A Comparative Study Of Compulsory Education For Children Of Poor Urban Families In Transition Period

The relation between family background and Children's academic performance is the hot topic which the intergenerational mobility research focused on. The paper based on the historical comparative study between urban poor families in two period of time, analyses the cause of academic performance difference between urban poor children and the upper middle class children. On the field work including in-depth interview, participative observation, and textual analysis with urban poor children in the downtown area of Hangzhou, the study develop and constitute innovative causal route:(1) In the macro context of social structure transition and educational system reform, what changes happened at the level of family and school, and how these changes continue or intensify the disadvantage of urban poor children in educational opportunities; (2) Following up the micro adjustment of educational value in the culture, how the change of educational concepts owned by teachers and parents impact directly on the shape of academic personal factors in urban poor children. The structural and cultural changes as two parallel influencing factors directly intensify the academic disadvantage of urban poor children in social transition, which the study tries to prove.In the binary route of macro structure and micro cultural value, the study takes educational opportunity, family resource, and the distribution of school educational resource as the structural factors, and takes academic personal factors, educational expectation, educational knowledge, and the value in educational decision making as the cultural factors. Three empirical findings are presented by the historical comparision between different period of time and the horizontal comparision between different family background within structural and cultural factors:(1) The polarization of family resource and parent educational concepts between different social classes, and the unequal distribution of high-quality schooling opportunities exacerbate the disadvantage of urban poor children in educational opportunity distribution; (2) The extension of class gap in family child rearing function and educational concepts, and the unequal distribution of educational resource worsen the academic personal factors of urban poor children; (3) With the stratification of educational opportunities and academic personal factors, the family background plays more important role in children academic performance.The empirical study takes the compulsory education of urban poor children in the early 1990s and the late 2000s as cases, uses the qualitative method to historically compare the influence of structural and cultural transition to the family resource, child rearing function and educational concepts of urban poor families, and the influence of compulsory education reform to the curriculum and extra-curriculum educational opportunities and the distribution of educational resource by teachers in the early market reform (1978-92) and the later market reform (post-1993). Based on the horizontal class differences between urban poor and upper middle class children on several factors, the study historically compares the change of class differences within two period of time, and demonstrates historical variance of the educational disadvantage of urban poor children. The comparison provides the foundation for the theoretical findings of the study.The conclusion illustrates that the strong program of cultural sociology provides another causal explanation which focus on the transformation of the symbolic classification of education in the mainstream culture, beside the structural and institutional cause of educational class differences.