VietNamNet Bridge – The Hanoi and HCM City education departments have sent an
ultimatum to substandard people-founded high schools, saying that they have to
upgrade their education quality, or get eliminated.
The HCM City Education and Training Department has announced that it would take
inspection tours to 119 non-state owned schools from February 2013, according to
Saigon giai phong.
A lot of schools in the city have been found as having insufficient financial
capability to maintain the education activities. The students of many schools
still have to sit in rent rooms, though the schools have been operating for more
than 10 years.
The Khai Tri Secondary and High School in district 5 and Phuong Nam High School
have been forced to stop operation because they cannot meet the requirements as
promised when applying for licenses. The Hien Vuong School has filed for
dissolution because it is incapable enough to maintain operation
A senior official of the HCM City Education and Training has affirmed that all
the schools which don’t have necessary conditions as requested by the education
ministry would be forced to shut down, even though the city’s authorities have
been calling for the socialization in education, i.e. calling for the investment
from different sources for the education development.
Meanwhile, Phap luat Vietnam has reported that the Hanoi Education and Training
Department is checking the conditions of non-state high schools in the
preparation for the 2013 enrolment season.
The schools which cannot meet the requirements in material facilities and
teaching staff have been told that they would not be given enrolment quotas for
the new academic year. There is a principle that must be followed by all schools
that they must be standardized to ensure the students’ benefits.
Some experts have suggested blaming responsibilities on some individuals who
deliberately did not expose the information about the schools’ situations to the
public, which then led to the wrong decisions of parents and students when
enrolling in the schools.
Meanwhile, people founded schools have been on tenterhooks because they can
anticipate the possibility of failing to enroll students for the new academic
year which would begin after the summer.
A report by the Hanoi education department showed that Hanoi had 92 operational
people founded schools in the 2012-2013 academic year, which accounted for 50
percent of the total schools in the city.
However, the people founded schools gather only 10,000 students, or 17 percent
of the total high school students in the city.
The headmaster of the An Duong Vuong High School in Dong Anh district Do Van Man
admitted that people founded schools now have to struggle to look for students,
complaining that there are not enough students to enroll.
About 4,000 students graduate secondary schools in Dong Anh district in
2011-2012, while a part of them went to state owned high schools, while the
remaining 1,088 students went to the 10 people founded schools in the locality,
including eight high schools, one vocational school and one continuation
education center, which meant that every school only had 100 students.
According to Man, the overly high tuitions set by people founded schools, which
are generally 10 times higher than that at state owned schools have kept
students far away from people founded schools.
And this is a vicious circle: since schools cannot enroll students, they don’t
have money to upgrade the material facilities and the teaching staff. The poor
conditions have made it more difficult to look for students.
Compiled by Thu Uyen