By She Yu & Feng Wenmeng, Research Department of Social Development, DRC

Research Report, Special Issue, No.31, 2017 (Total 1555) 2017-08-08

Abstract: The children of migrant workers receiving compulsory education in megacities now face elevated threshold for public school access. The reason lies in the fact that these children need to receive compulsory education subsidies in the cities where they and their parents live whereas these subsidies are still allocated to the towns where these children used to live. This problem is mainly due to the contradictions between central education policy and urbanization policy, between central education policy and local governments’ functions and interest and between educational resource supply and migrant children’s need for equal education. This paper holds that the general approach to resolving the problems is to follow the innate rules of population migration and urbanization drive and ensure the human capital storage and improvement for 100 million people. The policy options are as follows: we need to remove the planned-economy-oriented mindset, and make scientific estimation of cities’ population growth to increase timely supply of educational resources; further enlarge the proportion of expenditure shared respectively by the central and provincial governments in compulsory education; regulate the online and offline management of students’ enrollment status, reduce power rent-seeking deals, and ensure the fiscal subsidies to schools for the children of migrant workers; and enhance education on migrant workers and enable them to know about relevant educational policies.

Key words: compulsory education, migrant children, megacities, problems, policy options