Social Exclusion and the Hidden Curriculum: The Schooling Experiences of Chinese Rural Migrant Children in an Urban Public School

Since 2001, the Chinese government had passed a series of policies known as ‘the two primary responsibilities’ to allow the rural migrant children to attend urban public schools. However, what the migrant children actually experienced in and after negotiating access to these schools deserves serious attention from educators, scholars and policymakers. Based on prolonged ethnographic fieldwork in a Beijing public school, this study demonstrated three key aspects of exclusions in migrant children’s schooling experiences, namely, (1) access to school, (2) in-class participations and (3) peer interactions, and examined the ‘hidden curriculum’ in the existing school practices that prevented migrant children from integrating successfully in the urban school settings. We found that academic performance lay at the root of social exclusions, but the local educators’ perceptions of migrant children as outsiders, the urban-oriented school curricular and urban children’s involvement (vis-à-vis migrant children’s little involvement) in the extracurricular activities at school as well as the paid supplementary trainings outside school together formed the ‘hidden curriculum’ that led to the marginalization of migrant students in the urban school system.     

Shopping for schools or shopping for peers: public schools and catchment area segregation

Market theory positions the consumer as a rational choice actor, making informed schooling choices on the basis of ‘hard’ evidence of relative school effectiveness. Yet there are concerns that parents simply choose schools based on socio-demographic characteristics, thus leading to greater social segregation and undercutting the potential of choice to drive quality improvements. In this paper, we explore segregation by examining catchment areas for a range of public high schools in a specific middle-class urban area. We focus on socio-demographic characteristics, including levels of income, country of birth and religion affiliation, in order to explore residential segregation according to public high school catchment areas. Our data suggest distinct residential segregation between catchment areas for each public school within our data-set, particularly for the schools deemed to be popular and rejected, that may pose risks for broader equity concerns. We argue that, in contrast to market theory, even more affluent and active choosers are not equipped with information on the programmatic quality of their different school options, but instead may be relying on socio-demographic characteristics of schools – through surrogate information about the urban spaces that the schools occupy – in order to choose peer groups, if not programmes, for their children.