This study uses a randomized controlled trial of a school-based anemia reduction program in rural China to examine how increased school emphasis on health promotion affects academic performance. Although education and health promotion are complementary functions of schools, they do compete for finite school resources. We compare the effects of a traditional program that provided only information about anemia and subsidies to an otherwise identical program that included performance incentives for school principals based on school-level anemia prevalence. By the end of the trial, exam scores among students who were anemic at baseline improved under both versions of the program, but scores among students in the incentive group who were healthy at baseline fell relative to healthy students in the control group. Results suggest that performance incentives to improve student health increase the impact of school-based programs on student health outcomes, but may also lead to reallocation of school resources.

Although preschool has been shown to improve children’s school readiness in many developing countries, preschool attendance in poor rural areas of China is low. Vouchers/conditional cash transfers (CCT), which help parents defray the cost of preschool, are one possible policy intervention to increase attendance. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of a voucher/CCT program on preschool attendance and school readiness. To do so, we conducted a randomized controlled trial among 150 children in a poor, rural county in China. Our analysis shows that a one-year voucher/CCT intervention, consisting of a tuition waiver and a cash transfer conditional on attendance, raised attendance by 20 percentage points (or by 35 percent). However, the intervention did not have measurable impact on children’s school readiness. One potential explanation for these findings is the poor quality of preschool education in rural China.

Aiming to provide better education facilities and improve the educational attainment of poor rural students, China’s government has been merging remote rural primary schools to centralized village, town, or county schools since the late 1990s. To accompany the policy, boarding facilities have been constructed that allow (mandate) primary school-aged children to live at school rather than at home. More generally, there also have been efforts to improve rural schools, especially those in counties and towns. Unfortunately, little empirical work has been available to evaluate the impact of the new merger and investment programs on the educational performance of students. Drawing on a unique dataset that records both the path by which students navigate their primary school years (i.e., which different types of schools did students attend) as well as math test scores in three poverty-stricken counties, we use descriptive statistics and multivariate analysis (both OLS and covariate matching) to analyze the relationship between different transfer paths and student educational performance. This allows us to examine the costs and benefits of the school merger and investment programs. The results of the analysis show that students who attend county schools perform systematically better than those attend village or town schools. However, completing primary school in town schools seems to have no effect on students’ academic performance. Surprisingly, starting primary education in a teaching point does not hurt rural students; on the contrary, it increases their test scores in some cases. Finally, in terms of the boarding effect, the neutral estimate in OLS and the negative estimate in covariate matching results confirm that boarding at school does not help the students; in some cases it may even reduce their academic performance.

Across the globe, students living in disadvantaged areas (rural, impoverished, remote) and from disadvantaged backgrounds (low income) are less likely than their advantaged counterparts to go to higher levels of schooling. In general, disadvantaged students repeat grades more, drop out more, and on average perform less well academically. They thus face serious challenges in taking advantage of education, an important channel for social mobility, as a means to help them and their households improve their long-term economic well-being. Recognizing this, policy makers and researchers in developing countries have implemented a variety of interventions to improve the educational outcomes of disadvantaged students.

We describe the degree to which household income is negatively associated with the prevalence of different types of disability (i.e. medical impairments) in China using data from the 2006 China National Sample Survey of Disabled Persons. We then calculate the extra costs of disability across different types of households and show how these costs differ by the type and severity of disability in both urban and rural areas. We finally use nationally-representative panel data on persons with disabilities from 2007 to 2009 to examine the degree to which social security measures are reaching persons with different types and severity of disabilities in both urban and rural areas. We conclude that while social assistance and insurance for households with disabilities is increasing rapidly over time, it is still not enough to offset the income differential between households with and without disabled persons, especially when accounting for the extra costs of living associated with disability.

Recent studies have shown that only about two-thirds of the students from poor, rural areas in China finish junior high school and enter high school. One factor that may be behind the low rates of high school attendance is that students may be misinformed about the returns to schooling or lack career planning skills. We therefore conduct a cluster-randomized controlled trial (RCT) using a sample of 131 junior high schools and more than 12,000 students to test the effects of providing information on returns or career planning skills on student dropout, academic achievement and plans to go to high school. Contrary to previous studies, we find that information does not have significant effects on student outcomes. Unlike information, counseling does have an effect. However, the effect is somewhat surprising. Our findings suggest that counseling increases dropouts and seems to lower academic achievement. In our analysis of the causal chain, we conclude that financial constraints and the poor quality of education in junior high schools in poor, rural areas (the venue of the study) may be contributing to the absence of positive impacts on student outcomes from information and counseling. The negative effects of counseling on dropout may also be due to the high and growing wages for unskilled labor (high opportunity costs) in China’s transitioning economy. It is possible that when our counseling curriculum informed the students about the reality of how difficult were the requirements for entering academic high school, it may have induced them to revise their benefit-cost calculations and come to the realization that they are better off dropping out and/or working less hard in school.

This paper uses a clustered randomised field experiment to explore the effects of a computer assisted learning (CAL) programme on student academic and non-academic outcomes in poor, rural public schools in China. Our results show that a remedial, game-based CAL programme in math held outside of regular school hours with boarding students in poor rural public schools improved standardised math scores by 0.12 standard deviations. Students from poorer families tended to benefit more from the programme. However, CAL did not have any significant impact on either Chinese language standardised test scores or non-academic outcomes.

Background. Despite growing wealth and a strengthening commitment from the government to provide quality education, a significant share of students across rural China still have inadequate access to micronutrient-rich regular diets. Such poor diets can lead to nutritional problems, such as iron-deficiency anemia, that can adversely affect attention and learning in school. Large scale policies in Northwestern China have attempted to tackle these nutritional problems using eggs.  The overall goal of this paper is to assess the impact of the government’s egg distribution program by comparing the effect on anemia rates of an intervention that gives students an egg per day versus an intervention that gives students a chewable vitamin per day. We will also assess whether either intervention leads to improved educational performance among students in poor areas of rural China. To meet this goal, we report on the results of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving over 2,600 fourth grade students from 70 randomly-chosen elementary schools in 5 of the poorest counties in Gansu Province in China’s poor Northwest region. The design called for random assignment of schools to one of two intervention groups, or a control group with no intervention. One intervention provided a daily chewable vitamin, including 5 milligrams of iron. The other mimicked the government policy by providing a daily egg. According to the findings of the paper, in the schools that received the chewable vitamins, hemoglobin (Hb) levels rose by more than 2 g/L (over 0.2 standard deviations). The standardized math test scores of students in these schools also improved significantly. In schools that received eggs, there was no significant effect on Hb levels or math test scores. Overall, these results should encourage China’s Ministry of Education (MOE) to look beyond eggs when tackling nutritional problems related to anemia in an education setting.