ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how rural parents moved their families at critical schooling transition points and in search of better educational opportunities. Migrating a family for schooling clearly shows that rural parents are not passive, backward, or in anyway lacking in ability. They are actively engaged and involved in supporting their children's schooling. Moreover, this strategy is sophisticated and akin to the strategies used by urban Chinese parents as well as middle-class Western families. All families carefully prepared for their migration, aligning resources, tapping into the support of friends and family, and even working through the bureaucracy to change their family or child's hukou status. The rural families in Gansu also used migration as a parental-involvement strategy to support their children's education. Rural parents emphasized that children needed to take responsibility for their own school learning because parents themselves had limited academic aptitude. The specific strategies that rural parents engaged included migrating their families to provide a better schooling experience.
