Class Act

By staff reporter PENELOPE COLVILLE

"Friends and sisters" is how they describe each other; lunching in the canteen of the Dandelion Junior Middle School are Kitty Vorisek, special advisor, and Zheng Hong, founder.

It's perhaps the most common assumption made: tell a Westerner you are working in China and the response will be "Oh, teaching?" In many cases it will be the right assumption (clichés exist for good reason), but this column has been looking at anything Westerners are doing here that isn't teaching. It remains a fact though, that the educational sector is a huge employer of native English speakers. Here are two foreigners and two "sea turtles" (returned Chinese) who are doing good – in migrant, kindergarten and international schools. They exemplify ways to make an impact on all three levels of China's pre-university schooling – without doing any teaching at all, and they represent the array of China's educational challenges.

American Kitty Vorisek came here as the China business manager for a new line of J.P. Morgan financial services and set up a corporate social responsibility model while she was at it, but she had personal reasons to come to the East too. Her adopted son and daughter are Asian (Vietnamese and Chinese) and she felt being in this environment would honor their heritage and round out their development. She was surprised and yet not surprised by the conditions she found in China. Vorisek had met challenges in one emerging economy already, as a business manager fulfilling Citibank's ambitions in Hungary.

"I had so much fun in an emerging market I took on another one."

NowVorisek is an executive vice president with DHR International in Beijing, and launched their Asia Pacific non-profit practice. Migrant education in China was an issue that seized her, and this she had in common with Zheng Hong, founder of the Dandelion School, Beijing's first and only middle school for the children of migrants. Four years ago she became a special advisor to the school, and the two women make a formidable team.

China's migrant workers got a lot of ink in the Western press when the global financial crisis drove migrant workers back to their hometowns, but the vast majority returned to the cities within months, and the social problem went back to its original focus: the shortage of schools for migrant children who accompany their parents to urban areas. Migrant schools are mostly run as small family businesses and some parents struggle to properly educate their children; socio-economic factors can also make it difficult to continue a child's education in the family's adopted city. Vorisek explains, "Wen Jiaobao's remark that 'we all grow under the same blue sky' was a signal that ways would be found to open public schools to migrants without dismantling the entire household registration system, which is entangled with a variety of other laws." The system used to prevent migrants from entering public schools in their adopted city, but the law was recently changed and the effects are rolling out. Regardless, some migrants can afford to educate their children at schools like Dandelion.