The education of China's migrant children: The missing link in China's education system

•We compare academic performance, Student background and school quality between Beijing migrant schools, rural public schools and urban public schools.•We employ multivariate regression to explore contributors to the achievement gap between students in migrant schools and those in rural schools.•Due to better backgrounds, migrant students outperform rural students academically.•Students in Beijing migrant schools gradually lose ground to rural students due to the poorer school resources and teacher quality.•Given access to better educational resources, migrant school students may be able to significantly improve their performance.

This paper examines the academic performance of migrant students in China and explores determinants of their performance. The paper compares academic performance, student backgrounds and measures of school quality between private schools attended only by migrant children in Beijing (Beijing migrant schools) and rural public schools in Shaanxi province. Furthermore, we employ multivariate regression to examine how individual characteristics and school quality affect migrant student performance and the achievement gap between migrant students and those in rural public schools. We find that although migrant students outperform students in Shaanxi's rural public schools when they initially arrive in Beijing, they gradually lose ground to rural students due to the poorer school resources and teacher quality in their schools. Additional analysis comparing migrant students in migrant schools to migrant students in Beijing public schools demonstrates that given access to better educational resources, migrant students may be able to significantly improve their performance.