Rural Education Essay

Students from rural areas in China lag far behind their urban peers in terms of both the quantity and quality of education received. Rural students have low levels of educational attainment and persistently drop out of school across all post-primary levels of schooling (Liu et al., 2009; Yi et al., 2012; Shi et al., 2015). A series of field studies show that the dropout rate of rural junior high students ranges from 18 to 31 percent across a number of provinces (Wang et al., 2015; Li et al., 2015; Shi et al., 2015; Mo et al., 2013; Loyalka et al., 2013; Yi et al., 2012). Nearly 90 percent of students from large cities attend academic high school; in contrast, only 25 percent of students from poor, rural areas finish academic high school (Liu …show more content…
In theory, PD programs seek to help teachers gain subject-specific knowledge (Dadds, 2001), use appropriate pedagogical practices (Darling-Hammond and McLaughlin, 1995; Schifter et al., 1999), develop positive attitudes towards teaching (Cobb, 2000), and ultimately improve the learning of students (Villegas-Reimers, 2003). The importance of PD is further supported by empirical evidence from developed countries. For example, in a review of experimental evaluations of PD programs in developed countries, Yoon et al. (2007) found that the academic achievement of students whose teachers participated in PD programs (about 49 hours of training on average) increased by 0.54 standard deviations compared to students whose teachers did not participate in PD. These positive findings lend credence to the efforts of policymakers from developing countries who are in favor of using PD to improve the quality of teaching in their rural