I found that parents in rural China desired educational success for their children. They regarded education as a means to their children's gaining social mobility. However, few rural parents engaged in visible forms of parental involvement in their children's schools, such as attending parent-teacher meetings. Rural parents in my sample were caring, supportive, and had invisible ways of supporting their children's education. Their level of commitment to their children's schooling could be seen in the sacrifices they made, such as working at additional jobs or taking on additional household work so that their children could be free of household chores. Many rural parents sacrificed their free time in order to support their children's schooling. They also purchased schooling materials for their children, so that their children could enjoy a more positive schooling environment. In order to provide their children with better schooling opportunities, several families migrated to areas with better schooling conditions.

In the first paper, I investigate whether villages exert distinct influences on student achievement. Does living in a particular community provide children with an educational advantage? Do economic and social resources in the community affect student achievement? I begin by investigating the "fixed-effects" of village on student achievement. My analyses indicate that controlling for student background, the village in which a child lives influences his or her mathematics achievement. Next, building on these results, I address my second question by replacing the village "fixed-effects" by their equivalent random-effects to explore whether specific community characteristics influence student achievement. My results reveal that children who live in villages with a higher per pupil expenditure from non-governmental resources have higher mathematics achievement, net of controls. Similarly, children who live in villages with higher levels of social capital have higher math scores on average.

In the second paper, I use random-effects analysis to examine whether teacher attributes make a difference for student mathematics achievement in rural China. What kind of teacher characteristics matter? And what role might teacher attributes play in linking community disadvantage to student achievement? These analyses demonstrate not only that teachers matter for student mathematics achievement, but also reveal a complex picture of what kind of teacher characteristics make a difference in resource-constrained rural schools.

Using longitudinal survey data from rural China, this paper first explores the determinants of parent and child aspirations for schooling, and then investigates the different factors that affect the relative importance attributed to parent and child schooling preferences on school continuation. The five main results of the study are: (1) Aspirations for children are lower than parental aspirations, and correspond more strongly to measures of ability, while gender and wealth were not significant. In contrast, wealth is a significant positive predictor for mother and father aspirations, and mothers have lower aspirations for female than male children. (2) Higher children’s aspirations are significant predictors of staying in school, even after controlling for ability, socioeconomic, and demographic variables, and are more important than parental aspirations. (3) Mother’s aspirations are strongly correlated with children’s aspirations, but do not influence school continuation. In contrast, father’s aspirations do not predict children’s aspirations, but significantly influence school continuation, especially of boys. (4) Age increases the weight on father and child aspirations, suggesting that intrinsic motivation matters more at higher levels of education. (5) Income increases the weight on father aspirations, but decreases that of the child. These results support the inclusion of children’s preferences in household decision making models and human capital investment models, and provide insights into the intrinsic influences that affect intra-household decisions.

Low income coupled with incomplete credit markets make financing educational investments difficult in poor areas even when the returns to education exceed the costs. These problems are compounded by the prevalence of less educated parents in poor areas because such parents may be less likely to educate their own children. In particular, less educated parents may have a lower ability to assist their children with schoolwork, may be less able to provide complementary inputs to learning, and may value education less. Moreover, their children may face lower returns to schooling. In addition, the low education levels of women may affect their relative intra-household bargaining positions and thus household decisions about children's education if parental preferences differ.