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Extreme selection methods spark China education storm
Shanghai private schools assess parents and grandparents along with prospective pupils
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4 HOURS AGO by: Emily Feng in Beijing
A storm has erupted in China over its hyper-competitive education system, after oversubscribed private schools in Shanghai sought to filter intake by conducting tests and checks not only on prospective pupils but also parents and grandparents.
Growing wealth has prompted a boom in private school enrolments as Chinese parents seek advantage for children. But while pupil intake has soared, the number of schools has fallen, leaving those remaining at bursting point — and prompting ever more extreme methods to ensure only the highest-qualified pupils get in.
Bewildered parents took to social media last week after being forced to take IQ tests before interviews at two Shanghai primary schools. They were also asked to complete questionnaires detailing their own educational and professional credentials, as well as those of the students’ grandparents.
“Only with a godlike mother and father plus godlike grandparents = first tier school,” one parent wrote last week on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter. The next day Shanghai education authorities announced on Weibo that both schools’ maximum intake had been cut for the following year as a punishment for their admission methods.
Neither school responded to a request for comment.
Wang Rong, director of the China Institute for Educational Finance Research — a state think-tank that advised policymakers on the 2006 introduction of compulsory schooling for the first nine years — says the policy cemented divisions rather than increasing social mobility as intended.
“As income inequalities widen in Chinese society, more middle- to upper-class parents are choosing to leave the public education system and pay for higher quality private services,” she said. “Meanwhile, disadvantaged groups receive a much lower-quality foundational education, and it becomes difficult to break through the solidification of class structures.”
Education institutions have rushed in to seek profits from the growing demand for private schooling.
Public schools affiliated with prestigious universities have opened private branches.
They can also license their brand names to third-party operators. For example, students not admitted to Beijing’s Peking University-affiliated high school can also enrol in the Affiliated High School of Peking University in Henan province nearly 800km away, which is operated by the China Yuhua Education, a Hong Kong-listed company.
Many Chinese public high schools still run fee-paying international divisions that prepare students for university abroad, despite curbs on such operations.
In Shanghai, private school fees range from Rmb10,000 to Rmb95,000 ($1,450-$13,755) a semester — a huge expense in a city where the average monthly salary was Rmb7,000 in 2015.
This year Shanghai authorities limited private schools to just one round of student interviews and banned private schools from administering paper-and-pen tests to prospective students during application season. But competition is still cut-throat among students who want to get into the top private schools.
Last year 2,530 students in the port of Nanjing lined up around the block to test for 320 spaces at the privately operated Nanjing Foreign Languages Middle School.
In an effort to ensure the best intake and boost their rankings, some private schools offer cash incentives to students with the highest scores on state-administered school entrance exams. Hebei province’s Hengshui High School, labelled a testing “sweatshop” in the media, offers Rmb200,000 ($30,000) to students who score high enough test results to be admitted to Tsinghua or Peking University.
Discussing reforms to the compulsory education system is still sensitive, however.
An article about the education system’s damaging effect on social mobility was widely shared when it was published this year on the China Institute for Educational Finance Research website but was later taken down for unspecified reasons.
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