Research On The Spatial Effect Of Inequality In Basic Education

As an important channel for social mobility and intergenerational inheritance,education is crucial for every family in modern society.Because basic education is the initial stage of education,its demand has experienced a constant rise from popularization to rational distribution and high-quality balance along with the rapid economic and social development.In contrast,the education policy has gone through the key school system to the nearby enrollment policy.Although the policy tends to be fair,it is always difficult to solve the problem of the allocation of limited high-quality educational resources among schools.The growing educational demand and the unfair education status have made the allocation of basic education resources a driving force of social inequality.At the same time,China is experiencing an unprecedented urbanization in human history,which not only drives the rapid economic and social development,but also the problem of spatial inequality due to the rapid expansion and reorganization of space.The allocation of basic education resources is intertwined with the spatial transformation driven by urbanization,which makes educational inequality deeply mapped into space.Space becomes a place to carry and characterize education inequality,and it also becomes an important intermediary force to produce and reproduce education inequality like other factors.How to understand and verify the spatial effect of inequality in basic education?Sociology,pedagogy,and geography all focus on it but cannot give a comprehensive and systematic interpretation.Because of the division and different focuses of disciplines,it is difficult to establish an organic connection between space and society.However,the study of educational inequality cannot be separated from the spatial perspective,and it is also impossible to separate space from society.The allocation of educational resources not only produce spatial orders,but also produce social orders and value norm system.This paper attempts to integrate existing researches with the dialectical paradigm of "social-space",and establish an analytical framework to comprehensively judge the spatial effect of inequality in basic education.This paper purposes to answer the following questions: What is the spatial effect of inequality in basic education? How to evaluate and measure the spatial inequality of basic education resources allocation and its socio-spatial effects? How basic education resources are coupled with urban space by using spatial inequality as an intermediate mechanism?This paper chooses Kunshan City,Jiangsu Province as an empirical research object,and constructs a practice place to verify and feedback the theory of educational inequality.First of all,this paper clarifies the meaning and analytical framework of the spatial effect of inequality in basic education.The spatial effect of inequality in basic education has two layers of meaning:(1)The unbalanced spatial allocation of basic education resources;(2)The unequal socio-spatial effects caused by allocation of basic education resources which couples basic education with urban space.Correspondingly,The spatial effect of inequality in basic education can be analyzed from three aspects:(1)Evaluate the spatial allocation of basic education resources from the perspective of efficiency and fairness;(2)Analyze the socio-spatial effects caused by the unbalanced spatial allocation of basic education resources from the perspective of quantity difference and qualitative difference;(3)Reflect critically on the coupling relationship between basic education and urban space from the theoretical perspective of spatial production.Secondly,this paper analyzes the unbalanced spatial allocation of basic education resources in Kunshan City.By using two methods of accessibility including overall coverage and minimum time to go to school,it is found that Kunshan has a high school accessibility which has been optimized in recent years.The paper also utilizes variance analysis to reveal the accessibility heterogeneity between residential areas and the influence factors.Kernel grid density analysis results show that the high-quality educational resources of Kunshan City are unbalancedly distributed and highly concentrated in the old city and surrounding areas.The spatial autocorrelation results show that there is a statistically significant correlation in space.And then,this paper verifies the inequality socio-spatial effects caused by spatial allocation of basic education resources in Kunshan City and its influence factors.The first effect is reflected in the obvious difference in the average excess or surplus of classes between different schools.The regression results show that school education quality exerts a significant influence upon the school's excess or surplus extent and the influence has been increasing over time.Another effect is reflected in the school socioeconomic segregation.Under the nearby enrollment policy,housing prices have largely become a class filtering mechanism for quality schools.The results of hedonic price model and spatial regression model both prove that the higher the quality of education in primary and junior high schools,the higher the average housing price of residential quarter in the school district.The influence of the quality of primary education upon housing price is increasingly noticeable.The results also show that the higher the quality of education in primary and junior high schools,the more the average housing price of residential quarter in the school district grows.The influence of education quality upon price growth is reflected in both the “Matthew effect” and the school district adjustment mechanisms.Finally,this paper reveals how basic education resources are coupled with urban space.Through a critical reflection on the out-migration of two quality schools in Kunshan,this paper reveals that although the government promoted the spatial balance of education and residence through the layout adjustment of high-quality educational resources,spatial production caused new inequalities due to the imbalance of the participants' rights.The improvement of the educational quality and the gain of urban spatial value brought about by the layout adjustment were only shared by minority groups,while new residential differentiation and socioeconomic segregation are created.This paper utilizes interdisciplinary theories and methods as well as the sociospatial research perspective to the study of educational inequality in the context of China's rapid urbanization to construct an analytical framework for the spatial effect of inequality in basic education and then put it into practice.It reveals the spatial effect of the inequality of basic education in China,and comprehensively interprets the coupling relationship between basic education and urban space with the theory of spatial production.The findings create an effective complement to existing researches in related fields,enrich the spatial characteristics and characteristics of the era of educational inequality theory,and provide a scientific basis for the method and planning of basic education resources allocation.