“More than 70 percent of students from China’s major cities go to college, less than 5 percent of students from poor rural areas do.”
An old Chinese proverb 预防胜淤治疗 yùfángshèngyūzhìliáo tells us that prevention is better than a cure, and the is modeling what can be done to solve rural Chinese students’ biggest barriers to education through simple health interventions.
REAP was founded with the mission of tackling the great disparity in educational attainment between rural and urban China:
REAP works to help rural poor students from China overcome education obstacles and studies the education disparity between rural, migrant, and urban children. Through real-world, experiment based research, REAP provides policy makers with clear scientific results that can help shape successful policies to improve the effectiveness of K-12+ rural education programs and improve the educational experience of young Chinese rural students. Key core partners include the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford, the Stanford Schools of Education and Medicine, and the Chinese Center for Agricultural Policy within the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
According to Stanford Professor Scott Rozelle, REAP’s Co-Director, today’s divide in education and human capital investment is tomorrow’s less equitable and prosperous society.
“There have been no countries in the world, who have developed since World War II, that have gone from middle income level to higher income level with China’s level of income inequality,” he said.
REAP currently focuses on improvements to rural education as a way to close the gap. Although the Chinese government has poured massive investment into school facilities and teacher training, underlying problems remain that hold students back. In a recent talk in Beijing, Professor Rozelle highlighted REAP’s surprising findings from their field work:
“No matter how much you invest in facilities, teachers, and curriculum, if students are sick, they may not be able to learn. We did a baseline of 5300 students in 9 counties in Guizhou, and we found that 40% of the kids had intestinal worms.
In poor areas of, , , and , 11% of students are so nearsighted they can’t see the blackboard, and none of them have glasses. In Ningxia, Shaanxi, Sichuan, Gansu, we’ve taken 20,000 blood tests, and on average 1/3 of students in poor rural areas have anemia. That’s 20 million kids today that are so sick they can’t learn. This is China’s future labor force.”
REAP, based at with an office in the , follows a rigorous set of scientific standards when testing out new educational or health initiatives. By designing randomized controlled trials that compare control groups with those receiving an intervention, they are able to measure the exact benefits of a program. When looking at anemia, for example, only by dividing target schools into 2 groups, one that received daily multivitamins and one that didn’t, were they able to determine, with statistic significance, that multivitamins containing just 5 mg of iron per day can cure 60% of anemic kids and also boost their test scores significantly.
The REAP interventions have wide reaching impact. In the past four years, REAP has given out 1.5 million USD in scholarships, 20 million multivitamins, and de-wormed 10,000 children.
REAP also acts as a bridge to larger-scale government policy change. As part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences at CCAP in Beijing, REAP research results are summarized in policy recommendation reports that sometimes land on the desks of China’s highest decision makers.
“The Chinese Academy of Sciences has direct access to the State Council. Over the past 3 years, REAP has had 10 policy briefs that have been put on the reading lists of the Vice Premiers, and 9 of them were actually turned into policy action,” said Profezzor Rozelle.
Local governments that partner with REAP also take action. REAP work and policy briefs inspired the “One egg a day” nutrition program in Shaanxi that distributes 100 million eggs a year to poor students, a similar program in Ningxia that distributes 50 million cartons of milk, and the 60 billion renminbi allocated by the Guizhou government to deworming campaigns.
But sometimes knowing how to solve the problem is not the most difficult part. The real challenge is implementing these interventions on a national, long-term scale. China has the money to fund all of the programs REAP has proven to have an impact. Professor Rozelle estimates that a small portion of China’s moon expedition budget could go a long way in improving rural education and health:
“Early education, health and nutrition in schools, conditional cash transfers in junior high, mandatory, free education for high school, all of that can be done on a quarter of China’s moon budget.”
For more information on REAP, visit their website:
About the Author
It’s very impressive and I would think very unusual as well that the Chinese government has transformer Stanford’s policy papers into practice. How is this being done? Does somebody at Stanford have really good “guanxi” with the right people? What’s the secret?
In some ways it is and in some ways it isn’t.
In the large scheme of things it is rare for a Chinese policy decision to be directly traced to a foreign source. On the other hand, foreigners indirectly effect Chinese policy all of the time.
Non-profits are the best example. Foreign owned non-profits are politically immune in China: that is to say, people do not associate them with the government so what non-profits do does not reflect on government officials. Often times various governments within China will use this to their advantage and allow the Non-profits to experiment with social problems that might seem to radically politically, or may simply offend another official or higher-up if done through an official government arm.
I should emphasize that half of REAP’s leadership and many core team members are researchers at the Chinese Center for Agricultural Policy within the Chinese Academy of Sciences. REAP also has strong partnerships with China’s most prestigious universities including Tsinghua University, Peking University, Zhejiang University, and Renmin University, to name a few. It doesn’t hurt that Professor Rozelle has been working in China for 30 years, but it is in many ways a Chinese-driven research institute. I think this is why they have been so successful working with government at the local and national level.