January 13, 2000	atimes.com

China Education yet to make the grade in rural China By Antoaneta Bezlova BAODING, China - In heart-wrenching fashion, the 13-year-old substitute teacher begs the naughtiest pupil in her class, who has dropped out of school in search of a job, to please come back from the city. This scene, from the film ''Not One Less'' by China's renowned director Zhang Yimou, was one of many that won for it the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival last year. It is based on the true story of a community teacher, a student herself, who is asked to take on a class at the Shuiquan primary school in Hebei province while its regular instructor, Gao, is gone. She goes to the city in search of the wayward pupil, determined to keep her promise that all the students remain in school when Gao returns from his hometown, hence the film's title. Beyond winning over movie critics though, the film draws attention to the plight of impoverished rural teachers, many of whom rely on handouts to survive while struggling with the task of teaching children in China's vast and impoverished countryside. ''It is very truthful, it is like watching our own life on the screen,'' says Tian Zhengsheng, the 55-year-old village teacher in Baoding prefecture, another corner of Hebei province. The story of ''Not One Less'' is typical for hundreds of thousands of peasant teachers across the Chinese countryside. Known as ''minban'' or community teachers as opposed to public teachers, they are peasants with few years of schooling, but do much of the teaching in rural primary schools. In the egalitarian days of the rural communes that Chairman Mao Zedong created in the 1950s, community teachers were paid in work points, like everyone else. Today, after the sweeping economic reforms of the 1980s forced the privatization of education system, community teachers have to sustain living on a meager stipend of 200 yuan ($24) per month. This is just one-third of the salary of their state counterparts - the public teachers that have a higher level of education and whose expenses are borne by the state. As their pay is small and often up to five months late, most community teachers have to combine teaching with farming or tending animals. This legacy of underpaid and poorly-qualified peasant teachers has crippled China's efforts to make a leap forward in educating its vast rural population. By 1994 there were still more than 2 million untrained community teachers while the country was struggling to make universal the 9-year compulsory education for its 235 million schoolchildren. In the late 1980s and even more resolutely in 1995, Beijing set an ambitious goal for the education departments across the country. It vowed to phase out the community teachers by the end of 2000, which meant the retraining of many community teachers and doubling their salaries. As the time for reckoning draws closer, China may have reported significant strides in the process of phasing out the community teachers. But in fact, little has changed. In fact, many schools have resorted to hiring temporary or substitute teachers to cut costs and save on paying benefits. While those substitute teachers are no longer called community teachers, they are even less qualified and get even less money. The poorer the place, the wider the income gap between the public and substitute teachers. In Baoding prefecture, where a third of its 22 counties with a combined population of 10 million are classified as poverty-stricken, substitute teachers get only 140 yuan ($16) a month. A 1999 report by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) found that the number of community teachers had dropped from nearly 2 million in 1994 to about 800,000 in 1998. Yet in the meantime, the number of substitute teachers had risen sharply in the same period and totalled 842,000. When, in 1995, Baoding started the process of phasing out the community educators, it had 30,000 community teachers out of 300,000. Now, it has just 1,000 - but in fact most have been re-labelled as substitute teachers. ''It is not right to do that,'' says Wang Binggang, a Baoding teacher who had independently filmed and investigated many cases of rural teachers. ''But many local cadres are worried about reaching the target set by the government, so they think of ways to somehow come up with the quota.'' Says Shi Shoupeng, a retired official and former education chief of Baoding: ''In the poorest villages, some primary school graduates become primary school teachers.'' This is powerfully highlighted in the film, where the only substitute the impoverished village mayor could find for Teacher Gao was a 13-year-old schoolgirl. The problem of underpaid and poorly-trained teachers in the countryside is not going to go away any time soon. Even if a retraining program can be put into practice, Baoding education officials doubt that the change will be anything but slow. ''After you train people, they don't want to live in poor remote areas and they will not stay in teaching if they are not paid,'' says Shi. According to the Unesco report, the root of the problem ''lies with educational finance, that is, local financial resources are not adequate to pay the salaries of normally recruited public teachers''. The report admits that ''it would take much longer time to really phase out the recruitment of community teachers''. Freshly-released figures show that qualified public teachers across the country are owed back wages totaling millions of yuan. Using data from two-thirds of China's 30 provincial entities, a study conducted by the Educational Workers' Trade Union found that local authorities owed their teachers at least 710 million yuan ($85.54 million) by the end of March 1999. The total amount of unpaid wages would certainly be much higher if figures from other provinces were included in the survey. Making up the shortfall requires cutting administrative overheads and sacking up to half the education officials involved. ''There are way too many of them, you could sack half, even 70 percent of them and it wouldn't make any difference,'' says the Baoding teacher, Wang. (Inter Press Service)

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