Educational Administration

Essay Question With the introduction of market socialism, rural migrants are growing in China’s urban areas, like Bei Jing, Shang Hai and Guang Zhou. Due to frequent moves, poverty, pressures on parents, and related factors, children from these rural families are not achieving in China’s urban schools. While this problem is distinctive in many ways to the Chinese context, it also shares some “family-resembling” characteristics with the education of poor and minority students in American urban schools. In this essay, I first set forth similarities and differences between these two populations of student. Next, I indicate and analyze the leadership practices that are commonly advocated in the US context for helping these students to achieve in urban education, and finally, I discuss the some of the implication of such practices for the Chinese context. “When I return, I want to see all 28 students. Not one less.” Mr. Gao, who was temporarily leaving the only elementary school in Shuiquan village for his ailing mother, told the thirteen-year old substitute teacher Miss. Wei before he left. In the popular movie Not One Less, the famous Chinese director Zhang Yimou dramatizes the plight of schools and families in China’s rural areas. The young and inexperienced substitute teacher works in a dilapidated one-room rural schoolhouse. Heeding the words of the absent teacher, the substitute’s main goal is to prevent children from dropping out of school. The story centers around her journey to bring back a boy who left school to earn money in the city to help pay his mother’s medical expenses. “Not one less” has been China’s long-term goal in providing rural children equal access to education. After 1990s, with the introduction of market socialism, rural migrants are growing in China’s urban areas, like Bei Jing, Shang Hai and Guang Zhou. Due to poverty, frequent moves, pressures on parents, and related factors, children from these rural migrant families are not