With the increased population flow within and across national borders, migrants and immigrants have become another prominent group that suffers from social exclusion, because they are seen as ‘undeserving foreigners’ (Ferguson et al., 2005). As nowadays in China, promoting equity is one of the significant fundamental values of Chinese educational policies. Although a series of policies and measures are actively implemented in Shanghai to try to ensure the integration of migrant children in geographical，educational，and social and cultural spaces，including group-and district-oriented school running，educational connotation development，and cooperative education community inside and outside the campus. However, policy making doesn't simply mean equal to the ideal effects.This article tries to explore the practical conflict and dilemma in the implementation of education policies, by using school education practice as the main body of policy implementation. How to understand and to translate the concept of educational equity into the process of policy implementation, and what are the specific impact to school education practice and migrant children. 

Policy implementation is regarded as an important stage in the policy process (Majone and Wildavsky 1984). This paper tried to adopt context of practice (Richard and Stephen 2017) and place (Honig 2006) to explore the status quo, and to analyze the gap and conflict between policy making and policy practice for migrant children in Shanghai, especially “placing” of schools, teachers and students in the policy process. Here, social exclusion is also more than a simple economic phenomenon. Alienation, marginalization or disenfranchisement often accompanies social exclusion (Zhang & Luo, 2016). By utilizing Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural and social capital, field, and habitus, we also try to answer how and why social background and social identity of migrant children influence their educational experience and their social position in Shanghai. 

In order to answer these questions, we try to use qualitative methods in the form of semi-structured interviews (including 7 principals, 71 teachers and 69 students, who were selected by gender, birth city, discipline, age, education, working experiences, etc) were adopted to gather data in the selected 10 migrant schools of Shanghai, where located in suburban, and enrolled 100% migrant children whose parent without steady jobs. The further triangulated data from 100 classroom observations and document analysis (“official” legal texts and policy documents, formally and informally produced commentaries which offer to make sense of the “official” texts, etc.)

Finally, it finds that the process of national policy formulation and local implementation isn't linearly refer to policy objectives. As the impact of different policy interests among different level and sector, it orient deviations in implementation results, even produces policy distortions, such as “invisible classes” and “street children” in school practice, which reproduce the gap of social stratum between local children and migrant children. This opposes the objectives of educational equity. According to this study, we would like to contribute to inspire policy makers and middle-level executive departments to focus on the problems on implementation, to well transform and perform the educational policy. As many studies (Honig, 2003; Stephen& Christian, 2009; Richard & Stephen, 2017) focus on the macro- and meso- level of policy implementation, this study voids the gap about how national policies were implemented in micro-contexts especially for teachers, and students. While the research sample schools are also so significant, which are illegal schools before 2007 in Shanghai, as sensitive field and typically and directly represent the tension of national policy making and local policy interpretation and implementation.

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