The Cost of School Consolidation Policy: Implications from Decomposing School Commuting Distances in Yanqing, Beijing

Estimating the Effects of Educational System Consolidation: The Case of China’s Rural School Closure Initiative

“…We use 1999 as the empirical cut-off year because school closures were sporadic before this date in the data. Even though the central directive for school consolidation was officially issued in 2001, from our data, it seems that the policy was in place in some counties before the nation-wide policy announcement (also seeDai et al (2017)). 7 The age-at-closure effect is determined by the age of exposed children at year of closure.…”

“…China's Compulsory Educational Law, promulgated in 1986, provided the legal foundation for nine years of compulsory education and established the principle that primary schools should be located in close proximity to rural children (Dai et al 2017;Ministry of Education 1986). A legacy of this principle was a widely distributed network of schools across the country (Yang and Wang 2013).…”

“…However, demographic changes were already exerting pressures on provision of education at the village-level in the 1990s (Cai, Chen, and Zhu 2017, 124). Dai et al (2017) report that consolidation experiments were piloted in some provinces in 1993.…”

“…National school consolidation policies commenced in 2001 (Dai et al 2017) . This document required local governments to make reasonable adjustments to schools' geographic distribution to improve efficiency.…”

The spatial justice of school distribution in Jakarta

“…Additionally, this travel method is considered affordable to all students despite their economic background, thus enabling researchers to focus on spatial quality instead of the affordability of methods. This research will not compare transportation methods as has been done previously (e.g., Dai et al., 2019 ; Liao and Dai, 2022 ).…”