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November 22, 2016

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Home » City specials » Hangzhou

The ABCs of climbing the education ladder

AS night falls, parents and grandparents clutch the hands of children and trickle into Jietansi Lane in downtown Hangzhou. School is over, but study is not.

At the end of the lane is a building that houses four “cram schools,” offering extracurricular tutoring to improve academic performance and prepare youngsters for exams that determine entry into the best schools up the education ladder.

The largest of the schools is run by Beijing-based TAL Education Group, which operates under the brand name XRS, its New York Stock Exchange ticker. The XRS Jietansi branch contains about 30 classrooms providing mathematics and science classes to children aged three to 18.

There are 10 XRS schools in Hangzhou, and the brand also has operations in about 20 other cities in China.

The tutoring school is picky about applicants it accepts. Every candidate needs to pass a test, and the parents then need to be quick about snapping up a place via the XRS app on smartphones.

Cram schools have proliferated in China as parents push to give their children every advantage in the competitive education system. High achievers get enrollment at the best schools.

The stress of the whole system tells on parents. Earlier this month, when XRS began a new round of recruitment on its app, some parents told Shanghai Daily that they were suffering great anxiety.

A mother who said she failed on the last attempt because she was five minutes late, set her alarm this year. A father said the app line was so busy that he had to keep refreshing his phone, with shaking hands. Another reported breaking out in a cold sweat during the process.

In major Chinese cities, children can go to public elementary schools according to the home address on their hukou (permanent residency permit), or they can take enrollment exams for slots in private schools that cost plenty but have good track records in preparing students for critical exams.

It’s a dog-eat-dog realm. This summer at one Hangzhou elementary school, only about one child in 20 actually secured an enrollment slot. XRS cram schools prime children on how to take and pass these exams.

When Hangzhou pupils finish elementary education, the parents try to steer them into the best middle schools, which are considered precursors for entering the top high schools.

Only the top 5 percent of primary school students and those whose parents own apartments in relevant catchment areas get to attend the best public middle schools. The rest go to more mainstream schools or apply for private schools.

Hangzhou education authorities require that 60 percent of the intake of private middle schools must be chosen by computer at random; the rest can be individually recruited.

The only elementary school subject that XRS schools in Hangzhou teach is mathematics. The curriculum is far ahead of standard textbook teaching, incorporating considerable content from the much vaunted International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO).

The Math Olympiad is an annual six-problem contest for pre-college students, and training to do well in the contest starts in primary school tutoring.

“A student who masters IMO is supposed to have strong scientific logic, and, hence, score well in mathematics, chemistry and physics,” one teacher said.

“IMO is not for the masses but for children with exceptional talent,” said Zhou Shundian, an IMO coach in Hangzhou. “Children who fail to meet the requirements could lose interest in math if they are trained too early and too much.”

Too much, too early. That is often the problem.

Liao Liang didn’t choose for her son to learn Math Olympiad during elementary school. A year ago, when she and her son were interviewed for a slot in a private middle school, the interviewer asked whether the boy had done IMO.

“My son won a golden award in a national English speech contest,” the mother replied, trying to deflect the question.

“But has he learned IMO?” the interviewer persisted.

“He also ranked fourth in a national radio contest,” Liao gamely answered.

“Any award from Math Olympiad contests?”

“Ah … he also excels at chess,” the mother said, panic rising in her voice.

“All right, no more questions,” the interviewer said. “Next …!”

In the end, Liao’s son didn’t get into the school. He later asked his parents if he could take tutoring lessons at XRS.

“It is embarrassing if others do it and I don’t,” he told his mother.

Both children and parents suffer from peer pressure.

Zhang Jie is a college teacher and a mother. She chose at first to give her boy a relaxed childhood, but when his grades proved mediocre, she was forced to take action.

“My boy is not a good student, and if I don’t send him to a cram school, he won’t have a chance of getting into a good middle school,” she said.

Now every day, her fourth-grade son finishes school homework at 8pm and then spends two hours on XRS homework. Weekends he takes extra math and Chinese writing classes, as well as swimming and basketball lessons.

The Hangzhou Education Bureau is trying to ease some of the stress in the system. It has banned city schools from offering cram courses and discourages tutoring services for the international math contest. In addition, public elementary and middle schools monitored by education authority are forbidden from giving students too much homework and too many tests.

Private schools are exempt from these rules, and that seems to heighten their allure for parents.

Zhao Zheng, who has sent her daughter to XRS since the first grade, compares the two sets of schools.

“At public school, students talk about games and cosmetics during breaks; at private school, they talk about homework,” she said.

Last year, over 90 percent of students from the Hangzhou Wenlan Middle School — considered the best in the city — won slots at the top eight high schools in Hangzhou. The enrollment rate for students from ordinary public schools was around 10 percent.

Education authorities admit that there is an imbalance of educational resources between private and public schools, fueled by parental anxiety for quick success. But there are no signs that education obsession is easing.




 

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