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In many rural primary boarding schools in China more than 50 children sleep to a room, packed side by side. When bunk beds are not available, desks are simply pushed together. One of REAP’s efforts is to investigate how better dorm supervision and management may improve health and educational outcomes.

REAP

Poor rural students often have little protein in their diets and many suffer from iron deficiency anemia.
REAP

REAP is developing a new initiative to determine efficient and policy-practical ways of improving school-based nutrition in rural China.
REAP

Students complete a REAP program baseline survey. Subsequent surveys, both of students in programs and others who are not, are used to help determine program effectiveness.
REAP

REAP seeks to understand what problems the poorest students face, from pre-K and primary school to high school and beyond.
REAP

A poor couple explains their difficult choices. To cover even high school tuition, they must sell off scarce assets, borrow from money lenders at high interest and/or choose between which children to keep in school.
REAP

Like almost everything else in China today, rural education is in the midst of fundamental change. While progress has been made, increasing numbers of parents are migrating to cities to find work, often leaving their school age children in the villages. At the same time, China is consolidating rural primary schools into large, more economically efficient units, located even further from student households. Taken together, the need for child supervision and the impracticality of kids traveling long distance to attend school has led to the dramatic growth of boarding schools for children as young as six.

Dormitory facilities are often no more than unused school rooms with 50 or more bunk beds moved in. Sometimes beds are not available and student desks are pushed together to make sleeping platforms at night. In resource-constrained rural schools, malnutrition is a serious problem, and in more than half of boarding schools, children receive no protein at all.

Unfortunately, the challenges of primary school are only the first of many barriers that rural students encounter during their educational journey in China. Poor quality teaching, costly tuition and fees, especially after middle school, and the ever-present need for additional household income are just some of the hurdles to completing an education in rural areas of China that many poor students simply do not clear. The result is an education gap whereby only 5% of rural poor students go on to pursue higher education compared to 70% of their counterparts in urban areas.

Through Stanford’s Rural Education Action Project (REAP), researchers are working in rural China to help improve education through a combination of direct interventions and scientific research at several levels.

Improving boarding schools for young children

In partnership with Plan International and LICOS, a European Research Center, REAP will be running a pilot, school lunch-based nutrition program aimed at helping some of poorest students in rural China overcome their battle with iron deficiency anemia. The project is called, “One fresh egg, one piece of tofu and one ounce of meat” because the students are being provided three servings of protein each week. In addition, Stanford researchers are experimenting with different training programs for dormitory supervisors in an effort to improve physiological and psychological health. The results of each of these interventions will be closely evaluated and compared to schools not participating in order to determine which approaches are most successful.

Measuring the impact of scholarships

In March, the Rural Education Action Project (REAP) of Stanford University, with support from the US-based IET Foundation, and in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University and the Northwest Socioeconomic Development Research Center, awarded university scholarships to 125 of the poorest students in 10 high schools in Shaanxi Province. The schools are in remote, poor parts of one of the poorest provinces in China. The awards will help students cover tuition and fees for the students who are accepted into universities anywhere in China. A second group of students will be awarded scholarships in June.

Stanford researchers are studying the extent to which receiving the scholarships impacts the students’ performance on college entrance exams. One hypothesis is that students will be more motivated and will perform better in school if they know in advance that they will have the funds to go to college. The researchers also believe that, rather than substituting toward lower priced schools and majors within China’s system, students will more often select the universities and majors they most prefer when educational financing is available.

Influencing government policy decisions

Scott Rozelle, a Research Economist and Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies says, “Every one of our programs is developed by first determining which students and schools have the greatest needs, but we do not stop paying attention once the awards or the programs begin. On the contrary, every one of our programs—which are all implemented as Randomized Control Trials, similar to the way medical researchers evaluate new treatments—is carefully implemented so that we can follow the impacts and ultimately evaluate the effectiveness of the program.”

Jennifer Adams, Assistant Professor at the Stanford University School of Education, adds, “We also work closely with our stakeholders, partnering with government agencies and research institutes so the lessons from our work can be quickly scaled up. Our big hope is that the lessons that are coming out of all the research and evaluation we do of REAP programs will be helpful for policy makers who have the very challenging job of deciding which new policies to pursue and how to design the large number of new projects on the government’s development agenda.”