In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the People's Republic of China experienced dramatic growth and expansion that altered the educational environment of children. Rapid economic development increased prosperity and educational opportunities for children expanded in a wealthier society. Yet, a by-product of rising wealth was rising inequality. While the children of the emerging urban middle and elite classes enjoyed new prosperity, the children of hte persistently poor in rural communities continued to experience challenges such as food insecurity, illness, hardships of family separation, and migrant life on the margins of the cities. This time period saw a large resource gap emerge between the home conditions of poor rural children compared with those of their wealthier urban counterparts. This book highlights the complexities China has experienced in seeking to extend full educational access to rural children- including rural- to- urban migrant and ethnic minority children-during a momentous period in China. Chapters delve into the experiences, perceptions, strategies, and diffi culties of rural- origin children and their families in the school system, and lay bare the challenges of policy initiatives designed to support rural education. We hope the experiences detailed here will be of interest to students and scholars of rural educational policy and practice in China and worldwide.

Civic leaders around the globe now press educators to raise the performance of students and schools. Backed by a colorful array of odd bedfellows - from corporate interests to advocates for the poor - politicians seek to narrow the aims of learning, advance routine curricular packages, and tightly align standardized tests. Why are governments pushing to centrally regulate teaching and learning at this historical moment? Do these accountability mechanisms succeed in boosting student achievement? How are teachers responding to top-down rules, incentives, and the recasting of what knowledge counts inside school? These are the hotly contested ideological and empirical questions asked by this volume's contributors, a rich mix of sociologists, applied anthropologists, and education researchers. As public schools struggle to regain public confidence, political actors eagerly try to look strong and forceful. But do centralized accountability policies lift the motivation of teachers and students? Or, is this reform strategy a brilliant political remedy - but one that makes little difference inside the classroom.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the People's Republic of China experienced dramatic growth and expansion that altered the educational environment of children. Rapid economic development increased prosperity and educational opportunities for children expanded in a wealthier society. Yet, a by-product of rising wealth was rising inequality. While the children of the emerging urban middle and elite classes enjoyed new prosperity, the children of hte persistently poor in rural communities continued to experience challenges such as food insecurity, illness, hardships of family separation, and migrant life on the margins of the cities. This time period saw a large resource gap emerge between the home conditions of poor rural children compared with those of their wealthier urban counterparts. This book highlights the complexities China has experienced in seeking to extend full educational access to rural children- including rural- to- urban migrant and ethnic minority children-during a momentous period in China. Chapters delve into the experiences, perceptions, strategies, and diffi culties of rural- origin children and their families in the school system, and lay bare the challenges of policy initiatives designed to support rural education. We hope the experiences detailed here will be of interest to students and scholars of rural educational policy and practice in China and worldwide.

In recent decades, sociological research has investigated the nature of the school institution and its uneven effects on the progress of families, societies, and the global community. Yet, relatively little comparative research on schooling has dealt in a serious way with links between schooling and the other major contexts of childhood: families and communities. This edition of Research in the Sociology of Education speaks to the diverse contexts in which children function around the world, and to how these contexts shape school experiences and outcomes. The editions authors are international and interdisciplinary. They offer a pastiche of perspectives on a single topic: how the non-school contexts of childhood interact with the school institution to advance modern and not-so-modern forms of virtue, merit, and attainment, in cultural context.
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*Offers qualitative and statistical portraits of children living in Asian and African countries
*Links educationalopportunities to the child's socialization
*Urges social scientists and policy makers to consider a child's surroundings when modeling the modern school system

In recent decades, globalization and regional integration have brought significant economic and demographic changes in East Asia, including rising economic inequality, growing population movements within and across borders, and the emergence or renewed geopolitical significance of cultural and linguistic minority populations. These trends have coincided with significant changes in family formation, dissolution, and structures. How have these changes played out in the diverse educational systems of East Asia? In what innovative ways are East Asian governments addressing the new demographic realities of their student populations? This volume offers a snapshot of key educational stratification issues in East Asian nations, and their evolution in conjunction with changing student populations. Scholars of Japan, China, and Korea in this volume address issues ranging from curricular adaptations to globalization, to persisting and new forms of educational stratification, to new multiculturalism in educational policy. In addition, authors consider the ways that migration is shaping education in the city-states of Hong Kong and Singapore. Collectively, the pieces in this volume represent a first attempt to investigate national responses to critical regional trends.

Most societies place great faith in the modern school's power to offer children a more prosperous future, from better jobs to wider social opportunities. In turn, political leaders around the world push to expand western forms of schooling, creating more slots for children, from preschool through university levels. Yet despite this remarkable institutional change, are societies becoming equitable, especially for those groups living on the margins of civil society? Why, in too many cases, has schooling failed to deliver on its promise of reducing economic and social disparities?
This volume addresses these questions, taking the reader into a variety of nations and cultural settings. With studies from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, the volume illuminates how schools can reduce or reinforce the layered stratification of society, even in nations with non-western traditions. The contributors, diverse in their own origins and viewpoints, advance our understanding of stratification by highlighting how a nation's history, particular institutions, and cultural context shape the school's efficiency as an agent of equity. The chapters move beyond individual conceptions of attainment and distinguish near-universal versus country-specific mechanisms that characterize the interplay between school expansion and inequality.
- Shows how schools can reduce or reinforce the layered stratification of society, even in nations with non-western traditions

Transformative market reforms in China since the late 1970s have improved living standards dramatically, but have also led to unprecedented economic inequality. During this period, China's educational system was restructured to support economic development, with educational reforms occurring at a startling pace. Today, the educational system has diversified in structure, finance, and content; it has become more market-oriented; and it is serving an increasingly diverse student population. These changes carry significant consequences for China's social mobility and inequality, and future economic prospects.
In Education and Reform in China, leading scholars in the fields of education, sociology, demography, and economics investigate the evolution of educational access and attainment, educational quality, and the economic consequences of being educated. Education and Reform in China shows that economic advancement is increasingly tied to education in China, even as educational services are increasingly marketized. The volume investigates the varying impact of change for different social, ethnic, economic and geographic groups. Offering interdisciplinary views on the changing role of education in Chinese society, and on China's educational achievements and policy challenges, this book will be an important resource for those interested in education, public policy, and development issues in China.

Transformative market reforms in China since the late 1970s have improved living standards dramatically, but have also led to unprecedented economic inequality. During this period, China's educational system was restructured to support economic development, with educational reforms occurring at a startling pace. Today, the educational system has diversified in structure, finance, and content; it has become more market-oriented; and it is serving an increasingly diverse student population. These changes carry significant consequences for China's social mobility and inequality, and future economic prospects.
In Education and Reform in China, leading scholars in the fields of education, sociology, demography, and economics investigate the evolution of educational access and attainment, educational quality, and the economic consequences of being educated. Education and Reform in China shows that economic advancement is increasingly tied to education in China, even as educational servicesare increasingly marketized. The volume investigates the varying impact of change for different social, ethnic, economic and geographic groups. Offering interdisciplinary views on the changing role of education in Chinese society, and on China's educational achievements and policy challenges, this book will be an important resource for those interested in education, public policy, and development issues in China.

The book examines the effects of education in creating global citizens who share a world culture. This occurs within an international system that still remains decentralized, composed of independent nation-states as major actors. Prof. Kamens argues that as globalization intensifies, this system of nation-states becomes more saturated and dense with structure. Intensified globalization has produced a world society, thanks to the spread of global capitalism, education, democracy and bureaucracy. The upshot is that world culture travels quickly and produces 'recipes' for the development of an 'imagined community' that has increasing commonalities across societies. The book examines the role of education in diffusing such attitudes and models, as global citizens confront national institutions.

This timely and important collection of original essays analyzes China s foremost social cleavage: the rural-urban gap. It is now clear that the Chinese communist revolution, though professing dedication to an egalitarian society, in practice created a rural order akin to serfdom, in which 80 percent of the population was effectively bound to the land. China is still struggling with that legacy. The reforms of 1978 changed basic aspects of economic and social life in China s villages and cities and altered the nature of the rural-urban relationship. But some important institutions and practices have changed only marginally or not at all, and China is still sharply divided into rural and urban castes with different rights and opportunities in life, resulting in growing social tensions.

The contributors, many of whom conducted extensive fieldwork, examine the historical background of rural-urban relations; the size and trend in the income gap between rural and urban residents in recent years; aspects of inequality apart from income (access to education and medical care, the digital divide, housing quality and location); experiences of discrimination, particularly among urban migrants; and conceptual and policy debates in China regarding the status and treatment of rural residents and urban migrants.