About the Webinar
Global trends of fertility decline, population aging, and rural outmigration are creating pressures to consolidate school systems, with the rationale that economies of scale will enable higher quality education to be delivered in an efficient manner, despite longer travel distances for students. Yet, few studies have considered the implications of system consolidation for educational access and inequality, outside of the context of developed countries. This talk will consider the impact of educational infrastructure consolidation on educational attainment using the case of China’s rural primary school closure policies in the early 2000s. The talk will share findings related to gender and ethnic disparities in the implications of consolidation for educational attainment.

About the Speaker
Emily Hannum is Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean for Social Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests are poverty and child welfare, gender and ethnic stratification, and sociology of education. Current projects in China include studies of childhood poverty and inequality, environmental inequality and infant and child welfare, and the impact of large-scale school consolidations on educational attainment. She is also working on comparative analyses of school performance, with attention to disparities associated with family separation, family background, and gender. Recent publications include “Education in East Asian Societies: Postwar Expansion and the Evolution of Inequality” (2019, Annual Review of Sociology, with Hiroshi Ishida, Hyunjoon Park, and Tony Tam); “Differences at the Extremes? Gender, National Contexts, and Math Performance in Latin America” (2020, American Educational Research Journal, with Ran Liu and Andrea Alvarado-Urbina); and “Estimating the Effects of Educational System Consolidation: The Case of China’s Rural School Closure Initiative” (forthcoming, Economic Development and Cultural Change, with Xiaoying Liu and Fan Wang).