Educational quality differences in a middle-income country: the urban-rural gap in Malaysian primary schools

Shortcomings of educational quality in rural schools remain a key focus in the literature related to developing countries. This paper studies whether rural primary schools in Malaysia, an upper middle-income developing country, are still experiencing lower levels of educational resources, school climate, school leadership, and parental involvement than their urban counterparts. A survey questionnaire, containing items related to these 4 factors, was distributed to teachers in the 2 school locations. In the study, 1183 teachers from 63 rural schools and 1367 teachers from 60 urban schools were involved. Due to the hierarchical nature of the data, multilevel modelling analysis was used for data analysis. Open-ended questions were analyzed using text analysis. Findings showed that generally no differences between urban and rural schools in educational quality as perceived by teachers were found, which contradicts previous studies. Nevertheless, results did show that rural teachers perceived lower levels of school climate.