The Partnership Between School and Home: A Cultural Explanation

Abstract

In spite of rapid economic growth and continual accumulation of wealth, poverty persists in rural China, especially in remote rural areas. Education has long been seen as the best long-term anti-poverty program by Chinese government. The cultivation of strong family-school partnerships is also recently and widely viewed as an important strategy and policy tool to improve rural students’ educational outcomes. This paper begins with an overview of recent development of rural education policy in China. It then describes the reform in rural China to promote parental involvement. This is followed by the case study in Zongyang, a county located in central part of China. The paper evaluates the effects of the reform in school involvement and examines how rural parents are responding to the reforms. Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory is used in analyzing how rural parents become involved in rural schooling. Household interviews and field notes are the main sources of data, in addition to a range of parents and teachers involved in this study. Thus, the paper identifies different patterns of parental involvement in rural schooling, the cultural explanations and the consequences. This is one of the first empirical studies to inquire about increasing parental participation in education in the post-Socialist China.