Thanks for posting about this, Phil.

I'm the fellow who wrote that blog post about Liuzhou New Standard (or "New Standard Training Center" or "New Standard Training School" or "New Standard English School" as its name mutated several times during my time there). I really want to emphasize that this is a particularly bad place to work.

If you work for this school, you will most likely find yourself nothing more than, as one of my Chinese co-workers sadly put it, a white "walking billboard." If you care about educating students, you won't find it here, being nothing more than the icing on top of the classes the Chinese teachers teach (and, respectfully, do their best given their advertising-driven work life and lack of support from management) in order to rope parents in. If you care about pursuing your own interests, you'll be constantly frustrated by long hours of being in the office for no reason and getting calls late at night saying your days off have been moved around suddenly or even waived with nothing but vague promises of ever getting them back. If you care about seeing China, prepare to never be able to travel at all, because your days off are at random times, the schedule changes every week, and you are never made aware of it until the end of the current week. If you care about having a safe working environment, you won't find it at New Standard, whose sole foreign teacher is so paranoid about losing his job to a "bunch of punk kids" that he'll routinely verbally or physically threaten them, with the boss aware of this, literally suggesting that he's setting up a "competition" between the foreign teachers to only keep the hardest-working ones, and only doing anything about it once the local and provincial government got involved. And if all you care about is just making some needed cash (even if you could find time in your life to spend it), keep in mind that this place, by all accounts I've heard from expat friends in the city and region, definitely underpays its foreign teachers and will invent infractions to nickel-and-dime them.

I and three other recent graduates were placed in Liuzhou New Standard by CIEE, an organization that connects ESL teachers with schools in different countries and then provides them with support when needed throughout the semester or year. This was their first year in Guangxi, and this obviously was a freak case of an untested school that turned out to be really bad. Despite all of this nonsense, I do want to give props to CIEE for working very hard, getting the local government and labor dispute offices involved, and helping us find new and better ESL work. Even if they didn't properly do their research when putting us in, they did well at getting us out. I now have stable, productive, and more rewarding work at a university here in Guangxi.

I hope I'm not sounding like a broken record here, but this seems to be strong evidence to stay clear of private training centers when possible, especially when they're untested and unestablished. In short, stay clear of Liuzhou New Standard Training Center!