The Broken Ladder: Why Education Provides No Upward Mobility for Migrant Children in China

Abstract

AbstractThis paper attempts to explain why education fails to facilitate upward mobility for migrant children in China. By comparing a public school and a private migrant school in Shanghai, two mechanisms are found to underpin the reproduction of the class system: the ceiling effect, which is at work in public schools, and the counter-school culture, which prevails in private migrant schools. Both mechanisms might be understood as adaptations to the external circumstances of – and institutional discrimination against – migrants rather than as resistance to the prevailing institutional systems. Thus, the functioning of these mechanisms further strengthens the inequality embodied in the system.