Teachers take to the street over jobs

Dissatisfied with the low rate of qualifiers in teacher-selection exams, thousands of certified teachers who failed to find full-time teaching positions marched in the streets yesterday, calling on the Ministry of Education (MOE) to pay more attention to the shrinking employment rate and other educational issues.

Led by the Saving Teachers Association, more than 3,000 so-called "stray teachers" (流浪教師) yesterday poured into the street carrying placards, while some even dressed as Confucius, as they marched to the MOE to protest the shrinking number of vacant teaching posts each year.

"Every year, thousands of people who have teaching certificates participate in the teacher selection exams held in various cities, hoping to get a full-time teaching position. However, the shrinking rate of qualifiers forces us to wander around different schools as substitute teachers, and we have to take the exam over and over again," said Chen Chun-hao (陳君豪), convener at the association and currently a substitute teacher in Ilan County.

According to Chen, since the enforcement of the Teacher Education Law (師資培育法) in 1994, it has become easier for people to get teaching certificates through taking related courses. This effort to provide more diverse channels for training teachers and educational professionals than had been previously available through teacher training colleges and normal universities, however, created thousands of certified teachers, who then had to fight for shrinking number of vacancies at schools.

Just before the protest, which took place in the afternoon, many of the participants attended a Taipei City primary school teacher selection exam.

With only 96 openings in primary schools this year in Taipei City, the exam attracted more than 9,000 people, leaving the percentage of qualifiers at about 1 percent, according to statistics from the MOE.

Tu Weng-tsai (涂文財), a member at the association, said that many stray teachers have traveled around the country to take selection exams in different cities and counties for more than 10 years, but still can't find a full-time position.

This phenomenon has turned the MOE's effort to bring more well-trained teachers into schools a joke, and stray teachers suffer from unstable lives, Tu said.

In addition to urging the MOE to "solve" the shrinking employment rate, the protesters called on the ministry to bring down the number of students to 30 per class, to cut by 50 percent the enrollments in teacher education programs, to levy a teacher tax and to use the money for educational purposes, and to establish a review process to weed unqualified teachers out of schools.

In response, the MOE said in a statement that 70 percent of the people with teaching certificates have become full-time teachers over the past 10 years. In addition, the number of students in each elementary school class is already less than 30, the statement said. In the future, the ministry will also increase the number of teachers from one per classroom, to two, it said.

Representing the ministry to accept a petition from protesters in front of the MOE, Wu Tsai-shung (吳財順), the director of the ministry's Department of Elementary and Junior High School Education, said that the ministry understood the difficult situation teachers face, and will respond to the requests with detailed solutions as soon as possible.