Education Stimulus Bar

China has called for the formulation of an education reform plan that will focus on improving rural education, vocational training and teachers’ welfare, citing the global crisis as a call to arms to bolster education. The 2009 to 2020 evolving educational plan, will take into account the nation’s evolving population structure, rural-urban wealth gap and rural-urban migration, and meet the talent requirements for industrialization, urbanization and modernization.

The central government will create 50,000 teaching jobs in the country’s backwater regions in a double-barrel effort to help fresh graduates get jobs and improve educational standards in rural areas. The 50,000 posts, for “special vacancy” teachers, are in addition to a three-year initiative from 2006 to send 60,000 young college graduates to teach at grass-roots schools to bolster the level of teaching. Shouldn’t America be doing the same?

Students in rural areas in China, like America, have been increasingly failing to get access to quality education as the widening gap between urban and rural salaries and better working conditions lure many qualified rural teachers to more promising jobs in the cities.

Premier Wen Jiabao said educational planners must be prepared to shatter old mindsets and structures and be daring in exploring reforms in school management, pedagogy and assessment. “Education will take a prominent position as we seek to mitigate the impact of the global financial crisis on our economy,” Mr. Wen said. “Education has become the cornerstone of national development” ─ music to my ears. I advocated America do the same in my 2007 book Custom Made Knowledge. Why isn’t America? Why isn’t America, like China, investing in an education stimulus program that educates Americans in the ways to acquire the knowledge and the tools necessary to compete in an Interlocal economy.