China's rural education reform in financial plight

Heavy snow dusts the hair of a group of students commuting to Xiniu Primary School (XPS) in southwest China's Yunnan Province.

Their winter trek through minus five celsius temperatures is much longer than normal this year.

With the XPS in Yongshan participating in a rural education reform to streamline education resources by funneling small schools into larger operations, crowds of students from the surrounding region have been transferred to new schools.

With little access to public transport and the new schools far from home, some students are travelling for miles by foot each day. In some cases, it takes them more than two hours to reach the classroom, says Ning Shiwei, who is in charge of XPS.

Whenever winter comes, the students can always be seen wearing the "white hair" when they arrive at school, Ning said.

According to a 2013 survey by the National Audit Office (NAO), roughly 100,300 students from 25,127 surveyed county schools had to walk at least 5 km to get to school.

But the long commute is only a small part of a bigger problem. As students from the scattered schools flood into new ones, school facilities are having troubles handling the new load due to lack of funds.

In XPS, students light fires on the playground to warm themselves during winter because heat generators are beyond the school's budget.

"Because we don't have much money to buy warming equipment, the only solution is to ask for donations," Ning said.

The financial plight, shared by many schools across rural China, not only affects transportation, but also accommodation.

In Nongcheng Primary School in the mountainous Dahua County, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, one of the school's shabby shanties housed 54 pupils on seven bunk beds, with 4 to 5 students curling up on a bed just two meters' wide. Pungent smells are pervasive in the congested space, according to a recent investigation by Xinhua reporters.

Lan Jianhui, the school headmaster, said they had no alternatives.

"Of the 207 students in our school, 198 need accommodation, but we only have 36 bunk beds," Lan said.

In 2013, 1,601 schools in 538 counties out of 1,185 counties surveyed nationwide had similarly bleak housing conditions, according to a selected survey by NAO. Classrooms were also overcrowded, with 75,100 classes in 2,140 surveyed county schools having more than 50 students.

Many county governments have turned small schools into big ones, but barely allocated necessary funds for the new schools, lowering the quality of the school, a local official in Guangxi said on condition of anonymity.

"Even when they do, such money hardly reaches the hands of the school authorities because it would be embezzled in the process," said the official.

If schools raise fees for attendees to make up for the shortage of money, cash-strapped students would have to drop out of school, the official added.

The rural education reform, initiated in 2001, has so far improved education levels in the countryside.

With the concentration of resources,the cost of education is lowered. The new schools have more qualified teachers imparting subjects such as English, music, arts, among others, while in the past, one teacher was burdened with teaching a variety of subjects.

However, scientific planning is important if the reform is to be implemented thoroughly, said Luo Guo'an, a research fellow with Guangxi Academy of Social Sciences.

While China tries to make best of education resources in its rural areas, it should also consider a 'nearby enrollment policy' to save students' time during their arduous journeys on the road, instead of blindly removing small schools just to respond to the reform, Luo said.

"Local specific conditions should be taken into account," Luo said.

He added that the government should issue a compensation policy to encourage local governments and schools to buy school buses and cover boarding expenses to tackle the current problems.