Migrant Students and Their Mathematics Achievement in Shanghai

While Shanghai students’ top-notch performance in PISA mathematics assessments triggered global interest, it also brought some suspicions and doubts and tended to dismiss Shanghai achievement. One suspicion is that Shanghai had deliberately excluded the children of migrants from Shanghai’s PISA sample so that these students’ potentially poor performance would not be counted. Furthermore, such an argument has been related to China’s hukou system of household registration. Regarding this view, this paper first carefully scrutinizes the distribution of PISA sampled students by their migrant background and compared their related mathematics performance in PISA assessments. With a further introduction of educational policy related to the hukou system in Shanghai and two local surveys on Shanghai migrant children’s educational status and performance changes of Shanghai school students, there is evidence showing that, with the full implementation of the “two responsibilities, no discrimination” policy, the school environment for students with migrant backgrounds in Shanghai has been improved significantly, as the cases of migrant students missing learning opportunities from following their parents’ migration have been reduced greatly. Moreover, the performance of migrant students in Shanghai is not always worse, and sometimes is even better, than that of native students. Discussions and implications are as follows.