The Chinese state's commitment to improve teaching quality in rural regions is a key component of national efforts to close the rural-urban education gap. In this paper, we investigate an understudied but critical dimension of quality teaching: teacher expectations. We employ longitudinal data gathered in Gansu Province in 2000 and 2007 to first examine whether teacher expectations for rural youth are conditioned by students' social origin and teacher background characteristics. Next, we determine the predictive accuracy of their expectations. Our results highlight the ways in which teacher expectations condition the sorting of rural children among different schooling tracks with distinct life trajectories. Significantly, teachers are more likely to hold lower expectations for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. In addition, non-local teachers hold lower expectations for rural children compared to local teachers. Finally, a low percentage of teachers expect students to enroll in post-compulsory vocational education. We consider the implications of these results for both educational policy and social inequality. AbstractThe Chinese state's commitment to improve teaching quality in rural regions is a key component of national efforts to close the rural-urban education gap. In this paper, we investigate an understudied but critical dimension of quality teaching: teacher expectations. We employ longitudinal data gathered in Gansu Province in 2000 and 2007 to first examine whether teacher expectations for rural youth are conditioned by students' social origin and teacher background characteristics. Next, we determine the predictive accuracy of their expectations. Our results highlight the ways in which teacher expectations condition the sorting of rural children among different schooling tracks with distinct life trajectories. Significantly, teachers are more likely to hold lower expectations for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. In addition, non-local teachers hold lower expectations for rural children compared to local teachers. Finally, a low percentage of teachers expect students to enrol in post-compulsory vocational education. We consider the implications of these results for both educational policy and social inequality.

This special issue focuses on the education of rural youths who have been influenced by China's rural-to-urban migration, probably among the largest in human history (UNICEF 2014, 112). In contemporary China, rural-to-urban migration has not only fueled the nation's economic boom, but also affected the lives of a significant proportion of China's children. Among the estimated 106 million children 1 impacted by migration in 2010, 35.81 million children migrated with their parents to urban areas, while 70 million were left-behind in predominately rural areas (UNICEF 2014). The rural youths who have been influenced by China's massive rural-to-urban migration face formidable challenges for socioeconomic mobility. Access to quality education is a critical component of their poor societal prospects (Kwong 2006). Migrant and left-behind children hold lower educational aspirations and are less likely to complete compulsory education (

In this article, Lisa Yiu examines how migrant students attending public schools in Shanghai perceive teachers as uncaring and how the majority of teachers claim they are disempowered from caring. She contends that recent Shanghai reforms, which aim to “care” for migrant youth through inclusion into public schools, may be having the opposite effect, arguing that the nature of contact between educators and migrant youth is structured by conflicting state policies on citizenship, which constrain teachers from caring in the way migrant students desire. Yiu's findings problematize recent scholarship on migrant children's schooling which presumes that the dynamics of exclusion are primarily rooted in teacher prejudices. Importantly, this study advances caring theory by reconceptualizing care within the institutional context of the state's citizenship policies and contributes to a citizenship-based care praxis that is relevant to Chinese migrant youth who attend public schools.

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