Favored urban teachers get gifts while rural teachers get shafted

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Favored urban teachers get gifts while rural teachers get shafted

(Xinhua) 09:52, September 11, 2013

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Cheng Xinggui threw himself into a torrential river, accused by an official of lying about his teaching experience.

“I have evidence. Someone will prove it!” he was heard yelling before he died on July 17, aged 58.

His name was posthumously added to a list of underpaid rural teachers — dedicated people who lacked credentials and worked in the most remote place — entitled to receive government compensation.

Cheng’s tragedy and the plight of legions of rural teachers cast a long shadow on Teacher’s Day this week when many urban teachers are showered with gifts. The situation of rural teacher — uncertified people who make education possible in many villages — also demonstrates the yawning rural-urban gap.

Cheng had been a teacher for 25 years and six months from 1977 to 2003 at village schools on the outskirts of Zhaotong City in southwest China’s Yunnan Province — facts he had tried desperately to prove in his last days.

According to a Ministry of Education document issued in 2011, Cheng was theoretically entitled to receive 21,165 yuan (US$3,458) in compensation, calculated at 830 yuan for each month of service, but could not collect enough evidence to prove he had been teaching for that long, principally his monthly pay slips.

Cheng put his old papers together, but eight years of pay slips were missing — representing a loss of 6,640 yuan, three times his family’s monthly income.

He tore pieces off his lecture notes from those eight years that had the official seal of the local education authority, hoping to use them as evidence, then hiked 20 kilometers across craggy mountains to the village school where he taught, only to be told the papers were useless.

Cheng called his wife, complaining he had never been humiliated so badly. That was July 10, 10 days before the official deadline for Cheng to produce enough evidence to apply for his compensation.

The next day, he visited an old colleague and former school principal, 82-year-old Zhu Yinghuai, hoping Zhu would help. It was Zhu who persuaded Cheng to take a teaching job at the school in 1977, when education began to revive and there was a surge of students but a severe shortage of teachers.

Zhu suffers from cerebrovascular disease and lives in the county seat of Yanjin. He was unable to travel with Cheng to the countryside school for a face-to-face interview that authorities said was essential.

When Cheng went home in despair on July 13, he was not himself. “He was out of his senses and was incoherent all the time,” said his wife. In a fit of temper, he beat his wife and daughter, which he had never done before.

Four days later, at midnight, he ran out of his home in a torrential rain, crying, “I have evidence.” His body was recovered 18 hours later, in a river 5 km from home.

Cheng was among at least 150,000 teachers to have been temporarily recruited at village schools in Yunnan during past decades.

These teachers were not on the government payroll and were paid meager wages by their village schools. Most of them grappled with poverty throughout their teaching years.

Four in one

At Zhu’s request, Cheng began teaching at Gonghe Village Primary School in his home county Yanjin, Zhaotong City, in the spring of 1977, earning 10 yuan a month. Like most other rural teachers, Cheng was a mentor, baby-sitter, cook and nurse in one. In flood seasons, he carried children on his back to cross rushing rivers, and helped preschoolers clean up when they wet their pants.

A junior high graduate without teaching qualifications, Cheng could only be hired as a temporary worker, a position he had held for more than three decades.

Until 1995, he earned only 135 yuan a month, about one sixth the average of his colleagues. Neither of his two children went beyond senior high school, since the family was too poor to afford their tuition.

His only chance for promotion came in 1997, when the county government offered a one-year training program for temporary teachers. Cheng did not apply because tuition and lodging expenses were too high.

In fact, the majority of temporary teachers in the county did not apply. Despite their desire to be on the government payroll, their workloads were often too heavy to allow them to be absent for a whole year.

They paid a heavy price for their selfless decision: From 2004, temporary rural teachers were replaced by new university graduates.

In 2006, the Ministry of Education decided to fire 448,000 temporary teachers, saying they were unqualified. Incomplete figures showed China had at least 500,600 temporary teachers in its underdeveloped western regions that year.

Cheng was even less lucky: he was fired in the summer of 2003, when his salary had reached an all-time high of 170 yuan a month. Cheng’s story was published on the front page of Southern Weekly last Friday and cast a shadow over Teachers’ Day, which was yesterday.

The tragedy of Cheng and thousands of rural teachers has been a shock to China, where mainstream culture is largely founded on the thoughts of Confucius, the teacher of all teachers. While teachers at city schools are often showered with greeting cards, flowers and gifts on Teachers’ Day, many rural teachers, active and retired, are unable to make ends meet.

Zhang Xugui worked for two decades as a temporary teacher in Yunnan’s Yiliang County but ended up in abject poverty. Unable to endure their situation, his wife left him in 2009. His son quit university in 2013 to become a migrant worker.

Despite their lack of professional training and repeated calls to fire them, temporary teachers are still playing an irreplaceable role in keeping rural schools running in China’s remote countryside.

Ma Guoqiang is the only teacher at Xin’an Primary School in Yunnan’s Jinping County. The school has only 36 students, all first- and second-graders. A temporary teacher, Ma, too, was fired in March 2012. “But the villagers persuaded me to stay, and the village government pays me 400 yuan a month,” he said.

‘I had to stay’

Ma said he had to stay. “Otherwise, the school would no longer exist and the children would need to hike 14 km to a larger school. They are too young to walk that far.”

Xin’an is one of the eight primary schools in Jinping County sustained by just one temporary teacher, said Luo Fangde, the county’s education chief. “Theoretically, these small schools, with less than 300 students in total, should have been incorporated into bigger schools in neighboring villages.”

In Tongmian village of Ningming County, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, one third of the primary school teachers are temporary. Their educational background varies from primary school to senior high. “No college graduate is willing to work in this out-of-the-way village,” said Zheng Yuchen, principal of Tongmian Village School.

In China, salaries for public school teachers are covered by local treasuries. In underdeveloped areas, however, many rural schools have to recruit temporary teachers at their own expenses.

In Yunnan, temporary rural teachers earn an average of 500 yuan a month, about 20 percent of full-time colleagues’ salaries.

Officials estimate at least 150,000 temporary teachers are working in Yunnan’s rural schools.

Sun Xiaoying, a researcher with Guangxi Regional Academy of Social Sciences, said: “The government needs to increase spending on rural education, by offering higher pay to draw more teachers and new graduates to countryside schools.”

On the other hand, rural education authorities should help outstanding temporary teachers get adequate qualifications to improve the quality of rural education in general, he said.