GIS-based Spatial Analysis Of Rural Primary And Secondary Schools: A Case Study Of Gongyi City, Henan Province

With the ever changing of China's rural population and its structure.Inevitably, the primary and secondary school redistricting is an important issue for Chinese authorities in education department.And during the process, it's crucial to allocate the resources with reason and equity in that,and it embodies the true meaning and implementation of 9 years compulsory education policy. Facing the critical challenges during the management of rural education resources, this paper takes new insightful perspective from the element of space. By introducing Geographical Information System (GIS), spatial accessibility and Huff Model, the paper first evaluates the current spatial distribution of the resources and the issues wherein; then inspiring effective measures are deduced to provide as the basis of educational resource management.Based on the review of related theory and methodology, the primary and secondary school in Gongyi City are taken as an example to carry out analyses as follows. First, GIS is used to develop the geospatial database for the distribution of schools, population, transportation networks, terrain etc.Second, the spatial accessibility of the educational resources is calculated. Third, by using the Huff model the relationship between schools (with their locations and sizes taken into account) and students are analyzed. Four, the distribution pattern of local schools and current issues are discussed to finally draw some insightful conclusion on how to optimize the resources. All the work involved, for example data management, mapping, modeling etc. is carried out in ArcGIS 9.0 of ESRI Inc.The paper first uses ratio model to analyze quantitatively the current allocation of the schools in every town area. Huff model is employed here with the assumption that students always try to go to the nearest school. The service area of each school is depicted accordingly and the spatial configuration between schools and villages is discussed. Then, each school's size is taken into account and the Huff-based gravitational model is used to calculate the index of spatial accessibility of every region, which can show the inequity of education resources. With the assumption that students are distance minimizers, the shortest path between schools and villages is used in the models. Distribution pattern of the population is also considered. The model works in condition that school service is not in form of monopoly, which means that local students have enough options to choose their best schools. Finally the service radius and the spatial accessibility of educational resources to local students are derived and the configuration between schools'potential capacity and students'real demand is also discussed in the paper.The case study shows that: a. There exit uneven spatial patterns in terms of the per capita educational resources in the town areas and in schools, of spatial accessibility for schooling, and of schools'distribution. The characteristics of schools'spatial distribution, which can tell us critical issues in specific location, can be reflected in the following indices: current allocation of educational resources, the shortest distance for schooling, and the spatial accessibility etc. b. First the nearest distance model, then the gravity model and finally Huff model are used to calculate the service radius of all the schools. The first model neglects the students'demand; yet Huff model can explicitly reflects the real spatial relationship between the supply and demand of educational resources. c. GIS and spatial analysis plays significant role in allocating rural schools which is both indispensable and irreplaceable in that they can not only manage all the relevant huge amount of data, evaluate the spatial configuration of the resources, but also have great potential to offer optimum plan for the allocation of rural educational resources.