Narrowing the gap

FILLING A NEED: Li Jia, a teacher from a middle school in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, leads a gym class in Jianshan Village. Li was sent to the village, which has poor educational resources, during a government campaign to promote equal education

China's rural population accounts for 65 percent of the total, and 150 million out of the total 200 million middle school and primary school students are in rural areas. What's worse, less than 40 percent of the education funds have been flowing to the countryside.

Qi Tao, head of the Shandong Department of Education, would never have believed the miserable situation in rural education if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes.

"Why do rural teachers prepare their lessons on the ground? Why is the classroom empty with nothing left when a class is over? Because the teachers don't have their own desks, and the emptiness is because the desks and benches are brought to the class by the students themselves," the educational officer said in describing what he had witnessed when he inspected a rural school in the province.

"The conditions are so tough there for the children, it almost made me cry," said Qi.

Such poorly equipped schools are not rare in rural China. The terrible rural education situation is related to China's unbalanced educational policy, which favors urban education. During the period just after the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, when the country was in desperate need of talent to rebuild the country, the Central Government had to put its limited education funds into the key universities in cities to cultivate talent as fast and as much as possible. But 50 years have passed and this policy has not undergone any changes. Instead, it has become more unbalanced in some places.

China's education expenditures make up only 3 percent of its gross domestic product, equal to the level in the 1980s in Western countries. The insufficient input has long been the bottleneck restricting the country's education development.

Other statistics from the Ministry of Education show that the average education received by rural people above 15 years of age is seven years, three years less than that of urban residents. Among the rural labor force between the ages of 15 and 65, only 1 percent have had education above the junior college level, 13 percentage points lower than urban residents.

For quite a long time, China's compulsory education has been handled by local governments. Due to the imbalance in economic development in different regions, education levels differ from region to region and such an imbalance has been enlarged.

The Ministry of Education says three fourths of the illiterate or semi-literate population lives in the countryside in China's west and in regions populated by minority groups.

Reducing the inequality

Even within the same region, educational resources are distributed unequally. Under the examination-oriented education system, most of the educational resources are allocated to so-called "key schools" and "key classes."

To control the enrollment in these key schools, a high entry threshold has been set up. If a student fails to reach the cut-off score on the examinations, he has to pay a large sum of money called a "school-choosing fee" in order to enroll. In Chongqing, for example, the fee for the city's No. 8 Middle School stands at 35,000 yuan, equivalent to the annual income for a working class family. Under such circumstances, some parents have to make use of all their personal connections to send their children to these key schools.

A survey of the equality of a high middle school education in 10 cities showed that the 10 percent of children from families of Party cadres or government officials and middle- or high-level managers account for 42 percent of the student enrollment in key schools. In Beijing, the proportion stands at 57 percent.

The Chinese Government is now working on narrowing the inequality. A series of government documents released in 2006 ruled that the increased educational budget is to be mainly used in rural education. Rural students receiving compulsory education have been exempted from tuition and miscellaneous school fees, and schools are not allowed to be split into "key schools" and "non-key schools."

In addition, many local governments have launched teacher exchange programs. In October, 52 schools in Shenyang welcomed 1,000 rural teachers, who shared teaching experiences with their urban counterparts and received training from the veteran urban teachers.

In September the Zhengzhou educational bureau in central China began a one-year teacher exchange program in which 646 rural and urban teachers shifted positions. In five years, the city will allow all urban teachers to teach in rural areas for one year, said Si Futing, the city's education bureau chief.

(This is the second of the year-ender series.)