While the government is paying more attention to educational access for children in low-income families who attain high grades at school, this still means poor children whose attainment is lower are missing out.
Recently, East China’s Zhejiang Province released a report concerning the quality of primary schools. The percentage of poor children with excellent academic records, according to a report, is 30.4 percent, basically same as the international level.
This percentage shows that local government and educational departments are endeavoring to provide an equal education chance for poor children, and that these children have the ability to improve themselves and change their own destiny via studying, Xiong Bingqi, deputy director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, told the China Youth Daily.
However, focusing on academic performance can easily result in poor children with poor grades feeling that continuing to study is useless, so they drop out of school. This is particularly common in remote areas of the country.
Under these circumstances, educational authorities should not just use grades as a criterion when deciding where to target educational interventions. Schools should focus on all-round development, rather than only considering whether children perform well in subjects like math or Chinese and English, Xiong said. The most important thing, he noted, is to ensure that poor students are not discriminated at school.