The county is busy with school choices and is busy controlling dropouts.
Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “Ran Dimension” (ID: chaintruth).
Author | He Qiluo
Edit | An Zhe
Dechang County is a small county in the southwestern border of Sichuan. It belongs to Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture. Its population is just over 200,000. However, there are 5 primary and secondary schools in this county that have been rated as “Civilized Campuses in Sichuan Province”. Dechang First Complete Primary School is one of them, and it is also recognized by the locals as the “best primary school”.
“Try to find ways to enter a small child”, this has formed a consensus among some conscious parents in the local and surrounding areas. It is exactly the same. The small alley at the entrance of the elementary school has become the center of county art training and second-hand housing and rental information circulation. The few musical instrument dance training classes in the county seat are also gathered here. When going out of the alleys, it is all around the children’s business: stationery stores, children’s clothing stores, snack shops, and there are a lot of afternoon nursery classes upstairs.
A real estate agent is posting information. The rent for a two-bedroom and one-living house near the school is about 8,000 yuan a year. Some parents who are migrant workers have hired relatives to take care of their children in the county. After reaching the upper grades, some parents will give up their work outside and come back to study with them.
The alley at the entrance of Dechang County No. 1 Complete Primary School
In late March, more than 2,800 students were conducting earthquake safety drills in the bright sunshine of Anning River Valley next to the Huang Geshu for more than 110 years on the campus. In No. 1 Primary School, the gap between urban and rural areas is hardly felt. Just like the excellent primary schools in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, Dingding has been used for school management early on. Vice President Zhang Weijia majored in fine arts, and usually likes to paint some oil paintings, and prefers to delve into information technology. He built a “Dechang County Information Technology Chat Group” on Dingding, and moved the school’s work group to Dingding before the epidemic.
In the output of high-quality teaching resources, the first complete elementary school plays the same role as the second experimental elementary school in Beijing. The school has three classrooms dedicated to synchronous classrooms, and there are at least 20 lessons per week. The cloud is synchronized to the rural elementary school in Yonglang Town, the southernmost tip of Dechang County.
In the author’s visit to Dechang, there are some primary schools close to Beijing-Shanghai Guangniu School like No.1 Wan Primary School, and some schools that still regard “prevention of dropouts” (preventing compulsory education students from dropping out of school) as their top priority , On the one hand, there are conscious parents searching for high-quality educational resources,On the one hand, counties, townships, schools, and teachers are struggling to find students to come back to complete compulsory education.
The key to education lies in people. This simple truth in this western county presents the contrast and differentiation brought about by consciousness. The intergenerational transmission of consciousness is far from being solved by eliminating poverty, but it must be the only way to stop poverty. After completing these “top priorities”, education informatization can really be put on the agenda here.
This is a slice of a western county town and its educational story:
Ask students to return to school
“The head teachers of all grades must be at the door of the dormitory these days and nights, and wait until 11:00 to make sure that the students fall asleep before leaving school!” He Anyuan, the deputy principal of Dechang County Minority Middle School, sent such a notice in the teacher Dingding group. . “I haven’t had a good class for three days. This is a top priority and there can be no mistakes.”
He Anyuan’s “top priority” is to control dropout and save school. In the week of mid-March, a dropout control and school protection inspection team composed of government departments at several levels in Sichuan Province, Liangshan Prefecture, and Dechang County went to the school to shift their names to ensure that there were no fewer students.
Dechang National Middle School
As a county seat adjacent to Xichang City, the capital of the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Dechang has been a must pass through the Southern Silk Road with “North to Gyeonggi and Nantong to Mengzhao” since ancient times. The Anning River basin where Dechang is located is Panxi As early as 2015, in the most economically developed areas in the region, the per capita net income of farmers exceeded 10,000 yuan. Although Dechang completed poverty alleviation four years ago, it is still regarded as the “biggest obstacle” and “the hardest bone” in targeted poverty alleviation through education.
Some children would rather enter the factory than in the classroom, and try to escape; some children stay behind for many years, and their parents are out of control and helpless; even a small number of students get married and have children in junior high school under the acquiescence of customs and family. Unable to finish school at school.
“There are a few students looking for them, waiting to be picked up at the school gate from 12 to 1:00.” One late night in the fall semester of 2020, He Anyuan received a call from the County Control and Security Office and got up overnight and rushed to the school. The 3 students found were returned.
That night, the school’s teachers and dormitory administrators watched these students fall asleep, and the parents were asked to ride a motorcycle on the mountain road to pick up the children back at dawn the next day.
Some left-behind children whose parents are away all year round will leave through special channels (by non-operating vehicles), and it is impossible to find them. The government can only set up check cards at highway junctions, or fly to the eastern coastal areas in batches to invite students back. A few years ago, a student went to Jilin. The government spent tens of thousands of yuan. It took about half a month to find her in a footwashing room in the northeast.
Junior high school is a high incidence of dropouts. Students have a strong sense of autonomy and have considerable behavioral abilities. Dechang Minzhong has a wide range of local enrollment and a complex source of students. Among the 4,219 students in the school, nearly 80% are ethnic minorities, and 90.9% are residents. Because of this, most of the school’s energy is devoted to controlling dropouts.
The difference from many years ago is that students who drop out of school are not incapable of going to school. As a former old, young, borderline and poor area, Liangshan Prefecture’s “universal nine-year compulsory education” (universal nine-year compulsory education) began in 1995. By 1998, Dechang County and Xichang City, which have better economic conditions and educational foundation, took the lead in realizing the “Nine Generalization”.
Before and after 2007, the local area began to promote the balanced development of compulsory education, and the special funds allocated by governments at all levels increased year by year. Taking Dechang Minzhong as an example, the average public expenditure for junior high school students is 800 yuan per semester, and boarding students have a monthly state subsidy of 125 yuan and a daily nutritious meal of 4 yuan. Boarding students only need to pay 100 yuan for living expenses at the beginning of each semester, and sometimes there is a surplus after the semester.
Under the policy’s support for compulsory education, the phenomenon of “begging students to return to school” has not been completely eliminated.
He Anyuan remembers that once they took a car for more than three hours to the village office. They climbed another mountain with the village secretary, the village cadre where the students were, and the teacher persuaded to return, and they found the one who had dropped out of school because of tiredness of school. student. Because of the lack of discipline and company since childhood, parents are very vulnerable in front of their children. The secretary is an elder in the village, and the truth is that when the students shed tears, the students just refuse to go back to school. “In this situation, we can only take a moment, and wait for him to calm down before doing work.”
“Although poverty has been lifted, the pressure to control dropouts is still great. Education is the most effective way to stop the intergenerational transmission of poverty, but the awareness of some parents has not improved,” He Anyuan said.
According to Dan Yong, deputy director of the Teacher Development Center of the Education and Sports Bureau of Dechang County, Liangshan’s efforts to control dropouts and protect schools may be the largest in the country. “We have tried various methods through governments at all levels and the public security system. As long as we can find people, we must urge them to come to school and complete at least nine years of compulsory education,” he said.
Informatization of epidemic acceleration education
Dechang County is distributed along the Jingkun Expressway and the Anning River, a tributary of the Jinsha River. As soon as the New Year passes, Anning River Valley has the most majestic spring in Liangshan. But in many cases, spring also means separation for many children here.
In order to live better, their parents went to Chengdu near and far awayThe migration to Dongguan, Guangzhou, Shanghai…years and months has made companionship and attention become scarce, and even some parents don’t go home all year round. The companionship of parents helps to form good habits, and the attention of parents is the greatest source of accomplishment. These deficiencies are also the main reasons why children weariness and truancy.
He Anyuan realized this early on. How to make the parents of students feel more involved is also a question he has been thinking about. He started to teach himself computer in 1995, and an old friend of more than 20 years founded a computer company in the local area. In He Anyuan’s words, the company is relatively large, with dozens of people. Friends have introduced Dingding to him many times, saying that he can check attendance, send notices, and hold online meetings, which is closer to the needs of teaching and does not cost much. .
At first, Principal He only had some impressions. Until the semester after the Spring Festival in 2020, due to the severe epidemic situation, the whole county of Dechang could not start school as scheduled, and the online course preparation of “classes without suspension” began quietly.
What platform is used for class? How does the teacher go to class? How to schedule classes? These are the three major problems facing all schools in Dechang County. He Anyuan remembered the Ding Ding introduced by his friend, so starting from February 13th, shortly after he had varicose vein surgery, he lay in the hospital and began to nail the nails.
In the beginning, I was applying for organization certification. A teacher ran to the school overnight and took a photo of the organization code certificate and issued it to him. Then began to organize classes and teams to count the students’ families. “The most difficult thing is to get student families into the platform. Many families do not have internet access, so the online rate is not very high in the first week of the online course. In the second week, we contacted Telecom and moved to the student’s home to install the internet. “He Anyuan said.
Recalling the process of “drawing people”, since Dingding did not have a batch application function at the time, as the only administrator, He Anyuan could only “manually pass” one by one. More than 4,000 students and their parents in the school, in a short time Inside, “pass in one by one, eat and sleep all the time.”
After all members went online, soon on February 17, 80 classes of Dechang Minzhonghe National Hope Primary School started the first online lesson, with an online viewership rate of 85%. The changes in the presentation of teaching have also made the teachers urgent. After the first week of exploration, the Education and Science Office used the weekend to arrange online classes for the next week, and released the weekly schedule and weekly course content. The teachers then intensively prepared lessons based on the course content.
During the epidemic, Dechang Minority Middle School is on the topBroadcast class
As a result of the 1.0 era of educational informationization, Dechang County has realized “Class-to-Class” (multimedia classrooms) since 2015. All classrooms are equipped with electronic whiteboards. After that, all levels of financial funds are used to provide each teacher It is equipped with a laptop.
As far as Dechang Minzhong is concerned, currently 99% of teachers can use equipment and call resources, but less than 40% of good teachers are used. He Anyuan said: “Half of the teachers’ informatization methods are relatively single, and the teaching utilization rate is low.”
For these teachers, the sudden online teaching is not only a severe challenge, but also a profound self-subversion. As a student said in his composition: “Look! Our teachers who work hard at school have turned into webcasters.”
This means that the past top-down teaching based on textbooks needs to be transformed into a more refined, intuitive and interactive interaction that focuses on the blank space of the courseware in the cyberspace. “In the beginning, everyone understood that online courses were to play courseware, so they made detailed PPT, but later found that the effect was not good. The teacher is not a courseware player, but a person who wants to control the atmosphere of the classroom,” one teacher concluded later.
Dechang National Middle School’s online teaching week schedule for March 16-21, 2020
Not only was the teacher motivated, but because of the epidemic, many parents also spent the special two months after the Spring Festival with their children at home, until the Education and Sports Bureau informed them that they could return to school and resume classes at home. The teachers obviously felt that the mental outlook of the students was much better.
“Dingding accompanied us through the unforgettable years of the epidemic and laid the foundation for the next step of information management in our school. I went outside to train and visit, and saw that other schools’ informationization has been fully implemented, and even It has become intelligent. We also need something like this to pave the way and try.” He Anyuan said.
Like Dechang National Middle School, it is a typical path for the acceleration of informatization of many ordinary schools in Dechang to nail the whole staff during the epidemic. At present, the work groups of the entire county education system in Dechang have moved to Dingding. The local education and sports bureau has also established work contacts with schools. Most of the school’s home-school communication groups are established on Dingding. stand up.
Vice Principal He Anyuan hopes that those parents who have been away all year round can use such tools to participate more in their children’s learning and campus life, and to pay more attention to andA sense of participation.
School choice is booming in counties
March 30 is the birthday of Zhang Weijia, the deputy principal of Dechang County No. 1 Complete Elementary School, but he dare not pass his birthday in the past two years. On March 30th for two consecutive years in 2019 and 2020, serious forest fires broke out in Liangshan, causing many fire fighters to die.
For schools in the central city, the pressure to control dropouts is not so great, but “Sencao” (forest and grassland fire prevention) is like a high-hanging sword that ranks in the forefront of school management. It is necessary to preach to students and parents every week, and receive signed feedback. In the paper-based office era, each student sends out a leaflet and takes it back to sign and then summarize it. It takes 2-3 days for the process to complete.
After Principal Zhang nailed the teachers, students and parents, it only takes half an hour to collect one form for each class, and the signing rate is clear at a glance. He usually likes to check the school’s daily online rate in Dingding’s administrator background. As the best local primary school, the participation of parents of students is very high.
This is a kind of related feedback. For children in the compulsory education stage, if they are noticed, especially by their parents, they will be naturally nourished by the strength of their inner self-improvement. This is also a family-school co-cultivation. The purpose is. As for parents, if they don’t realize it, they will watch more, and there will be fewer “seeking students to go to school”.
There is also a kind of upward improvement because of seeing better people and a wider world.
There is a consensus in the local area that when you go to Dechang Minzhong, you must go online. The so-called “online class” refers to the recording and broadcasting teaching of Chengdu No. 7 Middle School since 2012. It synchronizes time with Chengdu No. 7 Middle School, synchronized textbooks, synchronized exercises, and assessments. Teachers often communicate with Chengdu No. 7 Middle School, prepare lessons, and give feedback for a long time. After that, the entire teaching team became stronger and stronger. Together with the teachers of the Internet class, these classes are all concentrated in the North Teaching Building of Minzhong University. Some students who are willing to study and go ahead voluntarily go to the North Building to attend classes. At present, it has expanded to 10 classes.
After having tasted the sweetness of online classes, National Hope Primary School also began to use one class for each grade to pilot the implanted teaching of Chengdu Experimental Primary School.
North Building of Dechang Nationalities Middle School
In the North Building of the Dechang Minzhong, the children started evening self-study before the sun had completely set. Because of sunshine timeLong, the time here always seems extremely long, so long that there are always students who can’t stand the boring learning years, because they lack the attention of their parents, they always yearn for the freedom of society.
For the people here, informatization of education is far from the top priority on the desk, because there are too many problems to be solved. But informatization, sometimes like an invisible hand, can smooth the wrinkles of resources; sometimes like a beam of light, it can see better places.
He Anyuan and Zhang Weijia, two vice principals, have both been engaged in education in Dechang for more than 20 years. In their view, the country’s investment in education has never been greater than it is now. Gone are the days when Principal He remembered that he could only go to the mountains to teach in the wood-carrying truck.
On the one hand, it is the control of dropouts and school preservation, and on the other hand, the school-choosing craze that has arisen in the county seat. In this way, education in this western county seat has jumped amidst the differentiation.
“After the fight against poverty, the people’s demand for high-quality educational resources is increasing. The desire of rural children to study in the city is very strong. Now we are all invested in the construction of school buildings, and basically the construction is almost the same.” Dechang County Said Dan Yong, deputy director of the Teacher Development Center of the Bureau of Education and Sports.
At present, there are more than 50,000 students in Dechang County during the compulsory education stage, and nearly half of them are studying in the urban area. Therefore, this year the county decided to build another junior high school and elementary school to alleviate the difficult situation of schooling in the county. Due to overheating in some schools, the popular computer-based enrollment in first-tier cities has also started a pilot program last year.
In the classroom of Dechang First Complete Elementary School, the teacher is using the electronic blackboard for class
The village tricks are dissatisfied, and the city can’t fit it. In order to balance educational resources, all levels of finance cannot be said to be biased in the investment of rural elementary schools and teachers’ resources, and channel the best resources, including teachers who must work in rural areas for a certain number of years before they can be assessed for professional titles, and income is also given a certain tilt.
“Under these conditions, we believe that the goal of equilibrium can be basically achieved, but the rural dolls are still trying to get into the city. No matter how well established village schools in the countryside are, parents still try to send them to the central elementary school to study. The parents of the elementary school thought of trying to send it to the county town.” Dan Yong said.
The local education department is also trying to solve the demand for high-quality educational resources in remote areas. Since all teachers are working on Dingding, is it possible to carry out the subject once a month?Of collective lesson preparation? In addition to the class of a prestigious school in Chengdu No. 7 Middle School, is it possible to build a prestigious teacher class on Dingding? These are gradually taking shape in Dan Yong’s vision.
Considering that there are no full-time teachers in rural schools, the local area also plans to extend the courses of full-time English, music, art and other subjects in urban schools and central schools to those without full-time teachers through special delivery classes starting in September this year. Schools, so that all schools in the county can start all the courses and start full class hours.
Vice President He Anyuan has always hoped that with the passage of time, after the pressure of controlling dropouts becomes less and less, he can devote himself to the school’s information construction, at least starting from the paperless office , And then try to engage in some famous teacher classrooms to solve some problems that cannot be solved at this stage.
The night in Dechang started at eight o’clock. The roaring trucks drove into the parking lot during the day, and the setting sun fell. Only the brightly lit Phoenix Pavilion stood quietly by the Anning River, staring at this thousand years. The ancient city and its changes.
*The title map comes from Dingding.
*Disclaimer: In any case, the information or opinions expressed in this article do not constitute investment advice to anyone.