As seen in Stanford Social Innovation Review's 2016 Fall issue.

The sprawling National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) in China is one of the world’s largest bureaucracies. Its reach spreads from the bustling supercities on China’s eastern seaboard to the remote villages that dot the country’s vast rural interior. For decades, NHFPC officials had responsibility for enforcing China’s One Child Policy. In their relentless drive to keep fertility low, these officials sometimes fined noncompliant families into a state of poverty or even subjected women to forced abortion or sterilization procedures.

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The Independent writes about REAP's early childhood education centers and efforts to provide babies in rural China with a stimulating start to life. To read the original article, click here.

Around 8 per cent of rural children in China take college entrance exams, compared with 70 per cent of urban children. Reap officials believe this is due to a woeful lack of mental stimulation for rural youngsters between birth and the age of three. They say this is the crucial period for neurons to connect in the brain and set a path for a child’s mental ability later in life. “Around 92 per cent of neurons will have completed connecting by the age of three,” says Professor Shi Yaojiang, who heads Reap at the Centre for Experimental Economics in Education at Xi'an city’s Shaanxi Normal University. “This period is critical for early development. If parents don’t nurture their child’s brains during this time, then mental ability cannot be maintained. If you miss it, it’s irreversible.”

To combat all this, Reap, which was set up in conjunction with Stanford University in California, has founded seven education centres in China’s centrally located Shaanxi province. Caregivers bring toddlers there for weekly play and learning sessions with trainers such as Mr Li, and can use the facilities all week.

The sessions are meticulously planned, offering age-appropriate toys and materials to stimulate motion, cognitive skills, language and social abilities. They are all designed to help ensure a child's crucial mental development. “We don’t have toys at home, and my granddaughter just used to rip up books,” says Chen Huafen, a grandmother who comes to the centre with her grandchild. My granddaughter’s parents work away in Xi'an, so I take care of her,” Ms Chen adds. “At first I told them I didn’t know how to nurture a child, so they said: ‘Go to the education centre.’ Everything is good here. At home my granddaughter would just play in the dirt.”

The four-room education centre is a burst of life and colour in the sparse village, the streets of which are deathly quiet due to most residents working away in fields, or as migrant workers. The centre is small and basic, filled with new toys and picture books. A ball pit and plastic slide make a colourful centrepiece, and the cartoon-adorned walls and floors are padded to help boisterous toddlers avoid accidents. The children who come to the centre are happy and calm, occupied by the wealth of playthings on offer, the tinny squawk of push-button electronic toys drowning out sporadic, short-lived tantrums. Most of the children have no such items at home.

Reap has around 90 trainers who also make home visits to around 550 families living too far from the centres to travel to them. There are fewer than 20 centres at the moment, but there are plans to increase the number to 50 and pressure on the government to roll out the project nationwide.

Every six months Reap researchers compare mental ability test scores garnered from the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development between children who take part in the education course and those who don’t, and the results show the project is working. The group’s scores are maintained over time at an average of 97, and researchers have found that if children don’t take part in the course, their score declines to an average of 81. “And with a score of 81, you are not going to have the ability to graduate from high school,” claims Professor Shi.

Professor Shi has discussed the benefits of Reap with 27 National Health and Family Planning Commission officials from provinces across China in an attempt to see it spread throughout the country. Some have started setting up their own regional education centres. He hopes that the government will be enticed to fund a nationwide rollout by offering the prospect of a better-educated workforce: one more suited to China’s ongoing shift away from agriculture to urban industries.

Caixin media cites REAP's research on middle school dropout rates in commentary on the importance of investing in China's rural human capital. To read the piece in its original Chinese, click here.

Recently, an academic consensus has emerged that China should focus its human capital development in rural areas. Rural residents receive only an average of 9.6 years of education, which leaves them ill-prepared for high-skilled work. Yet with the increased mechanization of factories, manufacturing jobs will likely move offshore, or revert back to the West. This is a great risk for an economy transitioning from low-income to high-income status, such as China.

REAP's research has shown that middle school dropout rates in rural China have reached 63%. In addition, psychological problems of rural students are on the rise due to being "left-behind" by migrating parents. China's poorly formed land, residence and education policies have lead to this predicament. It's time for China to implement better policies for rural children. Investing in rural children is investing in the future of China.

The Economist cites research from REAP on how poor nutrition impacts educational performance in rural China. To read the original article, click here.

NO CAR may honk nor lorry rumble near secondary schools on the two days next week when students are taking their university entrance exams, known as gaokao. Teenagers have been cramming for years for these tests, which they believe (with justification) will determine their entire future. Yet it is at an earlier stage of education that an individual’s life chances in China are usually mapped out, often in ways that are deeply unfair.

Expense is a huge deterrent for many. Governments cover the costs of schooling for the nine years of compulsory education up to the age of around 15. But at senior high schools, families must pay tuition and other expenses; these outlays are among the highest in the world (measured by purchasing-power parity). Many students drop out of junior high school—which is free—because rising wages in low-skilled industrial work make the prospect of staying at school even less attractive. Millions enter the workforce every year who are barely literate or numerate. Poor nutrition is also a handicap. Stanford University’s Rural Education Action Programme has found that a high incidence of anaemia and intestinal worms in rural areas affects educational performance.

In China meritocratic exams have been revered since imperial times, when any man could sit them to enter the civil service. For centuries they enabled the poor but talented to rise to high office. The gaokao is similarly intended to be a great leveller. But society has become increasingly divided between those with degrees and those who never even went to senior high. That will mean growing numbers for whom social advancement will remain a distant dream.

Bloomberg quotes REAP's director, Scott Rozelle, on the entrenched inequality of China's rural youth. To read the original article, click here.

Hu Huifeng, an 18-year-old high school senior from China’s Jiangxi province, is on a strict regimen. Seven days a week she rises by 6 a.m. for a day of classes in Chinese, English, mathematics, chemistry, physics, and biology, with the last one finishing at 9:50 p.m. “Once I get home, I study until midnight,” she says.

Hu is among the 9 million students preparing for the biggest test of their life: China’s annual college entrance examination. Called the gaokao, or “high exam,” it will take place over nine hours on June 7-8 across China. It’s the culmination of years of memorization and test taking, capped off by at least 12 months of grueling preparation. With its roots in the imperial examinations that started more than 2,000 years ago, the gaokao decides what school you go to and what career you might have, says Xiong Bingqi, vice president at the 21st Century Education Research Institute in Shanghai.

The gaokao is an especially high hurdle for China’s more than 100 million rural students, who already receive an education of far lower quality than their urban counterparts. A quota system for allocating coveted college slots by province, which greatly favors local students, also works against rural youth who often live far from the better universities and need higher test scores than local applicants to gain admission. That means urban youth are 7 times as likely to get into a college as poor rural youth and 11 times as likely to get into an elite institution, according to economist Scott Rozelle, a Chinese education researcher at Stanford. “The current system itself is unfair,” Xiong says. “Inequality is inevitable.”

The Wall Street Journal reports on REAP's project to transition family planning workers to a new role - early childhood development experts that give China's rural children a headstart in life. To read the original article, click here.

For 30 years, Yu Huajian visited villages in rural China to remind couples to have just one child, to abide by the law and help the economy. He also pursued violators of the much-hated policy and oversaw abortions.

Since the one-child policy was abandoned in October, Mr. Yu and some of the half a million other family-planning workers have knocked on rural doors with a different message: How to play with children, read to them and raise them with better skills.

The shift was abrupt, but Mr. Yu said he has always done what he and leaders thought was best for the country.

"I think we should focus now on education," he said. "It's more meaningful."

China's leaders say that the one-child policy, which was ended amid a growing demographic imbalance, improved livelihoods. But for rural Chinese, the gap between them and urban dwellers widened sharply during the country's decades of explosive growth.

Today, their annual per capita disposable income is around $1,750, compared with $4,770 for their urban counterparts. High-school graduation rates for rural students are about 3%, compared with 63% for those in cities, according to China's Ministry of Education and the Asian Development Bank.

That gap has come into focus as China's government tries to shift the economy toward services and away from low-skilled manufacturing.

"This is China's ticking time bomb," said Shi Yaojiang, an economics professor at Shaanxi Normal University who is working with the government on the early-childhood project.

"The roads have all been paved, the buildings all constructed," said Mr. Shi. "We now need a labor supply that's up to standard."

The new early-childhood initiative has been rolled out in 15 provinces, districts and cities, according to the National Health and Family Planning Commission.

Cai Jianhua, the director of program training at the commission, is urging China's senior leaders to reorient the commission toward early-childhood development and expand funding to build early educational centers.