Various municipalities in Jiangsu have recently been actively conducting surveys and research to reach a solution for the issue of the new school-choosing policy, scheduled to be implemented on September 1, 2013, in Jiangsu province.
After Jiangsu province implemented the lottery method for admission of public elementary school and junior high school, many parents are afraid that whether their children will attend a good school has become a matter of lottery luck. According to Shen Jian, delegate to the National People’s Congress (NPC) and director of the Jiangsu Department of Education, Jiangsu province has taken many effective measures to increase high-quality education resources.
“A good school is composed of a good principal and a group of good teachers. As long as we can make principals and teachers circulate around, then, more children will benefit from them.” explains Shen Jian. Jiangsu province explicitly specifies the rule that principals cannot serve for more than two consecutive terms at the same school and each school must ensure an annual ratio of teacher-turnover at no less than 15%. As a result, all the teachers in a district will be switched around among different schools within six-years or so with the disparity among schools being narrowed down. “We also conduct provincial trainings for all teachers every five years, and send 2,000 primary and secondary school teachers to study abroad every year. Once the overall quality of the teachers are elevated and the faculty resources of every school are about the same, school choosing will naturally decrease,” Shen Jian explains. According to the plan, all the public elementary schools and junior high schools throughout the province should confine the school-choosing students within 10% of the total school enrollment by 2015.
