Education gap could threaten China's stability
Divide between urban, migrant populations has stirred unrest
Jan. 3, 2007
In the past six months, Beijing officials have ordered dozens of the private schools for migrant students to close. Some allege the decision is an attempt to clean up the city in advance of the 2008 Summer Olympics.
Many of the schools defy the orders, or re-emerge in different locations. The government has not enforced many of its own orders, as the public schools lack the space for all the migrant children.
At the Haiqing Migrant School, few of the teachers have a university degree. The school can pay them only $102 a month, with no benefits. Public schoolteachers would make between $250 and $650 per month.
Another Beijing school, the Xing Zhi Xi Wang Migrant School, was told to close this summer, but stayed open.
On a late fall morning, four eighth-grade girls chatted on a campus with no playground, no science labs and no computers.
"The teachers in public schools would be more experienced," said Hu Xue Lin, a student. "Some of the teachers only work here for a couple of days, and then they leave."
The four girls came to this school because the tuition, about $44 a semester, was less than the fees they would pay at a public middle school. But they are acutely aware that their school is inferior.
"Things are changing for the better for migrant children in terms of attitudes, but not reality," said He Jin, a program officer at the Ford Foundation who has supported pilot efforts to improve education for migrant children in Beijing. "Increasingly, everyone realizes that education for all cannot be achieved by the public schools alone."
The clashes over the future of the private schools for migrants highlight the tension between the government and an emerging civil society as the concept of public education is redefined in China.
"The migrants live in the urban area, but are isolated from urban life," said Cui Chuanyi, a researcher for the Chinese government who studies migrant education. "This fact will lead to a crack between urban people and migrants in the future."
He said the migrant workers are necessary "to construct the roads, the buildings, to clean our environment, to provide services, to sell the vegetables and fruits that all urban people live on." But he said if the migrants do not get better access to public services, "there are sure to be clashes."
Throughout China, thousands of groups demonstrated in the past year over unequal access to public services. In Henan province last summer, students ransacked a university campus after learning that their diplomas would bear the name of Shengda College instead of its more prestigious parent institution.
With a glut of new university graduates making the job market more competitive, the name on the diploma was not insignificant. At least 60% of China's estimated 4.1 million college graduates in 2006 had a difficult time finding jobs, according to the National Development and Reform Commission.
The prospects for migrant students - who struggle to make it to university at all - are even bleaker.
Despite their appeal to families, the private schools are sometimes led by businessmen who are more interested in profiting off the migrants' desperation than running a quality school, said Minghua Li, an associate professor at East China Normal University's School of Public Administration.
He advocates turning the private schools into something more akin to the charter school model in the United States - with greater public funding and oversight.
"Most migrant kids' schools are run by entrepreneurs, not educators," he said. "They say they care about the kids' education, but... they care about money."
Copyright © 2005 International Reporting Project. All Rights Reserved.