What Happened After Word Spread That Shanghai's Private International Schools Would Be "Rectified"

Everyone is holding on to what little choice they have left, caught between Chinese-style thinking and Western-style education

Wang Meng had never seen parents come together so fast.

Before October 19, they chatted in twos and threes in the class WeChat groups they had set up, swapping notes on how to get their children into top American universities once they finished private bilingual school in China. Wang Meng's daughter is in fourth grade at a private bilingual school in Shanghai. Like most parents in her group, she had already laid out a path for her child:

High school and college abroad. Before that, get the child used to Western teaching as early as possible, ideally with English fluent enough to pass for a local, so that the move abroad would cost her nothing.

But that day, a meeting convened by the Basic Education Division of the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission seemed to signal that the carefully laid groundwork for going abroad might not hold. "Private international schools are to be rectified, and international curricula may be cancelled" — after the event, billed as the "Shanghai Policy Briefing on Foreign-Related Private Schools," ended, articles making that claim kept landing in the groups.

In two days, three school-wide parent groups filled up: 1,500 people.

Outside those three overflowing WeChat groups, the cohort is not actually that large. Consider the numbers: according to data from Xinxueshuo, a service platform for international schools, the number of parents who favor private schools and international curricula has been rising since 1995, but Shanghai has close to 875 ordinary secondary schools and 764 ordinary primary schools, and only about 80 of them offer an international curriculum — roughly one in ten.

"We think differently from other parents." Worried about the policy shift, these parents told QDaily again and again that they were a minority, the pioneering kind.

What worries them, though, may not be so different from what worries "other parents." When they complain about how irrational education in China is, most of what they say is familiar: drilling, repetition, learning by correcting mistakes, scores, rankings, pressure, the belief that the narrower the path, the easier the target is to hit. It tends to leave the whole family anxious.

So when a new option appeared on the market, they were not hard to win over. By their account, life for children and parents alike seemed to change overnight —

One boy at an international school turned the growth of a plant into a short film; it earned him full marks on his biology assignment;

One mother said her son loves beatbox and has put together his own a cappella group, which makes him popular at his private bilingual school — his grades have little to do with it;

A teacher at a private bilingual school said she thinks of herself as working in the service industry: the parents are her customers, and her "service" gets a score;

Looking back, the conventional route grew harder to stomach. Why, with so much interesting frontier science to talk about, do public schools still run the onion-skin cell experiment that has been in the textbooks for decades? And on the parts of history most open to dispute, no one used to think it mattered not to hand children a ready-made conclusion.

But whatever these parents believe about education, the rumors out of the meeting carried a different signal: something in these extra options did not have official approval. In fact, these people did not need approval. They were operating under another set of rules. The only worry was that the rules could change overnight.

The schools, at first, kept a pointed silence. The principal of one private bilingual school refused to go into detail. In a phone interview with QDaily he said, "We won't be affected," then added, "I've only just taken the job, and there's a lot I'm not clear about."

The parents, predictably, were "angry, even furious." One father said the day after the meeting that their children had already sunk so much time into the road abroad that going back to compete inside the system from scratch would be very hard. "Isn't this just forcing us to send them abroad sooner?" he complained.

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Parents treat this as a big deal because it is about "choice." So much so that few of them mention they are also spending far more money than other people.

Roughly, tuition at Shanghai's private schools averages about 100,000 yuan a year. Many families start paying it in the child's first year of primary school.

The money, it seems, is usually not a problem for these families. What makes them different?

By financial standing, they count as middle class or even wealthy. According to Hurun Media Group's research on China's millionaires, this group is willing to put 20% to 25% of its annual income into the children's education.

By personal history, a fair number have studied abroad, or lived or worked overseas, or hold foreign citizenship. One teacher at a private bilingual school joked: "A lot of these parents are the kind you can look up online." "Parents who send their kids to a bilingual school — are those people you can control?" another parent asked back in an interview.

But Wu Fan thinks that framing distorts how people see her. She wanted to correct one thing: they are not a group with a sense of superiority. Sending a child to a private bilingual school or abroad "is not some great achievement"; it is "something we have no choice about." "Compulsory education here is free, and it's good. Why would we pay a price this big?" Wu Fan said. "We're forced into it."

Now they feel boxed in again.

The day after the education commission's meeting, a bilingual school called Starriver announced on its website that the information session for its new Hangzhou Bay bilingual school had been postponed. Parents panicked harder. The school did not blame the delay on any policy risk, but parents easily tied the two together: "So there was something to it after all." Approvals for new private schools might be getting reined in.

Some parents who are considering private school worry about something else: that this will sharply intensify the already fierce competition for places. Phoebe, who is picking a school for her child now, said the batch of new schools going up this year had been widening everyone's options, but the policy could keep many of them from winning approval, or push them onto a different track, leaving fewer choices later.

In Shanghai, schools with an international curriculum were never plentiful, and most sit in Songjiang, Minhang, Pudong and Jinshan. One parent said that in Minhang, where she lives, good international education was already scarce, leaving very few schools to choose from.

The difficulty runs inside families too. Not every household agreed from the start.

A little over a year ago, Phoebe's husband opposed her plan to move their daughter from a public school to a private bilingual one. He believed the ability to adapt and survive anywhere mattered enormously for her. Going to great lengths to place her somewhere comfortable was not just unnecessary; it might set her back.

Within this group, the roles mothers and fathers play differ little from those in ordinary families. Most people in the parent groups are mothers, who start planning early, compare different schools' curricula and facilities in detail, follow their children's work closely, and trade views on family education and parent-child relations. Fathers are stricter, and worry their children will "go bad" if they leave the country too young.

The line is not always sharp. When Wu Fan's husband visited his child's school, he noticed, just as carefully, that the classroom had no heating on in the depths of winter and that many children had chilblains on their hands, while the teachers' office next door had its air conditioning running. That became one reason he decided to move the child from public school to a private bilingual one. He thought that kind of environment was "abnormal." But parents were used to an upside-down idea of "normal," which he and Wu Fan found frightening.

Phoebe's strong-minded husband came around in the end. Phoebe puts it down to the parent groups she joined and the education news she kept passing on to him, and to his own experience doing business abroad. The two reached a consensus.

That consensus looks strongly practical. The couple believe that getting their daughter into the international curriculum earlier will help her once she studies abroad. The view is common among parents: on language, "private bilingual schools care more about learning the language"; on personal qualities, "what you want is for her to be better at learning on her own and pushing herself further, which is something foreign universities value a great deal."

The anxiety of public-school parents also makes them uneasy. One mother said in an interview that a stay-at-home neighbor of hers studies her two daughters' coursework at home every day so their public-school grades won't fall behind, and spends most of the weekend ferrying them to and from tutoring classes.

"With public school, parents basically have no life of their own. That's what we're afraid of, and it's why we don't want to go that way," this mother said. And besides, she believes, "anxiety gets passed on to the children."

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But the risk did not appear only this winter.

The whole point of the choice is studying abroad, and the biggest problem with an international curriculum is that it is a completely different system from the mainstream Chinese one. Every parent interviewed said that once you step outside the system you cannot go back, and that even if you did, "what they've learned is completely different," so you could not compete with peers who stayed.

Zhang Libei's child has just gone from a private bilingual school in Shanghai to an American high school. She cannot remember the child ever using a Chinese-language textbook: "It was a copy of the Analects, and they read things like Dream of the Red Chamber." Chinese class ran on reading, discussion and writing. So did English class.

Ding Ruoran, who teaches science in an international curriculum, often shows students the latest TED talks and takes them through all kinds of entertaining experiments. One exam she set was to hand out seeds for students to plant at home and record the whole growth process. "It's fine if nothing grows" — the result counted for only a small share of the grade.

What separates this system more sharply from ordinary public and private schools is that most international curricula stream classes by level, putting children of similar ability together.

Some parents think this is kinder to children who "aren't top students." "Splitting them up this way is good for the kids. When everyone's at the same level there isn't much pressure. Class A averages 90, Class C averages 70; if they sat in the same room, the Class C kids would be miserable," one parent said.

These non-top students can shine elsewhere: selling 2,000 yuan of goods in one go at a charity sale, or entering a fashion-design contest if they love designing clothes.

What Phoebe's husband had feared — that too little competition would leave a child unable to adapt — is, in Ding Ruoran's view, exactly backwards. "Playing to your strengths" is closer to how society works. "Public schools go after weaknesses: whichever subject you're bad at, that's the one they shore up. But in society you live mainly on your strengths. Smooth them all flat and you have none left," Ding Ruoran said.

The most sensitive part of the system is probably its implicit promotion of democracy and human rights, and its blurry handling of major historical events. Wu Fan has read through her child's history textbook and heard plenty of stories from history class. Students are asked to think about questions such as whether the First World War would still have happened had Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife not been assassinated. Classes are mostly discussion; the textbooks are mostly sources and cases, and "they don't hand the students a shallow conclusion."

Set against all the argument and reservation above, one thing the parents agree on completely: "We hope they'll get good at English." Most international curricula teach in English. Every parent mentioned it among the reasons for choosing the school.

These "pioneering" parents keep a utilitarian streak of their own, even though they once hated that streak in ordinary Chinese education. It shows up in Chinese class, where opinions split most easily. "The kids all know they won't sit the gaokao and won't be tested on Chinese, so Chinese doesn't have much of a market in their heads," said Zhang Libei, a parent. But some parents worry that weak Chinese will leave a child just as uncompetitive on coming back to China one day — which was, after all, part of why they sent the child abroad and onto this track so early.

Only one parent mentioned that she had hoped her child would learn critical thinking through the international curriculum and come to understand something about democracy and human rights.

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Things turned around faster than anyone expected.

On October 24, the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission posted a clarification on its official Weibo account, saying people had "misread" the matter. The account also named a false report circulating on WeChat, another social platform, titled "Is Compulsory Education About to Change Again in 2017? Bilingual Schools May Take a Major Hit."

The accurate version is this: under the Compulsory Education Law, the commission will apply the "state textbook approval system" to curricula at compulsory-education schools, and will "further review the state of foreign-related schooling at private schools."

Beyond social media, though, officials have not raised the matter in any more formal setting. A month has passed since the meeting, and as of publication the commission has released no implementing document. The most specific account so far may be from Caixin, a magazine known for serious political and economic reporting, which said the curricula of "Sino-foreign joint venture, foreign-invested and domestically invested (with foreign backing)" schools would be reviewed, and that "importing entire international curricula wholesale will be banned."

Some parents said in their groups that what they had heard was that the rectification would mainly target schools and courses with "problem history textbooks" or "incorrect values."

Wang Meng found this confirmed. She used to wonder why, at a bilingual school where every student was headed abroad, her child still had to read the Three Character Classic and memorize the "core socialist values." She thought Chinese-related coursework was unnecessary, and had grumbled that her daughter's school, Starriver Bilingual School, was as tense and heavy as a public school. Once the rumors about rectifying schools and reviewing curricula came out, Wang Meng decided this proved the principal was "far-sighted."

If the rumors are true, most parents said they would back it. Their bottom line is "just don't cancel the international curriculum"; the rest they "can't worry about." Even if the school decided to "promote traditional culture" and teach the Standards for Being a Good Student and Child, they would "welcome" it too. The old notions of loyalty and filial piety in that text have long been disputed.

Less than a week later, parents at private schools all said in interviews that their children's teachers had told them there was no need to worry. The four school-placement consultancies contacted for this story all declined interviews, but they were still posting school-selection material, seminar notices and photographs of packed consultation sessions about Shanghai's international-curriculum schools on their official accounts, in parent groups and on Moments.

Phoebe, who had consulted an agency about choosing a school, said she was told that schools already up and running would barely be affected.

In Wang Meng's parent group, almost nobody raises the matter now. Everyone is waiting. Two parents about to enroll their children in private bilingual schools both said they were not anxious: "There's always a way around it," they said, in the worldly tone of people long steeped in how things work.

The one thing left to worry about is that demand for private-school places keeps climbing, competition keeps sharpening, and parents and children may sink into exactly the "Chinese-style anxiety" they tried so hard to escape.

Cathy plans to start her child at a private bilingual primary school next year, and since September she has been signing the child up for prep classes: a bridging class in Chinese, math and English for the jump to primary school, piano lessons, a thinking-skills class — "we signed up for everything we could." Of the two weekend days, only Sunday afternoon is free. On weeknights she sits with the child over schoolwork every evening.

Even so, she regrets starting late: "A lot of parents began preparing when their kids were in the youngest kindergarten class."

To apply to a highly ranked American university, Ding Ruoran says, a child has to keep up with schoolwork and take on all sorts of extracurricular activities to pad a résumé; many are up until the small hours.

The private bilingual school that Wang Meng's daughter sailed into four years ago is now competitive enough that only the "very best children" have a chance of a place. Some of the English vocabulary tested in this year's interview, she said, does not appear until her daughter's second-grade textbook.

By CLSA's estimate, China's private-school education market is already worth more than US$315 million, and enrollment at private international schools is expected to grow 14% a year up to 2018.

An overheated market has brought problems of its own, such as uneven quality among foreign teachers. Zhang Libei's child once had a terrible one: "You couldn't tell what he was talking about in class." And the genuinely good foreign teachers usually leave as soon as the contract is up. "They won't stay here long-term to serve you," Zhang Libei said.

"Foreigners aren't like us; they don't stay in one place forever," this parent said. They are used to a looser life.

(At the interviewees' request, Wang Meng, Wu Fan, Zhang Libei, Ding Ruoran, Phoebe and Cathy are all pseudonyms.)

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gbtimes, Wikipedia, Wikipedia (1)