From Quantity of Quality: Government Action to Promote Early Childhood Education in Poor Rural Areas of Northwest China--for the symposium entitled "Leadership and Quality of Early Childhood Education in China"

Northwest rural area is the area with most poverty-stricken population in China, and has a shortage of ECE for preschool children. In order to realize the goal of “popularizing the preschool education basically ”, Chinese... [ view full abstract ]

Northwest rural area is the area with most poverty-stricken population in China, and has a shortage of ECE for preschool children. In order to realize the goal of “popularizing the preschool education basically ”, Chinese government not only took the western poor area as the focus of popularizing preschool education, but also strongly promoted the construction of kindergartens in northwest rural areas, and made great efforts to provide educational opportunities for disadvantaged preschool children by implementing different projects. 

 But the grim reality faced by the rapid development of the northwest poor rural pre-school education is the shortage of teachers , low quality of teaching staff and the impossibility to “offer  qualified ECE for the children of the right age”. In order to cope with the reality, on the one hand the local government recruited preschool teachers to the public, established special post for rural teachers, and transfered primary and middle school teachers to kindergarten teachers. On the other hand, the government established the educational responsibility area of regional integration of urban and rural development district by forming the “four level interaction and integrated propulsion” work system including the county, township, village and teaching points. It also used the strategies of supporting the poor counties by normal universities and the whole county advance to provide long-term support mechanism for rural preschool teachers' training and professional development. The successive years of “replacing teaching” by preschool education majors in colleges and universities supported the most remote rural and minority areas and provided great leap forward development from quantity to quality.

The development path of integration of urban and rural has been proved to be effective, and it proved that only the government can guarantee the disadvantaged children to accept the high quality early education.