Background

China is at the vanguard of the consolidation trend. Nationally, China faced dramatic declines in school-aged cohorts in the early 2000s due to fertility reduction. The State Council in 2001 initiated a massive national push to consolidate educational infrastructure. The school consolidation initiative intended to address sparse demand, inefficiencies in provision, and perceived quality problems in rural education. Consolidation has happened extremely rapidly in China. By some estimates, in China, the total number of primary schools decreased by 53 percent between 2001 and 2012.

Study design

Fan Wang, along with collaborators Emily Hannum and Xiaoying Liu, evaluate the effects of school closures on using the rural sample from the 2011 China Household Ethnic Survey, which covers households and villages from 728 villages in 81 counties of 7 provinces with substantial minority populations in China. The household survey provides information on educational attainment, enrollment, and demographic attributes of children. The Village survey provides information on the timing of closure and school attributes. We exploit variations in closure timing across villages and differential exposure to policy across cohorts to evaluate the impact of policy on educational attainment as well as language facility.

Findings

We find that for girls exposed to closure during their primary school ages, we find an average decrease of 0.60 years of schooling by 2011, when children were, on average, 17 years old. Negative effects strengthen with time since closure. For boys, there is no corresponding significant effect of consolidation. Different effects by gender may be related to greater sensitivity of girls' enrollment to distance and greater responsiveness of boys' enrollment to quality.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/711654 

Because officially recognized minority populations disproportionately reside in rural and remote areas, minority students were among those at elevated risk of experiencing school consolidation. Emily Hannum and Fan Wang find that, much more than Han youth, ethnic minority youth were negatively affected by closure, in terms of its impact on both educational attainment and written Mandarin facility. Further, for both outcomes, penalties accruing to minority youth occurred only in the poorest villages and not to minority youth in relatively wealthier villages. Penalties were generally heavier for girls, but in the most ethnically segregated minority villages, boys from minority families were highly vulnerable to closure effects on attainment and written Mandarin facility.

https://fanwangecon.github.io/assets/HannumWangSchoolConsolidationEthLang.pdf