Recent anecdotal reports suggest that dropout rates may be higher and actually increasing over time in poor rural areas. There are many reasons not to be surprised that there is a dropout problem, given the fact that China has a high level of poverty among the rural population, a highly...

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, China’s Ministry of Education embarked on an ambitious program of elementary school mergers by shutting down small village schools and opening up larger centralized schools in towns and county seats. The goal of the program was to improve the teacher and...

This article exploits a randomised controlled trial to evaluate the impact of an intensive, short-term inservice teacher training programme on the performance of English teachers in Beijing migrant schools and their students. The results show no significant impacts of teacher training on either...