From education segregation to inclusion: The policy ramifications on Chinese internal migrant children

Introduction

In the context of the Chinese government’s recent policy reforms on the admission of migrant children into integrated public schools, China has witnessed the flow of many millions of people who have migrated from rural to urban areas. In the latest ‘National New-type Urbanization Plan (2014–2020)’ issued by the Central Committee and the State Council, China’s aim is to ensure that 60% of its people will be living in urban cities by 2020. Statistically, the ramifications of this ongoing migration mean that the governmental initiative for this massive urbanization movement is responsible for accommodating approximately 200 million rural people into the already swollen cities of China. The planning for this monumental migration requires inordinate funding and effective distribution programs for migrant housing needs, medical care, employment, and especially education (Wang and Wan, 2014). One dimension of the problems arising for migrant children involves their having to enter and adjust to unfamiliar societal and school cultures. For migrant children, schools figure prominently as one of the most important institutional environments, affording migrant students an often-challenging experience of urban values, norms, academic rules, and routines (Hamilton, 2013). Appreciation of this point has encouraged the authors to pay particular attention to the issue of migrant student adaptability, their adjustment to new directions in learning, and their capacity to form stable friendships. Learning to interact productively with other migrant children of different customs from different locations in China can be very demanding. This being so, the analysis of the experiences of rural–urban migrant children, along with comparative assessments of their performance outcomes, should be regarded as a research program of national importance. As Madeleine Arnot et al. (2013: 567) stated, ‘Rethinking the role of education in relation to new movements, flows and networks, and new forms of diversity and identity has become central to educational discourse, in both policy and research’.

Achieving our research goals

To achieve our goals, we have divided the paper into four sections. The first section discusses the background of global issues of relevance to the current Chinese governmental policy on the urbanization of internal migrant children. The second section examines the educational experiences of migrant children in the Chinese urban context, including the origin of its social system and the evolution of school segregation policy reform. The third section reviews the literature on the impact of policy reform pertinent to children’s educational outcomes and social assimilation. We then move to the fourth section, in which we discuss the policy transitions from segregation to inclusion, and discuss the challenges in the provision of education for migrant children. We shall endeavor to establish that the elaboration of the major issues in each of these four sections of our paper comprises a cumulative argument of relevance and illumination. Moreover, it is expected that the combinatory results presented in this paper could be extrapolated to help both developing and other developed countries to ascertain a deeper and clearer understanding of the virtues and corresponding liabilities of China’s current policy on the inclusion of migrant children into urban public schools. With the information available from our investigation, the Chinese government and its policy makers will be much better informed, and thereby well-placed to anticipate the strengths and weaknesses in the promotion of inclusive education programs for migrant children.

International policies regarding inclusive education for migrant children transiting from rural to urban schools

Many developed and developing countries have witnessed a significant increase in population migrations where people from rural areas have, in the hope of a better life for their children and themselves, transited to urban areas to secure better employment, housing, education, and social welfare. Over the last century, developed countries such as the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, and most European countries have recognized that a greater proportion of people are now living in large cities, while a smaller percentage of the population presently reside in rural areas. During the 21st century, developing countries such as China, Brazil, Indonesia, and India have similarly been undergoing a radical shift in the organization of their social structures, especially in the context of migrant education.

Most developed countries (e.g. the US, Canada, and Australia) have implemented a multicultural policy on the movement of migrant children from rural to urban areas. This trend has positively motivated the implementation of educational policies which integrate migrant children with local non-migrant children, whereas other countries have until recently shown a negative attitude towards migrant children’s education in urban areas (e.g. China and India). It is now more evident that educational policies for internal migration have changed considerably during different stages of the urbanization process.

The first half of last century witnessed a segregation policy amongst migrant populations in the USA and European countries. During this period, urban education for migrant children has thus been plagued by strong patterns of social prejudice and segregation. This propensity has led to a strategy of grouping and sequestering people with low income, less education, and migrant background together in certain areas (Ohrn, 2012). Segregation by race, income, and ethnicity have long threatened the quality of schools and their neighborhoods, while the persistent presence of inequality has adversely affected the quality of their health insurance, housing, jobs, and child care (Farnen, 2007).

During the late 20th century, the governments of a number of developed countries have helped to publicize the segregation inequities inflicted upon migrant children. This has afforded migrant parents an opportunity to make better educational choices for their children, including migrant children, by facilitating the availability of an ongoing evaluation of the quality of excellence exhibited by different schools. In other words, parents whose children would otherwise be educationally disadvantaged can thus utilize this information to secure them an opportunity to gain access into better schools (Farnen, 2007). Admission to any urban public school has in itself been regarded by many migrant parents as an improvement in the quality of their children’s education. It is believed that quality education has to do primarily with the provision of quality school environments which are well-equipped with teaching necessities, including well-stocked libraries, up-to-date gym equipment, and even healthy food cafeterias. It is taken for granted that urban public schools will be staffed with good equipment and well-trained teachers, though that presumption is not necessarily true.

Other developed countries have also experienced beneficent policy changes in relation to education for migrant children. The ‘Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union’ gives grounds for appeal in cases of discrimination based on language policies and related programs, which serve as supporting strategies to promote social inclusion for those people coming from immigrant backgrounds (Cullen, 2017; OECD, 2010).

In contrast, segregation in Asian developing countries such as India, Pakistan, and Indonesia have urban public schools in which migrant children have experienced student and teacher modalities of labelling, stigmatization, and contemptuous sarcasm, all of which act as impediments to social inclusion on the one hand, and educational exclusion on the other (Kang, 2010). Similarly, these countries have created segregation policies which sequester rural children in migrant schools, which in turn marginalize their capacity to find the best version of themselves (Deshingkar and Sven, 2005). These same internal migrant family populations, especially those in low socioeconomic status (SES) migrant families, have enormous difficulty getting their children into urban schools. This has been one of the biggest problems migrant parents and their children immediately confront after moving into urban areas (Noveria, 2013). Even if their migrant children are permitted to enter urban schools, there are still serious concerns about the capacities of urban school teachers to respect and treat them fairly. Indeed, there is evidence of teachers’ lack of support for migrant children who are struggling to adapt to their new schools and urban environments. There are, of course, some migrant students with relatively high SES histories who have been admitted to private or semi-public schools, whereas others with low SES have only been able, at best, to access private unaided schools serving children from ‘notified’ slum areas (Tooley et al., 2007).

Having observed that the problem of population migration from rural to urban communities is an international problem, we are now in a position to comprehend why China’s problem is more difficult than any other place in the world. For instance, in comparison to other countries, the 2016 magnitude of China’s internal migrant population of approximately 282 million (Bureau of Statistics, 2016) is far greater than any other country with annual shifting of migrant populations from rural to urban areas. In fairness to China, it is incontestable that as a consequence of these inordinate numbers of migrant people in transition, the government has had no other option than to embark, as efficiently as it can, on a program of rapid urbanization. ¹ It has been predicted that the potential growth rate for rural-to-urban migrations will continue to escalate by at least another 10 percentage points, or even more during the next decade (Wang and Wan, 2014).

China’s migrant student segregation: the ‘Hukou’ system and its policies

The seemingly relentless increase in China’s migratory population from rural to urban centers has served to galvanize the Chinese government’s commitment to improving the present disparity between the opportunities available to migrants in urban schools and urban students in urban schools (Wu, 2017). In addition to the sheer magnitude of the migrant families involved, we propose that it is the burden of having to accommodate the millions of migrant children seeking access to urban public schools that has become overwhelming and, thus, pragmatically problematic. Many migrant families, for example, have reported that they have experienced discrimination and been denied equal opportunities in potential employment, as well as housing, along with the distribution of public goods to which they should otherwise be entitled. We are convinced that the existence of what we call ‘equity deprivations’ such as the above helps to explain why the interpretation and potential flexibility of educational policies are of such vital importance and need to be carefully monitored.

One such policy that has become entangled in the politics of education is called ‘Hukou’, and despite is well-intentioned purpose, it has created serious problems of inequity for migrant school children. The rules that govern the Hukou household registration system covertly inhibit migrant people from obtaining equal access to the allocation of available resources in education (Goodburn, 2009). Historically, there has long existed a dichotomous class system in China, which has structurally embedded itself in policy politics to create a hiatus between the way in which rural and urban areas are valued and devalued. Within this context, Chinese people have traditionally been divided into two groups: (a) agricultural (rural areas) and (b) non-agricultural (urban areas). In the past the government strictly controlled the migration process between rural and urban areas and allocated social resources of welfare, employment, and public goods attainment based on the Hukou system (Wei and Hou, 2010).

The policies regarding migrant children’s education have gone through changes and reforms. With the development of urbanization and the concomitant ‘open and reform’ policy since the 1980s, large populations of rural people have migrated to urban areas to secure better opportunities of employment. However, given the range of deliberate structural impediments defined by the Hukou system, migrant children are almost invariably segregated from the urban mainstream culture and schools, where they have relocated. During its earlier stage of development (before 2000) the Hukou system unabashedly exhibited the formidable barriers to be confronted by migrant families:

1996: municipalities should allow migrant children aged 6–14 to study in full-time state-run and privately run schools with the status of ‘temporary students’.

In 2001, the State Council circulated an official notice of ‘Decision on the Development and Reform of Elementary Education’, and local governments have been encouraged to provide school education for all children under their jurisdictions. This policy was based on the following two premises, colloquially known as the ‘Two Mainlines’: (a) the ‘education of migrant children is mainly the responsibility of the recipient city’ and (b) ‘migrant children should be educated mainly in urban public schools’. This national directive urged every recipient city to take immediate action to deal with the issue of migrant children. Even so, there have been evidenced reports that children migrating from rural regions were excluded from urban public schools (Yang et al., 2014), and as a consequence, the majority of migrant students were sequestered in segregated migrant schools, thus receiving a less than adequate education (Liu and Jacob, 2013).

As the process of urbanization continues to burgeon in the 21st century, the Chinese government has admirably been striving to resolve the problem of how better to accommodate migrant children and cater for their education needs, demonstrated, for example, in 2008 by gestures such as ‘waiving tuition and miscellaneous fees’. Moreover, in regard to migrant student’s eligibility for receiving urban education services, it has been legislated that all internal migrant children should have accesses to formal programs of compulsory education in urban schools as soon as they reach schooling age. It is now legislatively expected that the Hukou system should gradually relinquish its authority to designate demographic divisions of educational apartheid in terms of agricultural and non-agricultural divisions. An undaunted effort has been made to extirpate the adverse dimensions of school segregation policy which have structurally created impediments to equity for Chinese migrant children. These reformations were implemented by the Central Government during 2003–2014, as follows:

2003: host cities should guarantee that the majority of migrant children are admitted to public schools; implementing programs which ensure that the private schools in which migrant children enroll reach the standards of excellence evidenced by urban public schools.

Although the Hukou system has until recently been the primary policy source for determining the educational opportunities for migrant children, the Chinese government has introduced several proposals designed to diminish the sociopolitical barriers that were previously propagated by the Hukou system, especially in some trial cities (Chen and Feng, 2013; Qian and Walker, 2015). During the past 20 years of various legislative reforms of school segregation for migrant children, Chinese policy makers have now adopted a balanced and ‘moderate’ approach to urbanization. ‘Not going to the extreme’ has a profound meaning in the ongoing transformation of educational policies (Huang et al., 2016: 38). Policy makers have been involved in the negotiation of complex political dynamics that are entrenched in myriad urbanization programs for the reform of institutional structures and educational activities.

In order to highlight the importance of ameliorating the tensional disparity between rural and urban populations, and the resultant inequalities in education, some cities have responded effectively to the central government’s ‘Two Mainlines’ policy. For example, in the city of Shanghai the local government was ambitious and gave the impression that ‘Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education’ were available and committed to making the changes required to accommodate migrant children appropriately in Shanghai’s urban schools (Qian and Walker, 2015). In 2004, the first significant regulation of ‘Suggestions on the Enrolment of Primary and Junior Secondary Schools’ (Shanghai Education Commission, 2004) were introduced to circumvent the obstacle of Hukou and to include migrant children in urban compulsory education systems. Public schools were encouraged to expand their capacity to enroll school-age migrant children in their neighborhoods. In 2008, a second crucial initiative entitled the ‘Three-Year Action Plan (2008–2010) for Compulsory Education of Migrant Children’ was launched by the Shanghai government (Shanghai Education Commission, 2008). Shanghai set an admirable and persuasive example for other cities in China, and the ‘Shanghai Model’ was highly revered as a benchmark for affording educational inclusion opportunities for migrant children. Except for the increase of public school admission, the Shanghai government embarked on a project to reform migrant children’s schools and strived to improve the quality of education for all migrant students. These reform achievements not only include the expanding school admission rate, but also the students’ academic achievement levels, and a much-improved level of social harmony between migrant and local people (Qian and Walker, 2015). This initiative stands in stark contrast to other large Chinese cities such as Beijing (the capital) where it was estimated that by 2012 approximately 70% of migrant children would be enrolled in low-quality migrant schools by 2012, whereas in Shanghai only 28% of the migrant children receiving compulsory education were enrolled in authorized migrant schools (Shanghai Ministry of Education, 2013).

Segmented assimilation, and the problem of migrant student’s limited access to urban public schools and poor performance outcomes

Although the policies initiated the Hukou system of reform and promoted educational equity between urban migrant and non-migrant children, it is undeniable that the current situation of migrant students in segregated migrant schools still exposes them to disadvantage in the majority of cities across China. Scholarly literature and research reports still reveal the adverse effects of school segregation on migrant children in different areas of China (Chen et al., 2009). With regard to migrant student’s access to urban public schools, urban public schools are allocated resources for urban children who hold the non-agricultural registration status within the school district. Some urban public schools recruit migrant children on the condition that they can meet requirements such as housing location, parents’ social insurance, etc. Migrant families with a higher SES may have opportunities to send their children to urban public schools. Nevertheless, for the majority of migrant children who hold the agricultural household registration with a lower SES, fewer opportunities are available for enrolment in urban public schools. Migrant schools are solely created for rural–urban migrant children in urban areas. This type of school does not require Hukou registration, but the price paid for this modality of independence is the poor quality of their schooling. The low school tuition fees and lack of government funding have ensured that migrant schools have ended up devoid of adequate educational resources, such as poor school facilities, unqualified teachers, and low achievement levels (Lai et al., 2014). It is reported that thousands of migrant schools were opened in 2000–2008 and are located in divergent cities throughout China. Despite these disadvantages, migrant schools do, to some extent, ‘open the gate’ for migrant children to receive education in urban areas.

School segregation features a decisive structural factor in explaining certain inequities in educational outcomes amongst migrant individuals. Migrant students who attend schools with a greater composition of children from higher SES backgrounds do generally perform better academically than those children who do not (Guo, 2011). In contrast, that is to say, segregated ‘minority’ schools without this variable tend to produce students who display lower levels of academic achievement, fewer job opportunities, and a reluctance to pursue demographically integrated relationships in future life (Linn and Welner, 2007). Moreover, migrant children from segregated schools were more likely to suffer some degree of mental/psychological health problems. Many of these students will inevitably develop poor learning habits (Lai et al., 2014), higher social anxiety and loneliness (Hu et al., 2009), more feelings of self-humiliation (Xu and Deng, 2010), lower levels of self-esteem, and also exhibit more internalizing behavioral problems (Li et al., 2008). In contrast, migrant children in inclusive schools had a better adaptive capacity than that of students in segregated migrant schools (Shen, 2008), and exhibited higher levels of academic achievement (Lu and Zhou, 2013).

One aspect concerning the disparate nature of the school setting, in the western context, relates to the widespread segregation of migrant children and the inequality they suffer in educational attainment. Students in segregated schools tend to perform worse than other children and are more likely to drop out of school and engage in risky and mischievous behavior (Nordin, 2013; Wells and Crain, 1994). Those in higher SES migrant families are generally more likely to benefit from good schools and other supportive formal and informal organizations, each of which contributes to ensuring better opportunities for a successful life for them. In contrast, children in lower SES families with poorly educated and unskilled parents often find themselves growing up in underprivileged neighborhoods, subject to poverty, poor schools, and a generally disruptive social environment (Portes et al., 2005). These children suffer the inequity of unequal distribution of educational resources, which, in turn, seriously curtails their chances in school performance outcomes and in having a successful life (Levy and Schady, 2013).

In this respect, Chinese rural–urban migration shares significant structural elements with the migrant experiences of students in other societies. The concept of ‘segmented assimilation’ has thus been considered as a mechanism to facilitate a greater degree of educational equity and equal opportunity in the context of China’s migration of students from rural to urban school situations (Lu and Zhou, 2013). A considerable amount of literature has accumulated to conclude that there exist variegated assimilation paths for migrant populations in China. One group exhibits a disposition to achieve a higher SES/lifestyle, while the other group feels incarcerated within a lower SES frame of mind. The former group displays a predisposition towards upward assimilation, while the other has an inclination downward assimilation and stagnation. During their period of segregated education from urban mainstream schools, migrant students in urban areas integrate only peripherally into urban society. This disparity is reflected not only by the contrasting achievement goals which characterize the aspirational rationale of the two groups, but the disparity is strongly exemplified in the ever-expanding hiatus between segregated migrant students and urban children, particularly as the grade levels continue upward. As we witnessed in the aforementioned body of the literature, the fact is that migrant students in desegregated schools achieved as favorable test results as did urban children.

In contrast, the impact of school segregation has left migrant children in a state of educational disadvantage, which may be irrevocably imprinted on the next generation of students across the entire nation (Hu and West, 2015; Lan, 2014). Migrant families with low SES lifestyles live in impoverished urban areas located on the city fringe and are literally stereotyped as ‘villages in the city’. There is no doubt that the Chinese central government has enhanced social support for these migrant families through strengthening social solidarity as an effective method of developing community services (Li and Placier, 2015). With regard to education, migrant children who attend desegregated schools also need to have access to social networks and personal friendships that are likely to have a beneficial socioeconomic influence on their lives.

Promoting the status of migrant children within the framework of educational inclusion

Given the influence of school segregation on migrant children, there persists an expanding concern among many scholars and policy makers about ‘how to better promote social inclusion’ (Ying and Chui, 2010). One scholar has recently averred that ‘The Paris Riots were an alarm bell for us’ regarding the consequential problem of social exclusion (Yiu, 2016: 286). Indeed, galvanized by the death of two teenagers, the 2007 Paris riots have reminded Chinese policy makers that youths around the world who are, or feel, marginalized endeavor to retaliate violently in an attempt to gain visibility in the public and political spheres (Moran, 2011). With respect to migrant children, Chinese governmental policies should reproduce and adapt to specific situations some of the successful programs and tangible strategies adopted by other countries, thus augmenting the Chinese sense of belonging and social inclusion within those cities where it is necessary and currently absent (Collins, 2015; Sellar and Lingard, 2013). However, a social stigma of exclusion that has been persistently attached to migrants in China’s metropolitan cites such as in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, has emphasized that they frequently speak different dialects, live in poorer neighborhoods, and get shunned by non-migrant peers. Furthermore, it is reported that migrants may face the disapproval of Shanghai residents who fear that the plethora of migrant children will consume a disproportionate share of the social resources of the community (Leitch et al., 2016).

Furthermore, to more deeply comprehend the problems of segregation and assimilation of rural migrant children in China, this paper looks significantly beyond the ‘segmented assimilation model’ derived from the US context. Segmented assimilation, we argue, implies a hierarchy that is made possible not only by state policies (such as Hukou), but also by cultural practices that generally portray rural residents as being inferior to urban residents. In addition to the conventional international approach to institutional segregation, we would suggest that Chinese segregation is more likely to manifest anomalies peculiar to its policies, some of which have developed as the outcome of China’s historical household registration policy.

It has been conceded that the Chinese government’s present version of inclusive policies has not been able to provide equal access to urban public schools for migrants, nor has it been successful in raising the standards of education of all urban schools equally (Kipnis, 2011). Since 1999 the term ‘education for quality’ (suzhi jiaoyu) represented a legal mandate to encourage and foster the pedagogic rhetoric and pragmatic implementation of educational reform at all levels (Kipnis, 2011). Reference to suzhi justifies social and political hierarchies of all sorts, with those of ‘high’ quality being seen as deserving more income, power, and status than those of ‘low’ quality (Anagnost, 2004). Urban dwellers are regarded as ‘high quality’ and rural ones as ‘low quality’. In popular usage, the notion of ‘lacking quality’ is used to discriminate against those schools preserved as examples of the standard of education in which rural–urban migrants have been sequestered (Lin, 2011). As government ‘two-mainline’ policy aims to make public schools more inclusive for rural migrant children, urban schools are evaluated on an achievement-based biased scale. This being so, it is evident that teachers serving disadvantaged students at migrant schools may respond with frustration, reduced effort, and attrition, all of which implicitly affirm schools at the top in the increasingly competitive market of education.

The intractable tensions are, nonetheless, useful in the context of how best to maintain a (more) effective education system with a dynamic learning environment, but not at the expense of excluding ‘low-quality’ students and teachers from the school or removing harmony and uniformity at the school level (Lin, 2011: 330). Schools have a critical role to play in the settlement of migrant children and in facilitating transitions to citizenship and belonging within a local community (Taylor and Sidhu, 2012). Inclusion of migrant children in urban schools requires that the schools play a role in fostering an environment of diversity, promoting instructional programs and an inclusive culture, and in building relationships between schools, parents, and students (Fang et al., 2017). An educational inclusion policy is needed to emphasize the ‘equality’ of local and migrant children in enrolment, while also encouraging migrant participation in school activities, awards, extracurricular activities, and leadership positions in public schools (Folke, 2016). However, migrants’ narratives of the deficiencies of student care and the lack of stewardship in migrant schools serve to rekindle new debate about the conflicting perspectives which reveal how these reforms have failed to dissolve the sociocultural dichotomy that characterizes the hiatus between the quality of migrant urban schools on the one hand, and the quality of the environment of public urban schools on the other (Lan, 2014; Yui, 2016). The ideal goal of reaching an inclusive education for all children is impeded by several problems, such as negative teacher attitudes towards students, insufficient support, and deficits within teacher preparation programs (Liu et al., 2015). More recently, public schools have begun offering self-contained classes within their buildings for the migrant children. These ‘schools within schools’ use the same curriculum as the rural provinces and are intended to be the next step toward full inclusion (Jacka et al., 2013). However, so far, studies illuminate the marginality and discrimination that migrant children experience daily in public schools (Mu and Jia, 2014).

All in all, beyond the theoretical field of social inclusion, there needs to be self-awareness about the structures of the receiving school community and an observant approach towards the construction of exclusionary lines within the school. Moreover, the conditions and success of inclusion are suggested to be determined by listening to the experiences of migrant students themselves. Above all, the inclusion of migrant students into the mainstream classroom ought to be coupled with adequate resources in order to provide them with a fair chance to participate in the social and pedagogical mainstream.

Conclusion and implications

This paper examines China’s policy of migrant children from absolute school segregation to the reform of educational inclusion. The impact of these policies on the education of internal migrant children in a Chinese urban setting has also been discussed. Our paper concludes that the reform of migration policies is imperative. The Chinese government has shown its ambition in addressing the quality of education, as experienced by rural migrants. Policy makers, however, need to also ascertain the importance of equality and social justice for migrant children. Both central and local governments have promoted policy reform, and the results show that significant improvements have been made towards relieving the segregation of the migrant population in recent decades. However, when enacted at the local level, on the other hand, the marginality and discrimination that migrant children experience daily in public schools have been far too prevalent. There remains an especially formidable barrier to provide inclusive opportunities of academic promotion, social assimilation, and future success for migrant children.

The results of our analysis provide insights into what should be implemented to advance the quality of migrant children’s education. We suggest that policy makers develop models which will incorporate the perspectives of local stakeholders (e.g., educators, families) in order to minimize the macro-level policies inadvertently giving rise to the unintended adverse consequences in schools. The implementation of some social policies for rural migrants has largely been ineffective. Further efforts need to be made to enhance the inclusion of rural migrants into China’s urban areas. Finally, it is necessary to reinsert the state’s inclusion policy context in investigations of migrant students’ schooling experiences, as very few studies of migrant children in public school inclusions consider the complex policy context in which schools are obliged to function.