Alexandra Harney quotes REAP research in a feature on the recent boom in vocational education in rural China. To read the original article, click here.

In China's countryside, tracts of forests are being replaced with concrete as a new type of factory is being built: the education factory. Motivated by a push to redirect China's economy toward a more innovative, high-tech future—and hopefully dodge the "middle-income trap"—the government is investing in vocational school parks designed to educate hundreds of thousands of students. 

China's vocational schools focus on workplace skills, rather than theory and academic subjects. However, in twenty years these students may be left behind, possessing skills that are no longer applicable in China's changing economy. Furthermore, many vocational schools fail to provide human capital enhancing experiences, instead shipping their students off to work as interns in factories that are often irrelevant to their majors and in some cases violate Chinese labor laws. 

Harney writes, ""You can build as much as you want, but unless you get good teachers, good curriculum and a system that assesses and rewards high performing schools with more resources, it's just going to be a waste of money," says Scott Rozelle, co-director of the Rural Education Action Program at Stanford University and the author of many papers on vocational education in China.

"There is no question China needs to raise skill levels. Wayne Zhang, who runs a home decor products factory in northeastern China, says that finding skilled workers - in order to increase capacity or make more complex products - is increasingly hard. Of the 100 such staff he set out to hire last year, he has only been able to find 60.

"As of 2010, just 24 percent of China's workforce had attended at least some upper secondary school, compared with an OECD average of 74 percent, according to a study published by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University in February."

In response to this problem, REAP launched Assessing and Credentialing Vocational High Schools, a project aimed at establishing an evaluation system to hold vocational schools accountable to education standards and provide incentives to improve. Preliminary results show that the system is leading to improved student learning and school satisfaction. Read more about this project here.

Matt Sheehan
China Correspondent, The WorldPost
October 12th, 2015

Simply giving nearsighted children glasses can dramatically boost their school performance. Convincing teachers and parents is harder.

This article is the second in a What’s Working series that looks at innovative policy solutions pioneered by the Rural Education Action Program. REAP brings together researchers from Stanford University and China to devise new ways to improve rural education and alleviate poverty. You can read the first article in the series here.  

QIN'AN COUNTY, China -- Wei Wentai can barely be heard over the crescendo of cackles coming from the hallway. Fourth graders everywhere cane be boisterousness, but today the presence of two foreigners, an exotic breed in the rugged hills of western China, has driven these kids into a frenzy.

You could try to reason with the children: tell them they need to quiet down because Dr. Wei is here to train their teachers in how to perform vision tests. Those tests will give some kids free glasses so they can see the blackboard, dramatically improving their grades and chances of graduating high school.

But yeah, that’d be about as effective here in rural Gansu, in China's northwest, as it would be in Alabama, and it takes the lunch bell to drag the mob away from the classroom window. 

With relative peace restored, Wei continues to tutor the 12 village schoolteachers in the basics of eyesight and education. Having grown up nearby, he knows what superstitions to dispel (“No, glasses do not make your eyes worse”) and what points to drive home (“Yes, glasses dramatically improve grades for nearsighted students”). Despite receiving his medical training in Shanghai, Wei returned home after graduating and always speaks in the local dialect when training the teachers to perform this basic eye exam and write referrals.

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It’s a simple presentation tailored to this county, but one predicated on years of trust building and scientific trials by researchers on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.

Driving the project, called Seeing is Learning, are researchers from Stanford University’s Rural Education Action Plan (REAP) and Shaanxi Normal University’s Center for Experimental Economics in Education (CEEE). These groups operate in an emerging field of development economics that prizes rigorous experimentation over theory. Concrete interventions, randomized controlled trials and impact analysis are what drive their research and policy recommendations. Randomized controlled trials compare a randomly assigned group of participants receiving a particular treatment being studied with one not receiving the treatments. These trials are often called the gold standard of scientific research. 

REAP and CEEE have spent almost five years accruing the political capital and research results that they hope will overcome one of the biggest obstacles standing between rural Chinese kids and a high school diploma: most of them can’t even see the writing on the blackboard. 

Like many of their peers around East Asia, rural Chinese children suffer high rates of myopia. Around 57 percent are nearsighted by middle school, according to one REAP study. Unlike schoolchildren in Singapore or in China’s cities, most kids growing up in the Chinese countryside are ignorant of and isolated from vision care. 

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In hundreds of visits to rural Chinese classrooms, REAP program director Matt Boswell has rarely seen a bespectacled face. A patchy and inadequate rural medical system, the high cost of glasses and cultural preferences for eye exercises over glasses (what one researcher calls “voodoo health”) mean that most children growing up in townships and villages never take a vision test. 

“There is no eye care at the township level in China,” said Boswell. “Period.”

That void has a huge impact on education. In a study published in the British Medical Journal, REAP and Chinese researchers showed that giving myopic kids free glasses improved their math test scores by about as much as reducing class sizes. Those improvements came despite the fact that only 41 percent of students who were prescribed glasses actually wore them regularly. According to Boswell, when results were limited to the students who actually wore the glasses they were given, the impact proved enormous: it roughly halved the achievement gap between these rural students and their urban peers in just nine months.

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Improvements of that size represent some of the juiciest low-hanging fruit in Chinese education. Sixty percent of children in the countryside will drop out before high school, many due to failed grades and entrance exams. These tens of millions of dropouts threaten to throw a wrench in the Chinese government's plan to transition to a service- and innovation-based economy.

But when dealing with China’s bureaucracies, having a simple solution to a vexing problem isn’t enough to start harvesting that low-hanging fruit. The real art and science of the project came in aligning bureaucratic interests to get it off the ground.

“Every issue has its own little ecosystem,” Boswell said. 

For Seeing is Learning, that ecosystem involved education officials committed to the eye exercise regime, schools that closely guard access to their students, families who are deeply suspicious of the effect of eyeglasses and hospitals that saw no reason to screen rural kids.

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To break the impasse, the researchers had to first get local education bureaucrats on board. Randomized controlled trials proved the effectiveness of glasses and debunked the myth of eye exercises. They caught the eye of a powerful official in the nearby city of Tianshui, whose backing opened the doors to local schools. With REAP’s pledge to subsidize glasses, the hospitals suddenly saw large new markets materialize.

As a kicker, one trial found that when teachers were offered an iPad if their students were wearing glasses during random inspections, usage rates jumped from 9 to 80 percent.

“Hospitals love it because they get in the schools. Principals love it because of the impact on scores,” said Boswell. “We love it because the kids are learning.”

Turning that newfound excitement into a working program required the creation of two “Model Vision Counties” in which nurses and doctors like Wei Wentai receive accelerated optometry training.  In order to expand that reach from the county seat down to the village,  REAP ran another trial to see if teachers could conduct accurate eye exams after just a half-day training (answer: yes). So the newly trained doctors now rotate through the village schools, training teachers who then refer students to the hospital vision centers for proper prescriptions.

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Now the researchers are looking to scale up the program to six counties and at the same time turn the vision centers into sustainable social enterprises. Using their privileged access to schools, the vision centers can sell glasses to urban children with the resources to pay. Those profits then subsidize the first pair of glasses for rural kids, and repay REAP's initial loan, which REAP can then reinvest in creating further Model Vision Counties.

It’s a new model for REAP and one that prompts many new research questions. Can the vision centers earn enough revenue to both subsidize glasses and keep the hospitals happy? Will teachers enforce wearing eyeglasses if given a simple mandate rather than an iPad? Will the impact of the first pair of glasses convince rural parents to purchase the second pair?

Those questions will be investigated and answered when the project scales up. But as this van winds its way back down from the village to the county hospital, Wei Wentai reflects on the work they’ve done.

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A child takes an eye exam administered by REAP and CEEE.

Du Guodong reports on REAP research in a special feature on left-behind children and boarding schools in the October 2015 issue of News China Magazine.

As millions of migrant workers flock to China's cities in search of factory jobs, they are leaving an estimated 60 million children at home in rural areas without one or both parents. In response, the government has invested heavily in boarding schools. However, these boarding schools often fail to meet students' basic needs—both physical and psychological. 

REAP launched the Dorm Managers in Rural Primary Schools project to address this issue. Dorm managers, who are responsibe for boarding students outside of the classroom, are often poorly trained, and their management approaches are frequently ad hoc, possibly leading to the extremely unsatisfactory living conditions found in many rural boarding schools. 

REAP evaluated whether a dorm manager training program could improve the health, behavior, and emotional state of boarding students. Overall, the training program was highly effective. Following the training program, fewer students reported feeling cold while sleeping, and fewer students experienced diarrhea. Students arrived to class more punctually and had fewer disciplinary problems. Finally, communication between dorm managers and students improved.

In a feature on left-behind children and boarding schools, News China Magazines discusses REAP's research within the broader context of what is being done to improve boarding school conditions.

"Over the years, China’s central government has attached growing importance to the problem of left-behind children, establishing boarding schools in rural areas across the country. In January 2015, the State Council, China’s cabinet, released its Guidelines on the Development of Children in Impoverished Regions (2014-2020), in which a comprehensive care system targeting left-behind children began to take shape, at least on paper. According to the plan, the number of boarding schools will be strengthened in 680 of China’s most impoverished rural counties."

"Nevertheless, according to a report on boarding school students in rural areas published by child welfare NGO Geluying, or “Growing Home,” the mental and emotional health of China’s boarding school students is a major concern. The organization surveyed nearly 100 boarding school students in 10 provinces between January 2012 and November 2014. They discovered that 47.3 percent of children surveyed suffered from acute “pessimism,” 63.8 percent said that they felt “lonely,” 17.6 percent suffered from depression and 8.4 percent exhibited suicidal tendencies. According to the Rural Education Action Program, a Sino-foreign joint evaluation organization that aims to inform education, health and nutrition policy in China, boarding school students have higher levels of anxiety and demonstrate poorer social skills than students who live at home."

Read the full article here.

Matt Sheehan
China Correspondent, The WorldPost
August 27th, 2015

This article was reprinted with permission from the Huffington Post. To read the original piece, click here.

“You can put off building a highway or an airport, but you can’t put off nurturing a child."

This article is the first in a What’s Working series that looks at innovative policy solutions pioneered by the Rural Education Action Program (REAP), an impact evaluation organization that brings together researchers from Stanford University and China to forge new solutions in rural poverty alleviation.

DANFENG COUNTY, China -- The Shanghai stock market is in free fall, and pundits (and Donald Trump) are in a frenzy. Bubbles, booms and collapses are the bread and butter of China punditry -- they get clicks and boost ratings.

Using real-world experiments, rigorous statistical analysis and nursery rhymes, a trans-Pacific research team -- called the Rural Education Action Program -- is teaching parents and grandparents how to stimulate toddlers’ brains. During a recent pilot program, REAP teamed up with family planning officials to make weekly visits to rural households. There, they would bring toys and lesson plans for the week, teaching caretakers the games and leaving toys with the families.

 

“Cut the celery, cut the celery! Sprinkle the salt, sprinkle the salt!”

 

Liu chants in unison with her grandchild. They both mime a chopping motion and spice their invisible dish as the toddler giggles. It sounds like a silly kids' game, but silly kids' games provide exactly the kind of mental exercise that experts say will help Peng graduate from high school.

 

Research has shown that the first 1,000 days of a child’s life (defined to include time in the mother’s womb) comprise the single most crucial period for forging neural networks. Children deprived of proper nutrition and mental stimulation before their second birthday are more likely to grow up with a very low mental ceiling. Many will face an irreversible deficit of the verbal and math skills needed to make it in the 21st century. 

Liu Qiaoyun (right) poses with her husband and two granddaughters. The family received weekly visits from family planning officials who taught them parenting techniques.

 

Rising wages mean China’s low-skill factory jobs are slowly evaporating, giving way to service sector work that requires a high school education. While kids growing up in Chinese cities get the attention and education needed to succeed in this new economy, many rural children spend these pivotal years in suffocating silence. 

 

Almost half of China's 1.3 billion people live in the countryside, including an estimated 60 million “left behind children” -- village kids raised by grandparents while their parents labor in faraway cities.  Elderly Chinese, many of whom lived through war, famine and abject poverty, often define good parenting as keeping a child clothed and fed. Newborns are often left to sit and stew in their own thoughts, while toddlers wander the courtyard by themselves. 

 

One REAP study found that 70 percent of babies in rural central China were significantly delayed in either cognitive or motor development.

 

Scott Rozelle, a Stanford economics professor who co-founded REAP, says the consequences are dire for these children and the future of China’s economy.

 

“You can’t go to high school, you can’t learn algebra, you can’t learn a foreign language, you can’t learn analytical sciences -- those guys are screwed,” Rozelle told The WorldPost. “How can you become a high-income country with a quarter of your population like that?”

 

If China hopes to make the leap from what it is -- a middle-income country with a per capita GDP just below the Dominican Republic -- into a wealthy country, it needs a well-educated population. Avoiding the treacherous “middle-income trap” (think Mexico or Thailand) requires China to switch economic gears from low-cost exports to services and innovation.

 

Children play at the first parenting training center opened by REAP in Danfeng county.

Productive workers in a high-income economy need a high school education, but only 40 percent of rural Chinese children ever make it to high school. REAP believes those problems begin in infancy.

 

After learning about the importance of early childhood parenting, Liu shakes her head when thinking about the way she raised her own son. Back then, parenting was a strictly material proposition.

 

“We thought it was enough that he ate his fill, had enough to drink and had warm clothes to wear,” Liu told The WorldPost. “We didn’t know what to teach him. We just taught him to walk, to eat.”

 

Educating millions of caretakers about how to nourish their toddlers, both physically and mentally, requires marshaling major resources. To achieve that, REAP partnered with China's family planning bureaucracy just as the country began phasing out population controls (the "one-child policy" is a misnomer, because many rural Chinese and ethnic minorities are allowed to have two children). With obsolescence on the horizon, family planning officials leapt at the chance to make themselves a part of the new parenting education pilot program.

 

Rozelle was uninspired by his initial experience of China’s family planning cadres and their handiwork in the 1980s. While conducting household agricultural surveys, he could tell immediately if a family had three children -- family planning enforcers had confiscated almost all the furniture, leaving families with a few mats and chairs.

 

“We’re trying to take the world’s largest, most notorious bureaucracy -- a million people who are known internationally for fining people into poverty -- and suddenly you want them to go in and teach mom and grandma how to sing to their baby,” Rozelle said. 

 

Family planning official Tang Hailan during a home visit for the REAP parenting training project.

The family planning participants in the pilot program first received a week of training about the importance of early childhood activities and how to teach them to parents. Then they began their weekly home visits, often setting off by motorcycle for remote hamlets.

 

The program represents a welcome change for the officials, who say the parenting training provides a refreshing break from their normal work.

 

“The families are happy to see me come,” said Li Bo, a local family planning official who worked as a parenting trainer for four families. “At the beginning, they didn’t believe us, didn’t understand. Now they’re really welcoming. They call me a lot and it’s really pretty moving.”

 

What separates REAP from traditional aid groups is its commitment to scientifically quantifying the impact of its interventions, and turning those interventions into government policy.

 

REAP is part of a new school of thought in development economics that conducts real-world experiments using randomized controlled trials -- the gold standard for impact evaluation. All projects have an intervention group (in this case, families who receive parenting training visits) and a control group (those who don’t), and both groups receive standardized assessments before and after the experiment.

 

Those assessments allow REAP to evaluate best practices: Is it more cost effective to give malnourished students an egg or a nutrition packet? Can government subsidies for parents keep kids in school?  Based on the answers, REAP can tweak interventions for maximum impact.

 

REAP is currently adjusting its parenting intervention, shifting its focus from providing home visits to teaching classes at parenting centers, where kids can play every day. Twenty centers are set to be constructed this fall, laying the groundwork for a statistical comparison to determine whether the centers are more effective than home visits -- or no intervention whatsoever. 

 

Children play at the new parenting training center in Shaanxi province.

This level of precision gives more weight to REAP’s policy recommendations. REAP’s China director, Zhang Linxiu, holds a prestigious post in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, meaning the group has the ear of China’s highest officials. China’s premier has already read over twenty policy briefs from REAP, and turned some into national policy.

 

The parenting training project is in its early stages, but REAP’s leaders in China and California hope that the data they’re collecting now will change the way China invests in its economic future.

 

“You can put off building a highway or an airport, but you can’t put off nurturing a child,” Zhang Linxiu said. “If you delay construction of highways by a couple years, you’ll have some economic loss, but if you put off nurturing a child by a couple years, then you’re losing a generation.”