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1. Introduction
Rural education is known to play a key role in economic development. This was perhaps most clearly documented by Schultz (1960), who showed the role that rural education plays in the promotion of agriculture, a key growth sector. Rural education is also important for enhancing the productivity of manufacturing and other important growth sectors (Brown and Park, 2002). High human capital is a key feature separating countries that successfully transition from middle-income to high-income (Khor et al., 2016). In countries with a large rural population, this means that rural education is important for sustaining growth.
Rural education is especially important in countries like China, where birth rates have historically been much higher in rural areas relative to urban areas (Muyeed, 1982; World Bank, 2005). As nearly two-thirds of China’s population still has a rural residency permit (hukou) and nearly half still lives in rural areas, a large share of China’s population continues to be educated in rural areas (Chinese National Statistical Bureau, 2005). If one is to understand China’s development path over the past 40 years, it is crucial that the policies, trends, and successes of rural education are documented and understood.
In this paper, we do two things. In the first part, we describe China’s past successes in rural education, focusing on all three of the pre-college rural schooling systems: preschool, compulsory education (primary and junior high school), and high school. In examining each of these sub-systems, we both review the main policy efforts during the different decades of reform, and examine trends. To the extent possible, we examine both inputs (number of schools and teachers) and accomplishments (student enrollment and graduation rates). We end with a short discussion of fiscal expenditure over time, since this is an important policy tool favored by the central government. This section draws both upon the literature, for a discussion of policy efforts, and upon secondary data, for the analysis of educational trends.
In the second part of our paper, we highlight some of the challenges that still remain in the push to improve rural education. The discussion in this second section is admittedly incomplete. We focus on two main challenges: first, rural primary schools’ nagging health, crisis; and second, sub-optimal nutrition and parenting stimulation...