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Draft amendment to education law under review
www.chinanews.cn 2006-02-25 18:08:16
(Source: Xinhua)
Several pupils from Huangju primary school in Bishidu Town of Hubei's
Ezhou City happily received enrollment fee and bags presented by the
educational fund of the village on Feb. 20, 2006.
Feb. 25 - The draft amendment to China's Law on Compulsory Education,
aiming to ensure a stable investment system for rural education, was
tabled to lawmakers on Saturday for the first review at the beginning of
a four-day legislative session.
The draft amendment to guarantee a nine-year free education for rural
poor children will be deliberated for three rounds before being enacted.
"Education resources are not distributed fairly. Disparity, existing
among schools and regions, and between cities and the countryside, is
growing every day," said Education Minister Zhou Ji.
The education system, based on the 20-year-old compulsory education law,
must be improved as the disparity of education resources has aroused
great concern and "strong" complaints from the general public, Zhou said.
According to sources close to the legislative session, the draft
amendment placed emphasis on specifying the funding responsibility of
central and local governments for rural schools, which is expected to
lift the educational burden of poverty-stricken rural families and to
give rural kids equal opportunities as their peers in cities.
China enacted the law on compulsory education in 1986, freeing students
from tuition fees in six-year primary school and three-year middle school
studies.
But families in some rural areas were burdened with heavy "educational
expenses," including the costs of textbooks, winter heat, and
transportation, as local governments could not set aside enough budget
for education.
Urban families and governments of rich regions, on the other hand, have
never been troubled with this headache.
In 1998, government budget for compulsory education in Shanghai was 10
times that in the central province of Henan. The figure was 50 times
higher in 2005, comparing the budget in Shanghai and that in the
countryside of Henan.
The growing wealth gap has started to undermine the people's equal rights
to education, sociologists say.
When children in such metropolis as Beijing and Shanghai study in schools
equipped with planetarium and swimming pools, children in poor
countryside, especially in western China, have to spend their school age
in make-shift schools, besieged with worry they might be forced to drop
out for high costs of schooling.
According to statistics of the Ministry of Education, drop-out rate among
students under compulsory education in big and middle-sized cities were
almost zero in 2004, but it was 2.45 percent for rural primary school
students and 3.9 percent for rural junior high school students, or even
as high as 5 percent inrural areas in seven provinces in central and west
China.
Zhang Jianhua, a State Council (or the cabinet) official in charge of
education, science and culture, said the draft amendment asks the
provincial governments, rather than county-level governments as
stipulated in the to-be-revised law, to take the responsibility to fund
compulsory education in their own provinces.
The draft also demands expenses for this purpose should be listed in the
budget of the provincial governments, said Zhang, director of the
Education, Science and Cultural Department of the Legislative Affairs
Office, the State Council.
"And the governments are required to give priority to rural schools when
they draw up the budget for compulsory education," Zhang said, citing the
provisions of the draft amendment, which also demand the central
government to cover the cost of textbooks for rural compulsory education
in the central and western regions.
To reinforce the teaching staff of rural schools, the draft amendment
requires teachers in urban public schools who are to receive the senior
professional title or are freshly employed teachers to go to
underdeveloped rural areas to teach for a certain time.
The Chinese government has paying great heeds to improve rural education,
with a recent promise to allocate 218 billion yuan (26.9 billion U.S.
dollars) in the next five years to boost compulsory education in the
countryside.
Rural students are expected to be exempted from all tuition fees and
other educational expenses, including the costs of textbooks, winter
heat, and transportation, according to the government.
Education experts who are worried about the negative impact of the
widening wealth gap on education, urged equal opportunities for all
children to receive education in order to root out hidden danger of
social instability.
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