When I was in Shanghai in March, I watched a special program on China-CBN (Di Yi Cai Jing) talking about “school for migrant workers’ kids”. Not surprisringly, the schools’ condition usually are much inferior to same level schools attended by “city kids”. The Shanghai Municipal Goverment gave 60 m Yuan this year for the “migrant kids’ school”. This is nice, but not too enough to cover all the kids, because they are millions of migrants workers in Shanghai, and I believe there are at least one million kids attending those schools (so roughly 60 Yuan per kid).
Incidently, I heard from KWMU (NPR), St. Louis City school district is also having a lot problems, mainly on the kids’ performance. The State of Missouri is threatening to take over (managing) the district if the situation does not improve.
Incidently (again), I saw from PBS “India’s Promise” series, India is having problem educating their kids. Not far from Tajma Hall, there is a “school” with 4 walls and no roof. Not only the facilities, India is also badly need good teachers. We all know India is taking many IT jobs from the developed countries in recent years. But right now from Microsoft to InfoSys, the companies have difficulty to find quality workers.
I was fortunate to have good education, thanks to my parents’ perseverance and hard work. Education brings the opportunity, we all know that. Tom Freeman’s recent book “World is Flat” talked about the globalization and equal opportunities. But we are definitely not there, if not everyone can have equal opportunity to access primary and secondary education.