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[VIETNAM] For more than a decade, Nguyen Thi Quyen’s ethnic minority students in Lao Chai village primary school would stare at her blankly, unable to respond to her questions. As the school year wore on, they dropped out to tend farm animals or hawk knick-knacks to the tourists.

Quyen was teaching in Vietnamese, the language of the majority Kinh, but ethnic minorities in the country’s northern hills speak Mong […] With Vietnamese the official language for education, school remains inaccessible for many ethnic minorities, who comprise 13 percent of the population and are among the country’s most impoverished.