An Examination of Distributive and Relational Justice in the Issue of Education Fairness for Urban Migrant Workers’ Children

Abstract

Current arguments on educational fairness for the children of migrant workers in cities primarily promote the opportunity to enroll in local public schools. Drawing on current research, as well as discussions of fairness and justice from Aristotle in the classical period to Rawls, Dworkin, Walzer, and the contemporary scholar Young, we investigate educational fairness for migrant children on the two levels of distributive justice and relational justice. The study finds that some migrant children in more disadvantaged socioeconomic situations still attend simple private schools. Obstacles still hinder migrant children in public schools from accessing high-quality educational resources in cities, as they are mostly concentrated in lower-quality schools. Thus, the principle of distributive justice is not realized when examining the opportunities for migrant children to attend school. Even when they attend public school, due to stereotypes and systemic factors, migrant children are collectively marginalized and experience cultural oppression in everyday school life. Thus, relational justice is hindered as these youths feel powerless and without educational rights.

Keywords:

• distributive justice
• education fairness
• relational justice
• urban migrant workers’ children

Notes

In this article “urban migrant workers’ children” especially refers to the portion of children among children of migrant workers in cities who have moved to the city with their parents or guardians and does not include left-behind children, because concepts such as “children of the floating population” and “migrant children” are used in different policy articles, and we follow the original uses of these concepts without differentiating among them.

Such data are currently not uniformly issued by an authoritative institution. During field surveys, an education official directly said that the reason for this is that on the one hand “this problem is somewhat sensitive,” and on the other hand “since workers in cities are highly mobile themselves, it is very difficult to compile data.” But in texts such as mainstream media reports, leaders’ speeches, and work summaries or survey reports from relevant local authorities we can often see relevant data, to the greatest extent possible formal authoritative publications and data provided by relevant local statistical departments were used for the data in this study.

For further discussion on Rawls’s theory of distributive justice, and in particular its relation to education, see: Zhong Jingxun and Zeng Rongguang. 2009. From distribution justice to relational justice: new perspectives on Western explorations in educational fairness. Tsinghua Journal of Education no. 5.

For related articles see: Lei Wanpeng. 2004, September 6. “Migrant children” challenge urban compulsory education—a survey of compulsory education for migrant workers’ children in Wuhan City. Chinese Education; Wang Shouheng and Zha Xiaohu. 2011. Educational fairness for the children of migrant workers in cities. Journal of Anhui Normal University (Humanities and Social Sciences Edition) no. 1; Ma Qing and Wu Zhihui. 2010. Zailun nongmingong suiqian zinü yiwu jiaoyu gongping wenti (Another discussion of the problem of educational fairness for migrant workers’ children). Hebei shifan daxue xuebao (Journal of Hebei Normal University, Education Sciences Edition) no. 7.

The education “quasi-market” was an important path for education development in the West in the late 1970s and early 80 s, in particular under the rule of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and public sector reforms promoted by the Reagan Administration, and similar to public sector reforms, it emphasizes deregulation, privatization, and marketization, namely the so-called DPM framework. For more see Lane, J. E. 1997. Introduction: public sector reform: only deregulation, privatization and marketization In Public Sector Reform: Rationale, Trends and Problems, 1–16. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

The names of sample cities, schools, and interviewee cases in all field surveys for this study have been anonymized.

Relevant data indicate that in 2012, in City B 490,000 migrant children of urban workers were in the compulsory education stage, and 74.7% of these were accepted by public schools (October 24, 2012, China News: “In Beijing City, More than 70 Percent of Migrant Children of Workers in City B Attend Public Schools”); in City T there were 110,100 migrant children of the nonhousehold registration population attending schools in the compulsory education stage, accounting for 14.08% of the entire city’s 781,600 students at schools in the compulsory education stage, and 76,800 of them attended public schools, a ratio of 69.79%. (November 6, 2012, “City T’s Work on Resolving Migrant Children of Outside Workers Receiving Compulsory Education”) As a somewhat remote ordinary prefecture-level city, City T does not have high-level white-collar workers, foreigners, or postdocs among their non–local household registration population such as large cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, and they mainly are urban workers. Therefore, interviews from the field surveys with relevant managers and leaders showed that in City T, the number of migrant children of the nonhousehold registration population can be regarded as the number of migrant children of urban workers.

This study gave filing codes for all interviews, and the interviewees were coded using the method “interviewee type-city code-work unit code-interviewee number,” and interviewee type includes: administrators of education management and functional authorities, school principals, teachers, students, and parents.

All data here are only based on statistics of students at school, and do not include children who dropped out or could no go to school.

In the current discourse environment that emphasizes fairness, an official from the T City Education Bureau explained, “Now the entire province is only talking about building ‘standardized schools,’ and they don’t have key and non-key schools or explicit levels for good and poor schools.” But he also said, “Of course, parents and ordinary people make their own judgments as to which schools are good or not good, they are very clear.” The researchers are also very clear that long-term uneven distribution of education resources cannot be changed in a short time. Based on this, the researchers asked personnel at the Education Bureau to make a “civilian” ranking of the schools based on their own understanding of the schools and from the perspective of ordinary people. We asked students’ parents and teachers from different schools to look at the ranking results, and they basically agreed to it. This gave us the five-level school ranking and distribution of migrant children within different levels of school for this study.

In the “Beijing City Basic Education Fairness Satisfaction Indicators” topic that we participated in in 2010, the data show that the satisfaction levels of the floating population with Beijing basic education were generally higher than that of people with local household registrations in the majority of dimensions.

It is our understanding from the circumstances that the “good students” often mentioned by interviewees include both local students with good grades and also more broadly local students with good family backgrounds.

This class was not large and because some students in higher grades had transferred home, there were not many students in the class, so fifth grade class one only had 17 students.

For more on white flight see the Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight and the works it cites.

Additional information

Funding

Funding is provided by the National Social Science Fund, Subject “Research on the Educational Issues of Urban Migrant Youth From the Perspective of Even Social Development (approval No.: CHA100145).”

Notes on contributors

Luo Yun

Luo Yun is an associate professor at the School of Education, Renmin University of China.

Zhong Jingxun

Zhong Jingxun is an associate professor at the School of Educational Science, South China Normal University.

Zeng Rongguang

Zeng Rongguang is Professor Emeritus at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Education.