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" (
"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 (
PHOTO: SEAN CHAO, TAIPEI TIMES
According to Chen, since the enforcement of the Teacher Education Law (
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 (
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 (
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