Chai Jingjing, a 15-year-old student, kneeled down and hugged her teacher's leg, begging to stay at the school where she had spent the last three years. However, it didn't help her much. Last winter, Chai's parents took her out of Anhuibeili Middle School in Beijing to move back to their home province of Sichuan in Southwest China. They believed that the best option for their daughter was to take the entrance examination there, so she could have a better chance of entering a decent senior high school and eventually get into a better university.

 

In Beijing, the entry score to get into a high school and the tuition are relatively high for students like her -- namely children of rural migrant workers' families who don't have local residency certificates.

 

Earlier this year, the Beijing Municipal Education Commission issued a notice that immigrant students didn't need to donate to the school, so long as they could provide five certificates -- their parents' ID copies, their temporary residential permission in Beijing, the certificate granted by their hometown educational administration, the checkup certificate from the local district education commission and their parents' labor contracts.

 

According to some experts, this action has not solved the complex issue of equal educational opportunities. Lin Weisheng, chief supervisor with the middle school where Chai used to study, says that migrant students can't register for the Entrance Exam for Colleges and Universities. By law, students have to register from where their residency certificate belongs, and different places may have different entry score requirements for universities.

 

Anhuibeili Middle School is a public school with more than 500 students, 80 percent of whom come from migrant families. The latest available figure indicates that by 2005, more than 340,000 migrant students were registered in public schools in Beijing.

 

Another option for migrant children besides public schools is attending private institutions. However, such schools usually have poorer teaching conditions.

 

A 2003 report about migrant children's education in Beijing, by professor Li Yaru of Capital Normal University, indicates that the average monthly income of rural immigrant workers is less than 800 yuan (US$104), which is much less than the average level of Beijing residents. Migrants mainly work as waiters, guards, builders, drivers or nannies.

 

According to a survey conducted last October among 1,018 migrant children in Beijing by Professor Shen Jiliang from Beijing Normal University, more than 70 percent of migrant families have two or three children, while 77 percent of the families earn less than 2,000 yuan (US$260) each month.

 

Chai's classmate Li Lili, also 15, is now facing the same dilemma. Li's parents, who do odd jobs as decoraters in Beijing, brought her here 11 years ago from East China's Fujian Province.

 

Li has won "Outstanding Student Cadre" and "Excellent Student Union Leader" awards from the school. But her exceptional performance won't bring her an extra five points added into her final High School Entrance Examination scores, "because the extra points are only available to students with Beijing residency," Lin says.

 

While she is confident of getting good scores and doesn't think the extra points matter much to her, Li wants to "fight for it because it's a precious honor for a student". However, she might soon leave the school for the south as Chai Jingjing did, where her father is looking for a high school to accept her.

 

Aside from school pressure, many migrant students have to shoulder responsibilities such as looking after their younger brothers or the family's small businesses before they can do their homework.

 

Lin once visited a student's home and found her doing homework on the only bed under dim light while her mother was going to have her second baby the next day. Lin has asked teachers to give migrant students less homework and help them finish it within school hours.

 

Professor Shen's study pointed out that many migrant parents are too busy to communicate with their children. Coming from lower educational backgrounds, the parents often treat their young roughly.

 

Zhang Hui, 11, is disappointed that her parents hardly go out with her on weekends and only want her to do homework after dinner. "The biggest disappointment came when my mother didn't let me enroll in my favorite kickboxing course," said the first grader of Anhuibeili Middle School.

 

Students in schools for migrant children have to put up with poor facilities, where plastic runway and fine arts courses in well-equipped teaching buildings are only a dream.

 

"I long for a reading room in our school, so I can read new books after class; if possible, I would like a new blackboard made of frosted glass," says Wang Qian, a 9-year-old from East China's Shandong Province, now studying at Ligezhuang Experimental Primary School.

 

Located in Louzizhuang Town, of Tongzhou District, the school has 14 classes and more than 630 students, but only 23 teachers. The scruffy classrooms and a courtyard cost the school 160,000 yuan (US$20,000) per year to rent.

 

Yang Fulin, director of the school office, says they charge each student 450 yuan (US$60) every semester. Several students haven't paid, saying their parents are too poor. Yang is worried that the school can no longer afford the monthly rent of 7,500 yuan (US$970) for the two buses that transport the students living faraway.

 

Still, there are some cases of migrant children not having to struggle so hard. Guo Fenqiang is a student at Anhuibeili Middle School. He comes from a rich family in Hebei Province and has his own room because his father runs a building decoration company in Beijing.

 

Guo says he loves his class and classmates. "If I see any people ragging my classmates on the street, I will definitely stick up for them against those baddies," the 12-year-old said.

 

Guo wants to call on his neighbors and friends to pay attention to Beijing's water shortage. "I'd like to remind them to use water more wisely, because there's hardly any real fresh water left in taps."

 

Guo has his own frustrations: He gets upset when his mother blames him. "She doesn't check it out but scolds me for not doing my homework. I usually finish it before she comes home because she never returns early."

 

(China Daily June 1, 2007)