Job Discussion Forums

[Just a guy]

I�m working at a No. 1 National Minority Middle School.

I thought I heard somewhere that the minority schools get extra $$$�s from the government,
Or was it that a school gets extra $$ for having foreign teachers..?
or am I thinking of something else....?

$$ above the normal teachers pay & so on that all schools get from the gov.

I was having a discussion with my fao stand in & she said I was crazy to think that this school gets any more than any other school that isn�t labeled Minority & / or have a half dozen FT�s.
`aside from better enrollment #�$ because of perceived better instruction from the FT�s.

If I�m incorrect, please feel free to let me know anyway ya feel fit..

If I�m as clever as she will say if I�m right, please let me know & please offer some way to prove it as she wont believe me if I just say it is true.

She is just the Chinese teacher that knows English well enough & has the job of dealing with us, she isn�t in a position to actually know. She is a pretty nice lady that does try to understand some things about the differences between our past life experiences, though she does have a hard time admitting to anything that might possibly show her home country in a bad way.

She does admit to the extra 20% given to collage exam scores for minorities but draws the line there.
& she even finally admitted that this school will in fact allow students who have test scores not high enough but parents that are...

Mahalo fo any help on this.

[Roger]

I have never heard such a claim! If it was true then why do so few schools in "minority"-inhabited regions have the power to employ expat teachers?
The answer is - these places are politically sensitive, and most of them are off limits to Western teachers, so why allocate more funds???

[davis]

A good friend of mine (Chinese) went to a minority college in Guangxi. She said the foreign teachers there were only making 2500 to 3000 RMB per month. She speaks better English than my Chinese minders but no school will hire her because she didn't go to a Teacher's College or major university. That's ok...she's making as much as my minders do as an interpreter-translator. Good for her!!!

[Jess_Laoshi]

My experience with minorities' schools is similar to Davis'. My boyfriend went to the Yunnan Nationalities University, and he said their foreign teachers make about 3000 RMB a month. They employ foreigners on a two year contract only. I met one foreign teacher there who was trying to find a way to stay for a third year because he loved teaching there so much. The students, who come mostly from poor families in rural areas, and they tend to be very motivated and enthusiastic about learning. The teacher I spoke with found them to be a joy to teach.

The schools are mostly involved in training minorities to serve as government officials in their home provinces. My boyfriend told me the graduates of the school's English department have a hard time finding jobs outside of teaching because minority schools don't have reputations for being competitive. Most of the graduates will end up working for the government in some capacity.

They offer majors in a ton of minority languages at YNU -- Yi, Dai, Zhuang, Zang, Bai, etc., and the university also has an amazing museum of minority culture. There's a tremendous amount of cultural knowledge being preserved by these schools (they are a main source of scholarly research on minorities as well), so it wouldn't surprise me if they got some extra funding, but I never got the impression that the school was well-off, or receiving funds in excess of what it should. It had a nice campus, but it didn't hold a candle to Yunnan University across the street, or even Yunnan Normal University down the road. The teachers made normal teacher salaries. Wealthy students can pay their way into many schools in China (and elsewhere!), not just minorities' schools, and the test score thing is well known. It's highly doubtful in my mind that these schools have any real monetary advantage over other public schools in China.

[Anne-Marie Gregory]

Yeah, the whole education funding system sucks, IMHO. Rich parents can buy their way into good senior middle schools if their kid fails to get the threshold score....the paying the school per mark below the cut-off thing appears to be totally legit...the school gets extra income to spend on nice stuff. Don't schools also get funding on the basis of how good their scores are?
This serves to reinforce the division between rich and poor and city and countryside...pretty much the same split. With the 'wrong class background'...what should be the 'right class background' in the Communist country...you stand little chance.
I teach talented young people from poor families in a college with only basic facilities. However good they are, they will struggle to get far because of their background.
This week I visited a top junior middle school and a kindergarten as well as teaching my normal college freshman classes. I was asked to sing 'Heads, shoulder, knees and toes' with the kindergarten kids...many already knew it...and by chance also did that as a warmer (literally, we don't have heating) with a college class earlier in the week, none of whom knew 'shoulder' nor 'toe'. Rich city kids have vastly more chances in life than (minority) poor kids.

Signed: Leftie who went through my country's state system and Oxbridge