China’s student population has drastically changed in recent decades to include rural migrants residing in urban areas and rural youth residing without one or both parents at home, often referred to as “left-behind” youth. While emerging bodies of work have compared their educational attainment to their urban and rural peers, less work has examined how teachers – key figures in the educational lives of youth – matter. Using a nationally-representative study of adolescents and a large-scale study of migrant and urban first-graders in Shanghai, we provide a comparative portrait of teacher qualifications and teacher perspectives of students and parents belonging to different groups. Small inequalities exist that favor urban youth in terms of teacher level and quality of education, certification, and years of and awards for teaching. We also find that teachers have less favorable perceptions of migrant, left-behind, and rural youth – and their parents – compared to teachers of urban youth. We end by discussing how teacher education programs can better train future teachers to work with China’s diverse student population to address biases that likely perpetuate, rather than eliminate, existing inequalities.