Implementation of equal education rights provision flawed: experts
Over 200 parents staged a protest at the office of the Ministry of Education (MOE) Thursday morning against a college admission policy favoring minority students, similar to the affirmative action policy in the U.S., which they claimed to have hurt the interests of Beijing students.
Experts said the policy, aimed at providing ethnic minority students equal education rights and resources, has good intentions, though flawed when implemented.
The parents said that the high school affiliated to Minzu University has been enrolling an increasing number of top minority students from over 20 provinces, a protester surnamed Li told the Global Times Thursday.
The parents told the Global Times that they are also against a policy issued by MOE in 2003 which allowed minority students studying at the Minzu high school to take gaokao, or college entrance examination, in Beijing, which means those students are using the gaokao enrollment quota meant for Beijing candidates.
Every year, each college has a fixed quota for different provinces.
Parents were seen holding placards saying "expand gaokao enrollment quota for Beijing students," or the abolition of the 2003 policy.
The protesters told the Global Times that they gave a petition to the MOE on July 14 and were told by He Guangcai, deputy director of ethical education department, to wait for a month for the ministry's reply.
The Minzu high school planned to enroll 310 students from Beijing and 630 minority students from 23 provinces in 2015, according to its enrollment plan.
"Top universities are reducing their enrollment in Beijing while students in Beijing need to compete with a growing number of elite minority students selected from the best schools in other provinces," said a parent surnamed Wang, who joined the protest Thursday morning. "It's not fair."
"However, it is consistent with years of ethnic policies since the education in remote and ethnic minority areas lags far behind," Xiong Kunxin, an ethnic studies professor at the Minzu University of China, told the Global Times.
China has implemented preferential college admissions policies toward ethnic minorities since the 1950s, giving students from ethnic minority areas easier access to high-quality higher education resources. The school provides top minority students equal access to elite universities, Xiong said.
Besides, sending them back to their home provinces to take the gaokao will make it difficult for them to adapt to unfamiliar tests, which is inappropriate, said Shen Guiping, a religious studies expert at the Central Institute of Socialism.
The policy might affect some local students during implementation, said Shen, suggesting that education authorities set an enrollment quota for minority students studying at the school.
Among the school's 620 graduates in 2015, 615 of them had a gaokao grade exceeding the cut line of China's first-tier colleges.
The protest started on July 9 and peaked on Sunday with 300 parents.
