Caixin Media reports on REAP's research about the shockingly high school drop-out rate of China's rural students. To read the original article, click here.

Chen is among the millions of students in rural areas who quit school each year without completing high school. Although there are no official statistics, studies by various research institutions say one in three students in villages – some 3 million teenagers on average – quit school every year before earning a high school diploma.

Boys and girls in rural areas start leaving school at a much younger age than their peers in more developed regions. From 2007 to 2013, almost half the students in poor areas in the central and western parts of the country had left school by grade nine, a study published in December by the Rural Education Action Project (REAP), which involves the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Stanford University and several Chinese universities, found. The researchers, who studied 50,000 students, found something even more alarming: by grade 12, nearly two-thirds dropped out.

The 2010 census showed that 78 percent of the country's school-aged students lived in the countryside, and the research report said that "if dropout rates continue as they are today, increasing unemployment and widening inequality could hinder economic growth and stability on a national scale."

Nearly half of the dropouts REAP surveyed said they quit to find work so they could "broaden their horizons and enjoy new experiences." Another 30 per cent said they chose to leave because "everyone else is doing it."

Chen said that like many of his classmates he was bored in the classroom and did not see how his studies were helping his future.

"Some dropouts are pushed hard by teachers but they can't pass exams," said Hu Yongqiang, who left a school in rural Shaanxi when he was in grade nine. "So they run away."

Middle School Woes

Experts say rural junior middle schools – which cover the seventh to ninth years of school – are one of the biggest problems in the country's education system. Stark inequalities in the distribution of resources have led to this failure, said Wei Jiayu from the New Citizen Program, a non-profit group focusing on rural education.

The government spent an average of 900 yuan more each year on a student in an urban middle school than on a rural student, government data from 2013 show. A few rural junior middle schools with better teachers and facilities, like science labs and libraries, have higher university admission rates, but many others "are just a waste of time," Wei said.

A lack of qualified teachers in rural schools is one of the main turnoffs for students, an education official in the Qinba Mountains area of Shaanxi said. The REAP study found that teachers' qualifications were linked to their students' dropout rate. In schools where less than 30 percent of the teachers had a university degree, students dropped out at twice the rate compared to schools with more qualified staff.

Most dropouts are students labeled by teachers as poor performers, said Liu Chengbin, a professor of sociology at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in the central city of Wuhan. Many teachers tend to pay more attention to students with strong academic records the others, said Liu, because the amount of funding a school receives from the government is linked to exam scores.

"(Students' scores) are related to teachers' performance assessments and salaries as well," said a teacher from the Qinba Mountains area.

Some teachers even tried to persuade students who did poorly on tests to quit so average test scores would stay high, said Shi Yaojiang, a professor of education at Shaanxi Normal University in Xi'an.

And the problems continue into high school. Beijing spent more than 28,000 yuan per high school student in 2013, compared to nearly 6,900 yuan per student in the southwestern province of Guizhou and nearly 5,500 yuan in the poor central province of Henan, research by the education information portal eol.cn in 2015 found.

Left Out

Tens of millions of rural workers have moved to urban areas in recent decades, but the country's system of household registration, or hukou, makes it difficult for them to send their children to good schools in cities.

Migrants often have no choice but to leave their children in rural areas to be educated. A lack of parental supervision compounds many students' difficulties in rural schools, experts said.

Some 60 million children are left in China's villages to be raised by grandparents or relatives, official data show, and educators say this is contributing to problems keeping children in school. "(The high number of) dropouts is the result of long-term problems," said a high school teacher in the Qinba Mountains.

The REAP study also found that nearly three-quarters of rural children showed some signs of psychological trouble. The figure was just under 6 percent for students in cities.

Over 13 percent of children left in villages by parents quit school by their eighth year of school, researchers found, but only 8.6 percent of those who were raised by their parents in rural villages chose to drop out.

Researchers are concerned about the career prospects of those who have not completed their schooling. Scott Rozelle, a Stanford University professor who co-directed the study, said that as the country looks to shift from low-end manufacturing to services and value-added industries, the growing number of less-educated workers will be a burden on the economy.

Nearly 100 health economists from across the United States signed a pledge urging U.S. presidential candidates to make chronic disease a policy priority. Karen Eggleston, a scholar of comparative healthcare systems and director of Stanford’s Asia Health Policy Program, is one of the signatories. 

The pledge calls upon the candidates to reset the national healthcare agenda to better address chronic disease, which causes seven out of 10 deaths in America and affects the economy through lost productivity and disability.

Read the pledge below.

"What do I do about the chickens?"

When assistant professor of medicine Eran Bendavid began a study on livestock in African households to determine impact on childhood health, he'd already anticipated common field problems like poorly captured or intentionally misreported data, difficulty getting to work sites, or problems with training local volunteers.

But he'd never gotten that particular question from a fieldworker before. It didn't occur to him that participating families, in reporting their livestock holdings, would completely omit the chickens running around at their feet, thereby skewing the data.

"They didn't consider chickens to be livestock," recalled Bendavid. Along with Scott Rozelle, the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow at FSI, and associate professor of political science and FSI senior fellow Beatriz Magaloni, Bendavid spoke to a full house last week on lessons learned from fieldwork gone awry. The return engagement of FSI's popular seminar, "Everything that can go wrong in a field experiment” was introduced by Jesper Sørensen, executive director of Stanford Seed, and moderated by Katherine Casey, assistant professor of political economy at the GSB. The seminar is a product of FSI and Seed’s joint Global Development and Poverty (GDP) Initiative, which to date has awarded nearly $7 million in faculty research funding to promote research on poverty alleviation and economic development worldwide.

Rozelle, co-director of the Rural Education Action Program, spoke of the obstacles to accurate data gathering, especially in rural areas where record-keeping is inaccurate and participants' trust is low. Arriving in a Chinese village to carry out child nutrition studies, said Rozelle, "we found Grandma running out the back door with the baby." The researchers had worked with the local family planning council to find the names of children to study, but the families thought the authorities were coming to penalize them for violation of the one-child policy.

Cultural differences make for entertaining and illuminating (if frustrating) lessons, but Beatriz Magaloni, director of FSI's Program on Poverty and Governance at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law had a different story to tell. Over the course of three years, her GDP-funded work to investigate and reduce police violence in Brazil - a phenomenon resulting in more than 22,000 deaths since 2005 - has encountered obstacle after obstacle. Her work to pilot body-worn cameras on police in Rio has faced a change in police leadership, setting back cooperation; a yearlong struggle to decouple a study of TASER International’s body worn cameras from its electrical weapons in the same population; a work site initially lacking electricity to charge the cameras or Internet to view the feeds; and noncompliance among the officers. "It's discouraging at times," admitted Magaloni, who has finally gotten the cameras onto the officers' uniforms and must now experiment with ways to incentivize their use. "We are learning a lot about how institutional behavior becomes so entrenched and why it's so hard to change."

Experimentation is a powerful tool to understand cause and effect, said Casey, but a tool only works if it's implemented properly. Learning from failure makes for an interesting panel discussion. The speakers' hope is that it also makes for better research in the future.

The Global Development and Poverty Initiative is a University-wide initiative of the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies (Seed) in partnership with the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI). GDP was established in 2013 to stimulate transformative research ideas and new approaches to economic development and poverty alleviation worldwide. GDP supports groundbreaking research at the intersection of traditional academic disciplines and practical application. GDP uses a venture-funding model to pursue compelling interdisciplinary research on the causes and consequences of global poverty. Initial funding allows GDP awardees to conduct high-quality research in developing countries where there is a lack of data and infrastructure.