This study incorporates teacher and child perceptions of child school experiences into the examination of the reciprocal influence between teacher and child educational expectations and child academic achievements. Analysing a longitudinal data from north-west rural China, the results highlight strong lagged effects of child school experiences: a child’s early feelings of disengagement have strong negative impact on his/her later educational expectations and achievements, while the teacher’s early evaluations of the child are closely linked to later teacher expectations and child achievement. A child’s family background has almost no direct effect on child and teacher expectations and achievements when controlling child and teacher perceptions of child’s progress in school. The findings suggest that future studies should focus more on child school experiences, which is a topic that has brought much insight to disparities in educational outcomes in developed countries.