The sudden outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has had a profound impact on the operations of education systems. China's education system accumulated a wealth of experience from its responses to the pandemic, but it has also exposed many problems. In terms of the responses in education, timely and systematic policy actions have provided…

This paper reports findings from a comparative study of urban vs. rural school principals in China. It is an extension and replication of an earlier study on the profiles and preparation of school leaders in the US and China. The study illustrates modern portraits--demographic characteristics of urban and rural principals in China, explores their…

Rapid urbanization in China has worsened the educational disparity between rural and urban regions, which can lead to increased social stratification and injustice. Information and communications technologies (ICTs), with their potential to enable universal access and pedagogical reform, are considered a promising solution to bridge such…

Given the big gap between rural areas and cities and developed areas of China in basic education, it is of great significance to train a large number of excellent teachers for basic education in the vast rural areas so as to boost basic education there and achieve educational equity. Hanshan Normal University is a regional normal university…

During the 14th Five-Year Plan, preschool education in China will move toward the objectives of quality and balance, and the kindergarten teacher workforce must be formed with sufficient quantity, high quality, and balanced distribution. At present, the scale of China's current kindergarten teacher workforce still does not meet the standards for…

Mitigating the digital divide is essential for the sustainable development of education. To provide distance access which ensures equality in education for both urban and rural students, online learning has been emphasized in the post COVID-19 period. However, some challenges to total online learning have been described, such as isolation and the…

In 1999, the Chinese government implemented a higher education enrollment expansion policy to improve education equality. Now, its positive impact on educational equality is contested. This study attempts to identify the link between city administrative level and tertiary attainment in the context of the policy. Our empirical findings indicate…

This study investigated 42,643 eighth grade students from 762 secondary schools in 104 districts and counties in the Z province of mainland China and also test the mediating role of self-efficacy in teacher-student relationship prediction of academic achievement. The results show that there are certain gender differences and regional differences…

Existing scholarship on marginalised academics is mostly western-based and concerned with inequalities caused by class, gender and/or racial and ethnic differences. This article adds to this literature by highlighting how inequalities caused by the urban-rural divide in China adversely impact on the academic trajectories of rural-origin academics…

With the advancement of China's economic and social development and urbanization, the scale of out-of-town migrant workers has been expanding. Following this, migrant worker children's education problem has become increasingly prominent and has gradually become a focus of education research. This paper reviews recent studies on migrant worker…

In recent years, alternative teacher preparation programmes are globally emerging to address teacher quality in 'hard-to-staff' schools. These programmes commonly attract graduates from prestigious universities to teach in disadvantaged schools for two years. One programme of this kind in China is the 'Exceptional Graduates as Rural Teachers'…

The Gaokao, a mandatory postsecondary entrance examination for all Chinese students, is often associated with psychological stress among Chinese students in their final year of high school. This project was conducted in summer 2017 in urban Beijing and rural Xi'an, China. The purpose is to explore the perspectives of urban and rural secondary…

The Teacher Rotation Policy (TRP) is a recent teacher policy developed in the context of China. TRP seeks to close China's teacher quality disparities through rotating 'high-quality' urban schoolteachers to teach in hard-to-staff rural schools for a period of time. This qualitative case study examined how five policy actors carried out TRP in one…

The subjects of this research were 776 pupils from grade three to grade six in Shandong Province, China. This study examined the influence of teacher support on students' reading engagement, and the mediating variables between those two factors, as measured by the perception of teachers' support scale, reading engagement scale, reading interest…

The current research investigated the variability of school effects on intelligence development in considering two economically and socially distinct groups of children. The data came from a nationally representative sample of primary school children from urban and rural areas of China. Two standardised reasoning tests were used to assess fluid…