areas have no opportunity. As the U.S. and China begin competing for first place in what is appearing to become a bipolar international order and as the major cities in both these countries grow wealthier and more urbanized at breakneck speed, the question about what happens to rural areas is inevitably raised. In the contemporary context of increasingly urbanized international superpowers and a pandemic-shaken world, urban/rural educational inequity is becoming a concerning issue despite not receiving nearly enough attention from policymakers around the globe. In this piece, I aim to analyze the urban/rural educational inequities in China and the U.S. and explore whether or not Chinese and American educational policy with its current characteristics and limitations is the most effective solution for tightening the educational equity gap between urban and rural communities.
Since the Chinese market reforms began in the early eighties, China’s GPD has risen dramatically, making income inequality a major policy issue in addition to widening the equity gap between urban and rural students. Although China spends over ¥5.3 trillion ($837 billion) on education, the allocation of this money is inequitable. Cities with large populations like Beijing and Shanghai require more funding, but what does this mean for places like southwestern China’s Yunnan province, among other rural regions with widespread financial instability and suppressed financial mobility? Many would argue that the state of China’s education system is not poor, at least when compared to pre-market reform China. This line of reasoning can be supported by the data showing China’s adult literacy rate rising from 65% in the 1980s to 96% today. In fact, some policy progress has been made in recent years with China’s development of an economic modernization plan, signifying the country’s commitment to basic public education for all by 2035.
However, the problem with urban and rural educational inequity cannot entirely be solved by money. Income inequity between urban and rural provinces is inexplicably related to the problems faced by China’s rural schools. With financial mobility being near impossible in rural provinces, many parents migrate to China’s major cities for work, leaving behind a generation of children widely referred to by Asian studies and development scholars as the left-behind children. Many of these children, saddled with newfound household responsibilities instead of parental academic supervision, drop out of school after the compulsory nine years of public education. Thus, the “increasing intergenerational poverty trap” is strengthened. If China’s market reforms have only aided in widening the educational inequity gap, what kind of supplemental policy has the potential to achieve more equity for rural schools?
Tackling some of the core issues in which rural poverty is rooted is a good start. Beginning in 2011, China launched a nutrition improvement plan designed for compulsory education students living in crowded, poverty-stricken areas in rural China. With ¥52 billion being spent by the central government on nutritious meal subsidies for rural students and ¥100 billion being put toward the construction of rural school canteens, many would agree that educational equity progress is heading in the right direction. Data problematizes this assumption, showing that only an approximate quarter of the rural compulsory students enjoy this policy. This likely has to do with the government’s focus on compiling nutrition quizzes for rural students and advocating more strongly for the funding of nutrition training for teachers than the funding of rural jobs that keep students’ families from having to move to large cities in order to support their children. These strategies do not address integral educational inequity issues in China like the urban/rural college gap. Over 70 percent of students from China’s major cities attend higher educational institutions as opposed to under 5 percent of students from rural, lower-income areas. China’s GPD rise has caused these inequities to increase since China’s western rural regions are struggling to keep up with the increasingly rich and increasingly urbanized cities.
This same “wealth-inequity paradox” can be seen in the U.S. In fact, many of the challenges affecting rural education in China are shared by rural schools in the U.S. As major urban areas in the U.S. like New York and D.C. have become increasingly richer, while the poor are largely excluded from any kind of financial or social mobility, which can be brought about by access to quality education. Many of the inequities facing rural education in America can be linked back to institutional racism and segregated schools. Although rural Americans as a whole have gradually attained better education over the years, students of color have considerably lower rates of college enrollment and completion. Solutions are being proposed for tightening the equity gap between rural students of color and rural white students, such as Dr. Gerri Maxwell’s proposal of more after-school programs for rural students of color and putting more of an emphasis on social justice leadership in rural K-12 schools.
Researchers have also looked into the proposal of attracting and retaining faculty members of color as a way to provide rural students of color with mentorship, but this raises the question of whether after-school programs and mentorship are enough to achieve educational equity in a country scarcely instating any policies to address this issue. While China’s rural education policies have been arguably ineffective at producing any noticeable equity in its most poverty-stricken, rural regions and with the U.S. not fully addressing the unique needs of rural schools, education policy scholars are left with few answers as to how to achieve urban/rural educational equity without the funding and support of government policy. Scholars from both China and the U.S. have supported the idea of technology as a means to bring about meaningful and sustainable change to rural schools. However, only half of the rural children in China have the necessary undisrupted access to online classes, causing a serious increase in the Chinese education gap during the pandemic. This has much to do with the mere 56.2% of rural families who have internet access at home and the staggering 7.3% of students in Chinese villages who own a computer. This problem is shared by those in America, although not to the same extent, with 35% of rural students reporting that they often or sometimes have to do their homework on smartphones and 12% reporting that they often or sometimes have to rely on places with public Wi-Fi like fast-food restaurants to do their homework. This data problematizes the increasingly popular counter to educational policy effectiveness, which argues that technology’s effectiveness in addressing and combating educational inequity seriously outweighs policy’s effectiveness. If poor students in rural America and China are being excluded from the digital age, technology without efforts to make Wi-Fi more accessible is futile.
Reports from the Asian Institute of Research offer a holistic solution to the inherently multidimensional issue of education inequity in China. The report’s first countermeasure involves “vigorously develop[ing] the rural economy” as one of the preliminary steps in combating the rural education gap. Targeting alleviation of rural poverty is another goal of the Asian Institute of Research rather than specifically targeting schools with nutrition quizzes. An interesting point brought up in the report is the emphasis on improving the social support system of rural teachers and fostering a sense of belonging rather than nutrition training among other training efforts from the government. Many of these ideas are directly applicable to the rural education challenges going on in the U.S. Dr. Gerri Mitchell’s proposal of hiring more faculty members of color is immeasurably more achievable once these faculty members are given the social and professional support needed to enjoy a sustainable career in education as well as a sense of belonging, which is essential for teacher retention. The cyclical nature of rural poverty in the U.S. and China is driven by a myriad of causes, including institutional racism in the U.S., rural taxes in China, and the decline of industries that formerly sustained these regions in both countries. These driving forces prove that development policies would be much more effective in addressing the urban/rural educational inequity gap in the U.S. and China than educational policies alone.
These holistic, economy-focused policies will only work in accompaniment with government acknowledgment of the social determinants of learning. Similar to the social determinants of health, a prominent public health theory analyzing the ways in which one’s surroundings, identity, and lived experience contribute more significantly to their health than their individual choices, the theory of social determinants of education works to place more emphasis on the context of one’s surroundings, identity and lived experience over a school’s individual choices, a teacher’s individual choices, or a student’s individual choices. Specifically for a rural student, one’s social environment and community, economic stability, and physical environment and community are significant contributing factors toward their academic success. For a school, its physical environment and community are overlooked aspects of its success. Rundown schools in communities with failing job markets and economic instability are widespread in rural America and China. They cannot be fixed by educational policies alone but rather policies that address the reasons why these schools and communities are struggling in the first place. Overall, the work to end rural educational inequity in China and America begins with poverty-reduction policies.