Public or private? A sudden policy change leaves Shanghai parents with the same old dilemma

"Right at the last kick in front of the goal," the policy changed.

Shanghai's primary school enrollment registration system opens on April 26. This year, though, registering is a much harder decision. A mother named Anxi says she may hesitate until the last minute.

The trouble began with a new policy that did not look like much. In early February, the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission announced its primary school enrollment rules: "From May 19 to May 20, the first round of verification for public primary schools and the interviews for private primary schools will take place at the same time." This is the first year Shanghai has run private and public primary school admissions simultaneously. In 2017, private primary schools finished enrolling on May 16. Eleven days later, public primary schools opened registration and took in, on equal terms, the children the private schools had passed over.

It is only a change of dates, but under the new rules private primary schools no longer get first pick. Some supporters of the change argue that it was precisely because private schools could always skim off the smarter children that the gap between private and public schools widened, and that the private-school frenzy grew.

Choosing a school is also less free now, and anyone who chooses carries real risk. The new policy says: "If parents do not register their child for a public primary school, and the child is not admitted after a private-school interview, the child will be placed on the basis of the actual results of the first round of public-school verification and of the admissions already assigned, following the principles of priority for children whose household registration matches their residence and of lower ranking within the same category, and in line with that year's district and school enrollment policies and implementation rules."

Children who lose out will be "assigned" to a public primary school that has not yet filled its incoming class. Public primary schools are ranked among themselves, and everyone rushes toward the better ones. So there is a reasonable worry: give up the public school matched to your home address, and the school you are assigned to may well be worse.

1

Choosing a school has always been hard, because the ones doing the choosing are usually the ones being chosen.

Admission to a public primary school is set by school district. The boundaries are laid out in public official documents, but they follow the address on a family's household registration. In other words, you go to school near where you live. How long the household registration has been at that address matters too: a family that just moved in is on shakier ground than one that has been there three years or more.

The school district became a source of anxiety because the primary schools attached to different districts are not roughly equal. They differ enormously. At the compulsory-education stage, though, officials forbid the publication of rankings of any kind, in the hope that this will promote educational equity. It does not work. People assemble the fragments of information they can find, and rankings turn up everywhere. Primary schools get sorted into tiers, and the worst are called cai xiao — "vegetable-market schools." The term is snobbish, and it has spread widely.

The only way to win the right to choose a public primary school is to buy another home in a better district. That has created a big market, with high prices and brisk trading. Some real-estate agencies have set up dedicated school-district-housing teams.

Policy started intervening in school-district housing in 2012. Shanghai's districts rolled out new rules one after another. The details vary, but they come down to this: each household address gets only one chance every five years to claim matched admission to the same school (multiple births and second children excepted). The rules were meant to hold down school-district housing prices and break the cycle of school-district housing sales.

Instead, people simply moved their timetable forward. School-district anxiety now starts when a child turns one.

Private primary schools run on a different track. They are not bound to a residential address (some enroll only within their own district, but even that is far wider than a school district), and household registration gives no one an advantage. The competition, though, is fiercer. Last year more than 14 private primary schools had admission rates below 15%. That means more than 2,000 people chasing 300 places.

Parents who want a private primary school pin their hopes on preschool. Jiabao Kindergarten (Julia Gabriel), on Wuxing Road in Xuhui district, is one of the most sought-after kindergartens in Shanghai. A mother who plans to send her child there may have to apply while still pregnant, because places are so scarce that even a child already in the toddler class may not move up to the next one. A year at Jiabao costs more than 130,000 yuan. Some think that is worth it; a line that circulates online calls it "probably the kindergarten with the highest rate of admission to Shanghai's top schools."

"Top schools" here means nothing but the well-known private primary schools.

Private and public primary schools differ in many ways. One of them: in the popular rankings, private schools usually place above even the "first-tier" public schools.

The best plan parents have worked out in their anxiety is to prepare on both fronts, if they can afford it. The division of labor is clear — private school is the sprint, public school is the safety net. The old sequence, private first and public after, suited that plan well.

2

The new policy has wrecked the best plan.

Anxi, the mother of a six-year-old, describes the whole thing this way: "right at the last kick in front of the goal," the policy changed.

Anxi enrolled her daughter at a training institution when the girl was 17 months old, then picked a private bilingual kindergarten near their home. They have a decent matched public primary school, but starting last year Anxi signed her daughter up for the institution's intensive class anyway, to prepare for private-school interviews. Three mornings a week, her daughter missed kindergarten for it. Later Anxi simply took her out of kindergarten for the whole day, so the afternoons could go to roller skating and fencing practice.

Anxi heard the news before the new year. She belongs to many parent groups on WeChat, in some of which she has no idea who the other people are, but they trade information constantly. When the policy changed, that turned out to be especially useful.

Anxi's first reaction was to wait for the detailed rules and the explanations. Then she got "scared" — less than three months to go before enrollment. "God, this is awful. If we'd had her a year earlier, we wouldn't have any of these worries." "And this is a Dragon Year, so there are especially many Dragon babies." She started "pulling strings and asking around blindly," but "what I found out wasn't very reliable either."

In March a K12 (kindergarten through 12th grade) education forum ran a poll: "public or private, in the end?" More than 1,300 people voted. 25.28% chose "I have first-tier school-district housing, so I'll go public and give up on private." Only 4.06% chose "I have first-tier school-district housing, but I still want to gamble everything on private."

And 15.80% of parents voted "still torn."

Anxi is afraid her child will be assigned to a "vegetable-market school" and fall short at the last step. Assignment lists have been circulating online, naming the likely destinations of the children who lose the private-school race. They are put together from where public schools sent such children in past years (for public schools, "first come, first served" means priority by household registration).

The education bureaus' enrollment and examination centers say the lists are not reliable. A staff member at the Xuhui District Education Bureau's enrollment and examination center said over the phone: how could anyone possibly know that now? Asked about the principle behind the assignments, they said, "relatively nearby." A staff member in the primary school division of the Huangpu District education examination center added: "In principle we assign within the subdistrict; if that doesn't work, then outside the subdistrict. That's what 'relatively nearby' means."

They also said there is no such thing as a "vegetable-market school" — the education bureau treats all public schools alike.

3

Refusing to admit that good schools exist may do little to even out education. It is widely believed that good schools and bad schools exist as a matter of fact, however people define them, and the new "simultaneous public-private enrollment" policy amounts to conceding the point.

Xiong Bingqi, deputy director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, says an important backdrop to the new policy is that the quality of private and public primary schools has changed places. In the past, private primary schools were not good and few parents chose them; letting them enroll early helped balance out education.

"But once private schools teach better than public ones, keeping this encouraging policy in place only pushes parents further toward private schools and widens the gap between private and public," Xiong Bingqi said.

By 2018 Shanghai had about 77 private primary schools. In 2015 the number was 56.

Private primary schools appeared in the 1990s to make up for what the government was not spending on education, and as an attempt at reform. They were first called schools converted from public ones, but they had already begun raising their own money and writing their own curricula, and policy let them select pupils by written exam — something no other public school was permitted to do at the compulsory-education stage.

Enrolling earlier was another favor granted them.

Some scholars think this fed the private-school fever in school choice, and they have made proposals about it. In an interview with China News Weekly last year, Xia Huixian, dean of the School of Education at Shanghai Normal University, suggested that Shanghai follow other regions and admit pupils to private schools by lottery. Xia Huixian helped draft the teaching plan when World Foreign Language Primary School was founded in 1993.

On the new policy, though, Xia Huixian declined to comment. In an email reply to QDaily, Xia Huixian wrote: "Since the 'simultaneous public-private enrollment' policy is being tried for the first time this year, a lot of it is still unclear. I have plenty of views, but it isn't convenient to state them now."

Others argue that "strictly forbidding school choice" is unreasonable. Zeng Xiaodong, a professor in the Faculty of Education at Beijing Normal University, told Caixin in a 2013 interview about the move from primary to middle school: "Leaving parents some measure of choice is an arrangement that any country's public education system ought to have."

Or perhaps the policy simply cannot do what it hopes to. "Adjusting enrollment policy alone can't cure the fever for school choice at its root," Xiong Bingqi said. If it isn't a fever for public school-district housing, it will be a fever for private schools.

4

Since the change, training institutions have felt a chill — for now.

Liu Fu is the father of a five-year-old girl. He says that at his daughter's after-school training institution, several parents who learned of the new rules before the new year decided not to sign up for the exam-prep sprint class after the holiday, or applied to withdraw.

This father, who asked that the institution not be named, knows that "the education bureau doesn't currently allow teaching ahead of grade level," but "that's how society works, and everyone takes what they need." On January 1 this year the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission began enforcing One Standard, Two Measures, which requires after-school training institutions to "drop comprehensive assessments and lower the difficulty of what they teach."

But Liu Fu's family needs the assessments and the difficulty. The institution runs its usual comprehensive assessments and ranks the students, and Liu Fu uses the ranking to judge his child's odds at a private primary school. Without it he would have almost nothing to go by. Plenty of families need the same thing; a place in the pre-exam sprint class can be hard to get.

The sprint class prepares children for the private schools' admissions interviews — the last kick in front of the goal. The groundwork was laid years earlier. The class is only the sequel to a three-year course in logical thinking and a one-year intensive exam-prep class.

The intensive classes are named after the private primary schools, which makes them look like prep courses run by the schools themselves. Parents believe the two really do have a special relationship. "They're very good at guessing the questions."

Parents who are glad to see their children taught ahead of grade level are called "chicken blood" parents, the Chinese term for hyper-driven. Their biggest complaint about public schools is that too little is taught in class. They see this as a problem with how responsibility is divided among the government, the schools and the parents, and they do not want to carry a share that isn't theirs. "Everyone talks about 'reducing the burden' now. The workload at public schools has come down, but the pressure to get into a good school hasn't," Liu Fu said.

Education authorities keep repeating the call to reduce the burden, and the credentials of training institutions come under question from time to time, yet demand shows no sign of cooling. Xueersi is another after-school institution for primary and middle school students that "chicken blood" parents favor. Its parent company, TAL Education, listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2010, and its market value now exceeds New Oriental's. HSBC's 2017 global education report found that 93% of Chinese parents put their children in after-school classes, the highest share among the 15 countries surveyed.

The new enrollment policy has worked for the moment: it has freed the parents who are giving the private-school exam a rest. Most of them don't believe the training has any lasting educational value. They believe only that in the fight for private-school places, a training institution can "do what parents can't" — learn the interview questions in advance, for instance.

The new policy has not shaken the resolve of Liu Fu and parents like him, who spend 60,000 yuan a year on training institutions. They have seen this before. As Caixin reported: "In the 2012 crackdown on Olympiad math, some parents who were sure Olympiad math was finished pulled their children out of the training. By the time they saw that admissions that year were still ruled by Olympiad math, it was too late to turn back."

Another after-school institution says it will open five intensive classes for Shanghai Experimental School over next year's winter break, against two or three in past years. Shanghai Experimental School was created by decree of the Shanghai Municipal People's Government in 1987, and it is the only primary school in Shanghai that the "simultaneous public-private enrollment" policy does not touch; it enrolls on its own. But the institution says it doesn't know whether the extra classes have anything to do with the new policy.

5

Salespeople at real-estate agencies have already made the new policy their most fashionable pitch.

"Sales of school-district housing have clearly picked up since the new year," one sales supervisor said, and she thinks the "simultaneous public-private enrollment" policy is the reason. Before, parents were only "having a look"; now they have suddenly made up their minds to rejoin the race for public schools.

March and April are the housing market's peak season anyway, so the claim may not be accurate. But other things agents say make clear that the public-school race the private-school enthusiasts are turning to is no easier:

In Xuhui district, school-district housing matched to some nearby "first-tier" schools has climbed steadily over the past four or five years, from 80,000 yuan per square meter to more than 130,000. If you put that down to housing prices rising overall, consider: "2017 was a bad year for the market, and school-district housing still didn't fall."

How long a household has been registered at the address matters too, though the enrollment rules say nothing explicit about it. Agents generally advise that three years is safe. Under three years, better to pull some strings.

Agents sell a kind of home that comes with the right to use it but not to own it. It satisfies the enrollment requirements, but only a buyer with Shanghai household registration can purchase one, in a single cash payment, with no mortgage. Beyond winning a school place, almost no one has any other use for such a home. The priciest per square meter, under 10 square meters, sold for 2 million yuan.

"People with money keep a school-district home in reserve anyway," said one manager, slouched and unhurried. "The ones policy always hits are the people with a little money but not much of it. They're the ones who can't decide."

Still, one industry insider who asked not to be named says that since last year, "school district" and "school-district housing" have gone onto the list of sensitive words at some agencies. They got the notice last April.

On the new policy, his comment was that private education is one of Shanghai's advantages over Beijing: it takes some of the pressure off school-district housing.

(Anxi and Liu Fu are pseudonyms, at the interviewees' request.)

Cover image from Thought Catalog on Unsplash, Wikipedia, PxHere.