The last 195 rural teachers who are not on the regular government payroll in Lanzhou, capital of northwest China's Gansu province, will be dismissed by the year end, despite their long years of devoted service in mostly poor remote areas.
The 195 to-be-dismissed teachers come after 750 other peers who have already been discharged by the city authorities since 2008, although there has been a stronger call for a fairer scheme that might have given these substitute teachers a chance to be re-employed as licensed educators.
The local government imposed the non-pay-roll-teachers-dismissal plan in 2007, by which they replace the "substitute teachers" with government pay-roll ones, compensating the former with only 1,000 yuan ($146) for each year of service. The compensation is reported to be jointly financed by the city and county (or district) budgets.
According to the plan, substitute teachers would have been put on the official payroll if they had passed a test organized by local personnel and education authorities, through which they get required qualification certificates and diplomas.
But apparently, the report said that Lanzhou has failed to honor the commitments they promised in the plan since not a single test has been given after the plan was introduced in 2007, Xinhuanet.com said on Thursday.
The report noted that the main issue at stake for the impasse was the absence of policy and financial support from the provincial government. It also said local governments lacked the resources to provide the teachers with official status, salaries and other welfare benefits even though they agreed to employ them.
It is a common practice in China's rural areas to employ substitute teachers in primary or middle schools due to a shortage of qualified pay-roll teachers. The substitutes are mostly high school graduates who have not attended a university or college. Although they do not have teaching backgrounds, the substitutes who are substantially underpaid make up a fairly large part of the teaching staff in less developed areas.
Lanzhou's teachers dismissal move came as the central government was about to select 448,000 substitute teachers for dismissal by an unspecified deadline, as announced at a press conference in March 2006 by the Ministry of Education.
Wei Liexiu, who taught at a primary school in Gaolan county in Lanzhou for 20 years, was fired in 2008. Wei compained that the once-and-for-all "compensation" of 20,000 yuan ($2,930) she received was far from enough to make up for the 20 years she had served in the village school. But she also said she considered it a kind of comfort, because her husband, who was dismissed in 2006, only received a shabby 240 yuan for each of the 18 years he served.
The Xinhuanet.com quoted Zhao Kai, an official with the Gansu provincial education department, as saying that there had been no specific policy either at the state or provincial levels on how to deal with the issue of substitute teachers since they were all hired by counties or schools and had no official recognition.
A report in the Workers' Daily on Thursday also noted that Lanzhou's actions regarding the substitute teachers coincided with an upcoming salary increase for the city's licensed teachers.
Online reports commenting on the move have also voiced netizens' stronger doubts over whether young and official state teachers are willing to stick to their teaching jobs in the poor remote villages vacated by the substitutes, and whether they have the will to truly serve the rural people as well as the endurance to live up to their expectations. |
