How best to educate a mobile population
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Some of these teachers like the experience and choose to keep teaching in their assigned rural schools longer than the mandatory two years. If, after several years, such teachers desire to move to a school in Perth, they are given preference over teachers with less experience in the rural schools.
Though not perfect, this method seems preferable to forcing some teachers to spend their entire lives in rural communities where they do not want to live and allowing others to altogether skip the experience of teaching in a rural school.
Some of the problems of educating Chinese students could be ameliorated by a greater centralization of school funding. In one county of Shandong province, where I have conducted research, educational resources that were originally controlled by township governments were placed under the control of the county government.
Before this centralization, teachers' salaries in the poorest townships were less than one-third of that in the county proper. As a result of centralization, the county education bureau was able to bring teachers' salaries across the county on par, and give extra bonus to teachers willing to remain in schools in rural areas of the poorest townships.
Also, as increasing numbers of people began moving from remote villages to work in factories in the county proper, the education bureau built new schools in the county seat to accommodate new students and consolidated schools in the rural areas. The new schools have excellent facilities and parents - county residents and migrant workers both - were pleased to admit their students there. New teachers were happy, too, to teach there.
Centralization has worked relatively well in this county, but in most other places a county level form of integration is not enough. The county has been fortunate in that most of the rural-urban migration was confined within its borders. But many migrant workers from less fortunate counties move from their province to another or even more than half way across the country. Consequently, some educational jurisdictions only lose students while in others their numbers only grow. To effectively deal with such a scale of migration, educational resources must be centralized at a level that matches the scale of migration - which in China is truly national.
The key to distributing educational resources as equitably as possible is centralization of education bureaus and budgets. If only local governments fund the schools, vast inequities between school districts can arise, and local authorities can become defensive about letting new students from outside their districts to be admitted to their schools. And teachers flock to better-funded and urban school districts.
Therefore, if allocation of teachers, facilities and school budgets is done in a relatively centralized fashion, local governments and schools will become less defensive about enrolling new students, teachers can be given incentives to work in less fortunate schools and educational resources can be distributed in a more equal fashion.
The author is a senior fellow in China studies at Australian National University.
