by Yong Zhao
Other hierarchical practices may not be as tragic but still do serious damage. For example, teachers commonly assign classroom seats based on student test scores. The highest scorer gets to choose his or her seat first, and the last one takes whatever seat remains at the end.24 One school was reported to provide top-ranked students with free extra lessons, while lower-ranked students had to pay.25 In other places, lower-ranked students had to wear green scarves in contrast to the high scorers' red scarves or were asked to take tests outside the classroom.26
Making education the only way to heaven lures all Chinese into the race, and the hierarchical system and constant ranking provide sustained and strong motivation for students to show that they are conforming all the time. It's no wonder Chinese students are the most hard-working bunch in the world. On average, students in Shanghai spent twice as much time on homework as the OECD average (13.7 versus 7 hours) and two and a half times the OECD average in academic studies outside school (17 versus 7.8 hours). “Time plus sweat” is the sensible explanation for Shanghai's PISA performance given by Yang Dongping, professor at Beijing University of Science and Technology and a popular commentator on education in China.27
Outside observers praise the hard-working Chinese students, but those students, their parents, and their government have all been cursing the academic workload for decades. Since the 1950s, the government has been working to reduce students' academic load and pressure. As recently as 2013, the Ministry of Education issued another stern order to all schools to limit the frequency of testing and the amount of homework.28
Furthermore, the fierce competition for the culturally manufactured scarcity of spots in top classes, schools, and universities creates motivation for parents, teachers, and schools to do whatever they can to earn a spot in those top classes and schools, thus causing massive inequality. In a CNN commentary, Jiang Xueqin, deputy principal of Tshinhua High School, wrote about Shanghai's PISA performance: “The dog-eat-dog and winner-take-all mentality of China's school system isn't just making children unhappy and unhealthy—it's also causing cheating and bribery, leading to an unfair and unequal school system.” He pointed out that wealthy families can pay or bribe to get the best teachers, extra lessons, and the best schools, thus securing a better chance for their child for a better university: “The bribery is on top of every other advantage that Shanghai's wealthy parents have bestowed upon their only child: weekend piano, math, and English classes, private tutoring, summer camp in America, vacations in Europe and above all a born-to-succeed attitude.”29
More important, Chinese students are motivated or pressured to learn all the time, which means they learn more, but what they learn and how they learn is troublesome. “Critics see young people as learning by being fed knowledge in imposed structures, seldom left on their own to learn in their own way,” writes Kai-ming Cheng, professor at the University of Hong Kong, in Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World's Leading Systems. “They have little direct encounter with nature, for example, and little experience with the society in general. While they have developed the skills, they may not have learned how to learn.”30
In China, the incentives for learning are all external and based on performance demonstrated by test scores. The goal is simply to be better than others in the prescribed tasks. The consequences may be high aggregated test scores in math, science, and reading. But students forgo opportunities to genuinely learn arts, music, and humanities, which the PISA does not assess. Moreover, “incentives do not just make students stressed, lonely, and unhappy—they also kill students' innate curiosity, creativity, and love of learning,” writes Jiang Xueqin.31
One Gatekeeper to the One Small Heaven
The power of the Chinese educational system to homogenize thinking is strengthened by the government's monopoly on curriculum and assessment. The Communist government has complete control over what schools teach. It also sets the criteria and the process that universities use to admit students. Even privately funded schools and universities must follow the national curriculum and use the prescribed admissions standards and process. Chinese citizens are not allowed to attend international schools that follow a non-Chinese curriculum. In fact, even if the government did not dictate the school curriculum, it would still control what schools teach and students learn as long as it controlled the selection criteria and process. The Chinese government controls education just as tightly as the emperors did in ancient times. The government is the only gatekeeper to the small heaven everyone wants to enter.
PISA lovers glorify this arrangement. In Surpassing Shanghai, Marc Tucker explains what high-performing countries do and America does not do: “Virtually all high performing countries have a system of gateways marking the key transition point from basic education to job training to the work force…The national examinations at the end of the upper-secondary school are generally—but not always—the same examinations that universities in that country use for admissions,” which is certainly the case in China. The advantages of such a system, Tucker notes, are numerous:
In countries with gateway exam systems of this sort, every student has a very strong incentive to take tough courses and to work hard in school. A student who does not do that will not earn the credentials needed to achieve her dream, whether that dream is becoming a brain surgeon or an auto mechanic. Because the exams are scored externally, the student knows that the only way to move on is to meet the standard. Because they are national or provincial standards, the exams cannot be gamed. Because the exams are of a very high quality, they cannot be “test prepped”; the only way to succeed on them is to actually master the material. And because the right parties were involved in creating the exams, students know that the credentials they earn will be honored; when their high school say they are “college and career ready,” colleges and employees will agree.32
But Tucker is wrong on all counts, at least in the case of China. Students may work hard, but they do not necessarily take tough courses. Rather, they take courses that prepare them for the exams or courses that matter only for the exams. Students do not move on to meet a high standard but to prepare for the exams. The exams can be gamed, and have often been. Teachers guess possible items, companies sell answers and wireless cheating devices to students, and students engage in all sorts of elaborate cheating.33 In 2013, a riot broke out because a group of students in Hubei Province were stopped from executing the cheating scheme their parents purchased to ease their college entrance exam. “An angry mob of more than 2,000 people had gathered to vent its rage, smashing cars and chanting: ‘We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat,’ ” read the story in the UK-based newspaper Telegraph.34
Tucker's assertion that “because the exams are of very high quality, they cannot be ‘test prepped,’ ” is completely untrue. Chinese schools exist for test prep. Every class, every teacher, every school is about preparing for the exams. In most schools, the last year of high school is reserved exclusively for test preparation. No new content is taught. All students do the entire year is take practice tests and learn test-taking skills. Good schools often help the students exhaust all possible ways specific content might show up in an exam. Schools that have earned a reputation for preparing students for college exams have published their practice test papers and made a fortune. A large proportion of publications for children in China are practice test papers.
Even if Tucker were right, the system he glorifies hinders the development of creative and entrepreneurial talents in a number of ways. First, national standards and national curriculum, enforced by high-stakes testing, can at best teach students what is prescribed by the curriculum and expected by the standards. This system fails to expose students to content and skills in other areas. As a result, students talented in other areas never have the opportunity to discover those talents. Students with broader interests are discouraged, not rewarded. The system results in a population with similar skills in a narrow s
pectrum of talents. But especially in today's society, innovation and creativity are needed in many areas, some as yet undiscovered. Innovation and creativity come from cross-fertilization across different disciplines. A narrow educational experience hardly provides children opportunities to examine an issue from multiple disciplines.
Second, examinations such as the PISA assess cognitive skills. But creativity and entrepreneurship have a lot more to do with noncognitive skills.35 Confidence, resilience, grit, mind-set, personality traits, social skills, and motivation have been found to be at least as important as cognitive skills in the workplace.36 The Chinese educational system motivates students to spend all their time preparing for the examinations and gives them almost no time to cultivate noncognitive skills and traits. Meanwhile, the constant ranking and sorting put students in stressful situations that make them less confident.
Third, examinations reward the ability to find the correct answers and give those answers in expected ways. To obtain high scores, students need to learn to guess what the examiner wants and provide answers that will please the examiner. This finding and delivering of predetermined answers is antithetical to creativity, which requires the ability to come up with new solutions and pose questions that have never been asked before.
Chinese students are extremely good at well-defined problems. That is, as long as they know what they need to do to meet the expectations and have examples to follow, they do well. But in less defined situations, without routines and formulas to fall back on, they have great difficulty. In other words, they are good at solving existing problems in predictable ways, but not at coming up with radical new solutions or inventing new problems to solve.
Fourth, a gateway system such as China's educational system replaces students' intrinsic motivation with extrinsic, utilitarian motivation. Instead of caring about what they can learn, they care about what they can get by demonstrating to the authority that they have learned what the authority wants them to learn. Getting the credential is more important than actually learning, which explains why cheating on exams is rampant. Moreover, it is possible to impose basic skills and knowledge on students without their being the least bit interested in or passionate about the subject. Thus, the Chinese system can successfully impose on students the skills and knowledge necessary for performing well on tests such as the PISA, which measures skills and content at the basic level. But no one can force those students to be creative or seek greatness if they have neither the interest nor the passion to do so.
The Hell to Heaven
Nestled deep in the mountains of China's Anhui Province is Asia's (perhaps the world's) largest test-prep machine, Maotanchang Secondary School or Mao Zhong. More than eleven thousand Mao Zhong students took the college entrance exam in 2013. As in the previous three years, over 82 percent scored above the cutoff point for admission to four-year colleges. Most of the students in the school are not local; the entire population of this remote rural township is only about thirty-five thousand. Students come from other parts of the province and other regions of China. Most are high school graduates who failed to achieve the score needed to get into college or to get into a good college.
The students pay about 48,000 RMB ($6,000) in tuition for one year of study.37 The 2013 tuition was about the same as the average annual income of residents in Shanghai, China's wealthiest city; twice the average annual income of city residents; and seven times the income of rural residents. With such an expensive price tag comes the opportunity to spend one year in “hell” and the probability of a 100-point increase on next year's gaokao. Given that the total possible score on the gaokao in Anhui Province was 750 in 2013, a 100-point increase can send many students to college or to a better college than they would have otherwise.
The school has become a legend in China. The national TV network, CCTV, sent a drone to capture the send-off for more than ten thousand students, traveling in seventy buses, escorted by police cars, to take the exam on June 5, 2013. The Mao Zhong model has been used in advertisements by other schools in China in the hope of attracting students. The school has also become a major economic development engine for the township, which traditionally relied on exporting cheap natural resources such as bamboo. Now Mao Zhong has transformed the local economy, creating a boom in real estate and services for the tens of thousands of students and their parents.
The school is a telling example of education in China. It has all the elements that make Chinese education the world's best and worst: hard-working students, devoted parents, well-prepared teachers, efficient instruction, clear goals, high-stakes accountability, and an entire society dedicated to serving the needs of the students.
Parents
Mao Zhong may have the world's most devoted parents. The tuition is not small change, and on top of the tuition are a year's living expenses. Typically one parent, often the mother, comes to live with the student for the entire year. They live in rented rooms or apartments. Demand has driven the average rent up from 5,000 RMB ($900) to 20,000 RMB ($3,300) a year, comparable to rent in far larger cities. In addition, most parents forgo a year's income because they are unable to find employment in the township (although many try). Then there are costs for food, supplies, and transportation. But the biggest sacrifice is not financial. Parents have to live apart from the rest of their family, many have to quit their job or put their career on hold for a year, and they must spend that year in a tiny, remote, unfamiliar rural town. Killing time while their children are in school or doing homework is their toughest challenge. But as one father, himself a businessman, told his son on successfully enrolling him in the school: “Son, I have made many investments in my life, but you are my biggest. And this investment can only succeed. It is not allowed to fail.”38
Students
The workload of Mao Zhong students is three times as heavy as it is in other schools. The number of practice tests students are required to complete in one year is what students in other schools do in three years. To accomplish this, students are required to get up by 6:00 a.m., be in the classroom by 6:30 a.m., and finish the day around 10:30 p.m., when they are released, with homework and preparation still to do for the next day. The concept of the typical week does not apply. A “week” here lasts nine days. On the tenth day come the “weekly” exams. “This is the hell to heaven,” one student said.39
Teachers
Teachers at Mao Zhong are organized into work units and held accountable as a group. Every year the school appoints a lead teacher for a group of students. The appointment of lead teachers, all of them men, is based on the test scores of their students in the previous year. The bottom few are not appointed. The lead teacher then forms his teaching group by selecting from a pool of teachers who have applied to work with him. The lead teacher is given the authority to fire any member in his teaching group should he find their work unsatisfactory. The performance of the lead teacher and his group are judged entirely by their students' exam scores. A student who scores above the cutoff for prestigious universities earns the group 3,000 RMB in bonus pay. If she or he scores above the cutoff for ordinary universities, the group earns another 2,000 RMB. The money is distributed to the members of the group using a weighted formula. Some teachers receive as much as 50,000 RMB, the equivalent of their annual salary. “The double psychological and financial incentives motivate the over 100 male lead teachers to try all sorts of magic to raise the red number on students exam papers,” writes a journalist after visiting the school.40
The Township
The town revolves around the school, with almost all of its services catering to the students' needs. In addition to increased housing, the town has seen rapid growth in restaurants, office supply stores, hotels, cell phone services, and agents to help with online shopping. To give the students good luck, the businesses give their services and products names that carry good wishes for academic success. Cell phone cards are called Zhuangyuan cards. (Zhuangyuan was the title granted to the number one exam
inee in keju.) Hotels and restaurants are named “The Academy.” Shops hang banners that say, “Wishing All Students Listed on the Golden Scroll” (which emperors used to announce the winners in keju). Moreover, to make sure there are no distractions, the township forbids the establishment of any entertainment outlets. As a result, there is no Internet café, KTV, or video game arcade, and there are none of the billiard saloons popular in many rural small towns. Video surveillance cameras monitor every intersection to prevent students from running around. The whole town quiets at 10:30 p.m. to give the students peace to study and rest.
Teaching
The teaching is strictly exam prep. Anything that does not help raise test scores is considered a distraction and is barred. School leaders are stationed in each teaching building and use video cameras to monitor classroom activities. Teachers can show up anytime in the classroom or in students' rented homes. Students are not allowed to bring electronic devices, food, or drinks to the classroom, nor may they discuss or argue with the teacher in class. One lead teacher told his class on the first day, “You all are here to improve your scores to go to college. So forget your personality and individuality. Do whatever the teachers want you to do. Follow them and you will go to a college.”41
“The most miserable thing for a teacher is, you have to do things you know are wrong,” said one Mao Zhong teacher, speaking on condition of anonymity. Many years ago, the teacher was a fresh graduate of a teachers' college and believed that education should cultivate citizenship. He thus did more than other teachers. For example, he read a collection of essays by a Chinese American author in class and started discussions about love and friendship in his class. Ten years later, a former student thanked him for what he had taught them. What the teacher did not tell his students was that he almost lost his lead teacher appointment that year because his experiments caused a decline in test scores. After that, he stopped his attempts to cultivate the humanities.42