Research On Equality In Admission Opportunities Of Migrant Workers' Children To Shanghai

As China experiences increasingly rapid urbanization, industrialization and modernization, the economy's required allocation of human resources has engendered large scale population migration. Shanghai, as one of most economically advanced regions in China, has experienced annual increases in the volume of migration; additionally, migration due to family and employment needs has become a regular occurrence. Thus, the effect of urban migration on compulsory education for the benefit of children has become societal problem that cannot be ignored. Migrant working families to Shanghai seeking educational opportunities for their children generally have two options: the first is a public school of relatively high educational quality, while the other is a specialty school operated by migrants and reserved for children of these families. Due to the obvious superiority of Shanghai public schools over the specialty migrant children's schools in terms of both facility conditions and overall educational quality, studying in public school has become an important goal for the children of migrant workers. However, since migrant workers' children do not have Shanghai residency, they are required to pay a certain "Jie Du Fei" in addition to meeting standard admission requirements in order to enroll in Shanghai's public schools; a common practice by schools is to rely on additional admission examinations to determine the enrollment eligibility of these children.Equality in admission opportunities is a starting point and critical component to social justice, and fairness in the stage of compulsory education is the most basic concept of equality. To provide the children of urban migrant workers with fair, equitable educational opportunities in a competitive system is an intrinsic requirement to establishing a stable society. This study, by investigating two elementary schools in Shanghai, found through comparisons of family capital (including social capital , economic capital and cultural capital) among different migrant working families that there is great inequality in educational opportunities for their children. Families with greater family capital typically selected schools with better conditions and higher educational standards: Shanghai's public elementary schools. In contrast, families of lower social, economic and cultural capital were limited to specialty migrant children's elementary schools.Via a new perspective of study, this dissertation tries to analyze the reason why the migrant children have different opportunities for education in Shanghai. Besides the residency, the financial assignment system, and the city-countryside dual system, the opportunities of education in city among the migrant children are also deeply influenced by the accumulation of capital.The dissertation includes five chapters. The first chapter is preliminary remarks, in which we review the existing domestic and foreign research and the core concepts and research method are defined or described. The second chapter mainly analyses the relationship between the social capital and the migrant children's enrollmentopportunity for education from two dimensions-----the source of information aboutschool and the social relations network. The third chapter mainly discusses the relationship between the economic capital and the children's enrollment opportunityfor education from three dimensions-----expense on education, providing theirchildren with good education, and time spending on their children. And the relationship between the culture capital and the children's enrollment opportunity for education is researched in the fourth chapter, in which the dissertation illustrates the problem through three sides including the effect of diploma, the effect of language mode, and the effect of habits upon the children. Finally, in the fifth chapter the dissertation gives the conclusion and discussion.