Nearly 27 mln Chinese children quit school in '06

BEIJING, June 30 (Reuters) Nearly 27 million Chinese children dropped out of school last year, as the bill for building schools and paying rural teachers mounted, Chinese media reported.

''While the enrolment rate for compulsory education is quite high, the completion rate for the full nine years is worrying,'' the Beijing News said, citing a work report about the country's education.

''In 2006, nearly 27 million children who were supposed to receive a compulsory education did not finish their course,'' it said yesterday.

The total amount of debt for rural school construction and teachers' salary reached 6.57 billion dollars, it said.

China achieved broad literacy and basic education in the early decades of Communist Party rule, but economic reforms since the mid-1990s have gradually starved local governments of funds to pay for buildings and salaries. Rural parents often cannot afford the increasing cost of classes, books and boarding fees.

China planned to invest 184 billion yuan in rural education and promised to exempt children from impoverished rural areas from fees, the Premier Wen Jiabao said during the National People's Congress in March.

But the legislature, when assessing the implementation of the educational law, found that local rural governments or schools had more than 50 billion yuan in debt, the newspaper said.

''The actual fees for the construction of collapsing school buildings were larger than the money given by the governments,'' it said, citing a senior official in the National People's Congress.

''If the problems of the debts and the dangerous school buildings are not solved, they will affect the implementation of the new educational mechanism,'' the legislature team was quoted as saying.

Reuters SKB VP0430