The overall goal of this paper is to try to understand in the context China’s middle school education system what is the tradeoff between community service and educational performance. In addition, we seek to understand some of the other effects of participation in community service activities. When students participate in community service, does their self-esteem rise and/or self-efficacy rise? Finally, we also want to know if students participate in community service activities will their sense of social responsibility rise.

Because the nature of this question is so broad we must necessarily reduce the scope of the paper. To do so, we study a community service program funded and run by a private US foundation in 592 junior high and high school classes in two counties in Shaanxi province. While we understand that there are many institutional and pedagogical issues that will affect the relationship among community service, grades and a sense of social responsibility (e.g., citation), we will focus our efforts on empirically evaluating the linkages. We also recognize that by focusing on the activities of an NGO in a single part of China that many of the findings will be affected by the context of the program. However, we also believe that we may be able to observe and measure more fundamental behavioral relationships. At the very least we seek to provide rigorous, statistically-based evidence from a case study which hopefully can be combined with other work to help us more fully understand community service, social responsibility and educational performance.

Background. Despite growing wealth and the growing commitment of China’s government to providing quality education, a significant share of children across rural China still have no access to regular sources of iron-rich foods, vitamins and other micronutrients. Such poor diets may not only result in high incidences of nutritional problems, including anemia, good nutrition has been shown to be an effective input into the creation of human capital.

Objective. To increase our understanding of the extent of anemia in poor Shaanxi Province’s primary schools, and identify structural correlates of anemia in this region. Methods. A cross-section survey was conducted. Data were collected from 4000 grade fourth grand students (ages 9 to 11) in 70 primary schools in poor rural areas of Shaanxi province. Structured questionnaires and standard test were used to gather data. Trained nurses carried out the hemoglobin tests (using Hemocue finger prick kits) and anthropomorphic measurements using high quality equipment.

Results. The paper shows that the overall anemia rate is 21.5% (39%) when using a blood hemoglobin cutoff of 115 g/L (120 g/L). We find that those students that are boarding at school and those students that eat lunch away from home are more likely to be anemic. Children with anemia are found to have lower height for age (HAZ) scores and have higher incidences of stunting.

Conclusions. If this part of Shaanxi province is representative of the rest of Shaanxi’s poor rural areas (or all national designed poor counties in China), this means that tens of thousands (or millions) of children in rural Shaanxi (all national designed poor counties in China) may be anemic. Although we were not able to pinpoint the exact determinates and causal effects of anemia, the main implication of this work is that anemia remains a serious health problem for educators and health officials in rural China.

Despite the rise in grade retention in poor areas in rural China recently, little work has been done to understand the impact of grade retention on the educational performance of students in these areas in rural China. This paper seeks to redress this shortcoming and examines the effect of grade retention on educational performance on 1649 students in 36 elementary schools in Shaanxi province. With a dataset that was collected from a survey designed specifically to capture school performance of students before and after they were retained, we use Differences-in-Differences, Propensity Score Matching and Differences-in-Differences Matching approaches to analyze the effect of grade retention on school performance. Although the descriptive analysis shows that grade retention helps to improve the scores of the students that were retained, somewhat surprisingly, the results from the multivariate analysis consistently show that there is no significant positive effect of grade retention on school performance of the students. In fact, in some cases (e.g., for the students who repeat grade 2), grade retention is shown to hurt school performance.