The 21^st Century Education Research Institute  focuses on the development of rural education. With the reduction in the number of rural school children, larger population of migration, and disadvantages of “consolidating rural small schools” for ten years, there were many problems arising, such as children living far from schools, expensive tuition, dropouts, huge classes, migrating children and children left in rural areas. These problems expose the  detrimental results from “consolidating rural small school”. In 2012, the 21^st Century Education Research Institute initiated nation-wide discussion and survey about  such policies. In December, 2012, the Summit Forum of All for the Rural Students was held and put more thoughts on the problem of rural education. These discussion and surveys were finally compiled into a book.

In the meanwhile, many rural areas explored various education practices in China. These explorations will bring us irreplaceable value to the rural education. The healthy development of rural education in new era would promote a new growth for new rural civilization,  which would inherit ancient country civilization. Under this background, research and discussions were conducted on the exploration of scientific developing path of rural education in the process of urbanization.

 With the integrated research on rural education, the 21^st Century Education Research Institute discovered that rural small schools are the last 20% of rural schools and also are the critical part to realize the equality of rural education. Therefore, rural small schools were paid intensive attention and following research and policy advocacy were performed on the base of policy study of rearrangements of rural schools.  In November, 2013, we published Research Report on the Construction of the Rural Small-Scale Schools , which includes scene survey on the reconstruction of rural small-scale schools and the practice of rural small-scale school in the US, Japan, Southeast Asian countries, and Taiwan.