In November 2015, the CPC Central Committee and the State Council issued the Decision on Winning the Fight against Poverty, highlighting the role of education in poverty alleviation. It clearly stated that education is fundamental to breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty, and that children living in poor areas must be guaranteed a fair and sound education at the beginning of their lives.

The concept of intergenerational transmission of poverty was developed by American anthropologist Oscar Lewis. It refers to two or more successive generations of a family living in underprivileged situations due to poverty. The conditions and factors that lead to poverty are passed from parents to children in the household, typically within a certain community or class, perpetuating a vicious cycle.

In order to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty transmission, it is crucial to pay attention to the role of education, in addition to a comprehensive range of factors including transportation, financial support, cultural norms, and other systemic components, to usher local people into prosperous lives. 

Take the “three prefectures” region as an example. The three prefectures refer to the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province, the Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan Province, and the Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture in Gansu Province. All three suffered from extreme poverty due to harsh natural and economic conditions, and a lack of awareness of education’s importance among some ethnic minorities.

Transportation and employment

Transportation is an important factor that prevents many children in poor mountainous areas from going to school. Constructing roads to “connect every village” and even “connect every household” in the three prefectures is key to preventing children from dropping out of school due to dangerous journeys and long commute times.

During field investigation in the three prefectures, we came across an extreme case of a 12-year-old boy who had to walk four hours at least, five to six hours at most, from his school to his home. As a result, the boy had never attended school. Later, he was able to receive vocational training classes in basic knowledge and skills thanks to the government’s policy to mitigate dropout rates and schoollessness. Without convenient transportation, many children from poor families might drop out of school at early ages. 

At the same time, more employment opportunities should be created in the three prefectures region to demonstrate the value of education to poor families and children. This would fundamentally eradicate outdated ideas such as “the uselessness of study” or the belief that “early marriage is better than attending school.”

A preliminary survey found that many locals had a limited understanding of formal employment, one that only considered employment as civil servants, or work at state-owned enterprises and public institutions, as formal employment. In reality, these career paths have limited openings each year. If their children could not find employment supported by a government payroll, the parents would assume that education leads nowhere, and they would encourage their children to drop out of school sometime in junior high school to seek work in big cities. 

In addition, early marriage and early childbearing are still common in many places within the three prefectures area. A certain percentage of students are married at the ages of 16, 17 and occasionally as young as 14 or 15, each year. It is only when industries develop, and begin generating more job opportunities for local people, that parents can recalibrate the value of education.

In 2016, the government issued the East-West Cooperation Action Plan for Vocational Education (2016-2020), which proposed establishing a joint and supportive relationship between schools inside and outside of the province (autonomous region and city) on a voluntary basis. This plan played a pivotal role in developing vocational education in western Yunnan Province.

In light of this, the three prefectures could follow suit, and join with eastern provinces such as Guangdong, Jiangsu, and Fujian provinces. At present, Foshan, Zhuhai, and Xiamen have established relationships with these three national-level impoverished areas, but these links are far from sufficient. In the future, Guangdong, Fujian, and Jiangsu provinces might each be assigned to one of these three prefectures, to comprehensively improve local principals’ abilities to run their schools, empower teachers, enhance teaching quality, and upgrade school facilities. 

Teachers are key

Early childhood education should be continuously improved by means of the “One Village One Preschool” project—a government-supported public intervention to provide disadvantaged rural and minority children in central and western rural China with access to early childhood education, cultivation and training for preschool teachers, preschool education investment through central and provincial transfer payments, and more support for private kindergarten funding. All these steps are fundamental if education is to play a role in lifting the three prefectures out of poverty.

According to statistics, the mandarin penetration rate was 61.56% in the three impoverished areas. Many ethnic minority parents don’t speak Chinese, so their children lack a proper environment to practice using mandarin. When these children attend school, it’s difficult for them to understand Chinese coursework, leading to poor academic achievement and reducing their will and access to higher levels of education. The comprehensive promotion of mandarin in preschool education will lay a solid foundation for the development of basic education in the three prefectures. That said, mandarin training among adults can also enhance impoverished people’s ability to lift themselves out of poverty. 

An additional area for improvement is the “One Village One Preschool” project. This project recruits a large number of village kindergarten teachers, among which some are formally offered permanent employment, while a majority remain temporary staff or volunteers, who receive a salary from the government, private enterprises, or foundations. Most of the volunteers or temporary hires are not enrolled in the social insurance programs. Sometimes, their wages are delayed.

In recent years, China has increased the pace of building more public kindergartens and inclusive private kindergartens to ensure that children obtain a better and cheaper preschool education. However, the county can only subsidize 2,000 yuan for each student each year, and inclusive private kindergartens are not allowed to charge parents additional fees. As a result, these kindergartens are faced with massive operational difficulties, and are barely able to pay their teachers around 2,000 yuan monthly. Without social insurance and benefits, teacher mobility is frequent, making the improvement of teaching quality impossible. 

To this end, the central government and provincial governments should increase the financial transfer support for inclusive private kindergartens, to ensure the healthy and sound development of preschool education in the three prefectures.

According to our survey, some 50.6% of teachers in the three prefectures received an after-tax salary ranging between 50,000 yuan and 80,000 yuan in 2019, which is 8.7 percentage points higher than the national level and 2.3 percentage points higher than the western region of China. Those who earned above 80,000 yuan accounted for 11.94%, 8.98 percentage points lower than the national level and 4.55 percentage points lower than the western region, whereas those with an income of more than 100,000 yuan only measured 2.05% in the three prefectures, 7.42 percentage points lower than the national level and 1.59 percentage points lower than the western region. 

As we can see, the proportion of low-income teachers are the majority, whereas high-income teachers are rare, making it hard to attract talented new teachers or to retain the existing cohort. In our field investigations, we also discovered that in the past, these impoverished areas were able to recruit new teachers graduating from provincial-level normal universities, but now they can only hire normal college graduates, and the teachers’ turnover rate has increased significantly in recent years as a result.

At any rate, it is necessary to increase transfer payments on the provincial level, and even establish wage subsidies and special subsidies for teachers in these impoverished areas, in order to raise their incomes and promote their sense of fulfillment, so as to attract excellent teachers and retain the current workforce. 

No child left behind

In recent years, China has taken different measures to limit dropout rates, such as improving the quality of rural education to make schools more attractive to students, poverty relief work to exclude financial reasons for dropping out, increasing educational investment, constructing better schools and developing boarding schools to solve rural students’ transportation problems, and promoting information technology to make more high-quality educational resources accessible to rural schools. At the same time, the government is also working to strengthen the vocational training for unemployed youth, and newly transferred rural labor force.

However, compared to basic health care and housing guarantees, the dropout issue is more complex, intractable, and hard-to-tackle. Therefore, local governments at all levels prioritize the role of education in poverty alleviation. For example, Yunnan Province has pioneered a four-step method to control dropout rates, including publicity efforts, orders for correction, administrative punishment, application for mandatory enforcement or filing a lawsuit. The county-level people’s court could even jail those parents who refuse to enroll their children in the nine years of free and compulsory education, including six years of primary education and three years of junior middle school education. 

Shen Youlu is a professor from the School of Education at Hainan Normal University.