Getting rural migrant children into school in South China: migrant agency and parenting

ABSTRACT

Scholarship has examined how immigrant parents in North America and Europe acculturate their children to the education system in their receiving societies, with a focus on overcoming language barriers and coping with cultural differences in education between home and host societies. However, relatively less attention has been paid to the efforts of migrant parents in circumventing structural obstacles to the education access of their migrant children. To address that gap, this study draws on the qualitative data obtained from 23 rural-urban migrants in South China to investigate how these parents help their migrant children access urban education resources in a social context where structural obstacles outweigh cultural/racial differences. This study defines migrant parents as active agents who use strategies and actions to adapt to, manoeuvre within or circumvent the structural constraints to augment urban education resources for their migrant children. The migrant parents’ agency includes persistent efforts in obtaining urban hukou for their children; applying strategies to increase their children’s qualification for public schools that use a point system; exploring guanxi and using tiger parenting to get their children into public schools; exchanging economic resources for education opportunities in elite private schools; purchasing extracurricular education services; and actively maintaining parent-teacher partnerships to support their children’s schooling. While valuing the migrants’ agency, this study also indicates that the efficacy of their actions and strategies is affected by disparities in their socioeconomic resources.

KEYWORDS:

• Migrant children
• agency
• education
• parenting
• China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Yinni Peng http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7506-6854

Notes

1 Using the national-level data in 2010, Qin, Wang, and Lu (2018, p. 183) found that the ‘average monthly income of college-educated rural migrants was 3,139 [yuan]’, which was much higher than that of less-educated rural migrants (2,314 yuan). Their findings partly support the statement on the positive correlation between education and income for rural migrants in China.

2 Data source: Zhang (2016).

3 After 2008, although the central government advocated the active incorporation of migrant children into the urban education system in receiving cities, some geographic variations in local practices have been reported. For intra-provincial migrant children, it was relatively easy to get enrolled in urban public schools in their receiving cities (Yang, 2017). However, for inter-provincial migrant children, especially those in megacities, the situation was more complicated and the local governments in different regions adopted diversified policies and practices. For example, the receiving cities in the Pearl River Delta relied on developing private migrant schools and the point system to offer education resources for migrant children (Yang, 2017). In 2013, Shanghai applied the point system to allocate the education resources for migrant children and its public schools absorbed 77.3 per cent of migrant children at the compulsory education stage (Yang, 2017). However, to control its population, Beijing tightened its control over migrants and increased the education entrance threshold of migrant children after 2014 (Yang, 2017). Therefore, the findings of this study mainly reflect the situation in the receiving cities of the Pearl River Delta, and should be interpreted with caution when applying it to other areas.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University Grants Committee, Hong Kong [grant number HKBU 258513].