For various reasons, the school-age population of a school district in any given country is rarely stable. Population in some places grows unexpectedly, while in others it decreases, resulting in empty schools and wasted facilities. And since certain schools are more desired by teachers, parents and students than others, the problem of fair allocation of educational resources is aggravated further.
In China, the vast scale of rural-urban migration, economic inequality among different school districts and the relatively de-centralized methods of funding education exacerbate these problems.
A mobile population creates several types of educational problems in China. As parents from the countryside move to urban areas, cities grow and rural population shrinks. Rural schools lose students and become more expensive (per pupil) to maintain and, teachers, who want to raise their families in cities, try to shift from schools in remote rural areas to those in urban areas.
City schools are often reluctant to accept children of migrant workers, because authorities think their education levels are far below that of urban students and admitting them could lead to under-funded and over-crowded classrooms. Also, urban parents fear that their wards` studies would suffer if they share over-crowded classrooms with migrant workers` children.
During my travels in rural China over the past 25 years, I have met with rural teachers who were sent to the countryside in the 1970s and forced to spend the rest of their lives in rural schools, urban teachers who have not spent even a minute in a rural school, and teachers who used to be posted in rural schools but shifted to urban areas and thus created shortage of teachers in the countryside.
In one village school that I visited, the principal had to convince a 70-year-old retired teacher to resume teaching because no one else would take up the job. But because of his advancing years and failing health the teacher was often absent and the children`s learning suffered.
In Australia, where I live, the population is mostly concentrated in a few large urban areas. In Western Australia, for example, there is one large city (Perth) and very many small towns in a vast, sparsely populated hinterland. Since few teachers want to settle permanently in the small towns, the state education department has made it mandatory for all teachers to teach for at least two years in a rural school before they can be considered for a permanent position in Perth.
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.