Public Investment in Basic Education Informatization and Equity of Education:Evidence from Rural Distance Compulsory Education Project
Educational equity plays a crucial role in promoting overall social equity.Currently,China's uneven development of education quality,particularly the basic education,remains a significant issue with a substantial urban-rural gap in resources and solidified intergenerational educational transmission.Addressing how to enhance rural basic education quality,narrow the urban-rural education gap,and facilitate intergenerational educational mobility to ensure early access to educational equity for children from rural families is imperative.The"Rural Distance Compulsory Education Project"utilizes information technology to deliver high-quality educational resources to rural schools,fostering resource sharing between urban and rural areas while enhancing the quality of rural education and teacher proficiency.Assessing whether this project truly promotes educational equity holds great significance for refining relevant policies amidst digital informatization trends.Drawing on the data from population mini-census for China in 2015,this study examines the impact of special investments of this rural distance project on educational equity by analyzing the urban-rural education gap and intra-rural intergenerational mobility of education.Findings indicate that every 100 yuan increase in per-student investment narrows the urban-rural education gap by approximately 12.80％and reduces relative intergenerational mobility within rural areas as evidenced by a 9.52％increase in correlation between parental and child education rankings within these regions.In order to explore the causes of these results,we combine with the theoretical model inference of the impact of public education input on human capital accumulation and intergenerational mobility to conduct mechanism analysis,and find that the education input promotes the accumulation of human capital of rural individuals on the whole,but the group with better family education background benefit more.The formation of the benefit pattern mainly stems from the uneven improvement of education quality in rural areas brought by the implementation of the project.Heterogeneity analysis shows that female and children with better family economic background benefit more from this project,and local education investment preference and project investment management incentives will affect the full release of policy effects.The main research contributions of this paper are as follows:Firstly,from the perspective of research,it analyzes the balanced policy effect of this project more comprehensively through considering the impact of this project on the educational equity between urban and rural areas and within rural areas.Secondly,in terms of empirical strategy,this project is taken as the impact of exogenous policy to identify the causal effect of this investment on the urban-rural education gap and the intergenerational mobility of education in rural areas.In the analysis,a more scientific correlation index is used to measure the intergenerational mobility of education from the perspective of relative and absolute complementarily.This paper further explores the logical mechanism behind the policy impact,which provides a reference for the improvement of relevant policies in the future.Thirdly,in the theoretical sense,most domestic relevant studies on how public education input affects intergenerational mobility of education argue that the increase of public education input will definitely enhance the intergenerational mobility of education.While based on theoretical model deduction and empirical evidence analysis,this paper finds that if and only if the increased public education input is distributed"progressively",Intergenerational mobility in education would be enhanced by increased public spending on education.Finally,the empirical results have the following three policy implications.First,we can continue to actively promote the development and improvement of digitization and information technology in rural basic education.Second,in the follow-up development process,more attention should be paid to the"progressivity"of the benefits of distance compulsory education in rural areas,and the quality imbalance caused by the difference in the type of project schools and the development level of information infrastructure should be gradually improved.Third,it is necessary to further improve the supervision and management mechanism for the use of special investment funds in basic education,so as to effectively supervise and improve the efficiency of the use of education funds.
Rural Distance Compulsory EducationUrban-rural Education GapIntergenerational Mobility of EducationPublic Investment in Education
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