The culture that is Shanghai

by on May 22, 2017 at 1:50 pm in Education | Permalink

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.

That is from Emily Feng at the FT, via Dan Wang.

1 msgkings May 22, 2017 at 2:06 pm

I’ve always wondered why places with such intense demand for private schools (Shanghai, SF, NYC, etc) don’t see massive amounts of new schools opening to meet the demand? How could you not succeed?

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2 JWatts May 22, 2017 at 2:21 pm

Is there intense demand for additional private schools in SF and NYC?

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3 JWatts May 22, 2017 at 2:25 pm

Specifically, at the current marginal profit margin. I assume that SF & NYC are fairly expensive locations to meet regulatory costs, labor costs, rent costs, etc.

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4 msgkings May 22, 2017 at 2:29 pm

Yes there is, almost every school in those cities and others has to turn away many applicants.

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5 Gopchik May 23, 2017 at 12:03 am

“…almost every school…”? Did that come from makeshitup.com?

6 A Centrist May 23, 2017 at 10:17 am

Maybe he left out the word ‘good’? As in private or elite public? But in my experience as a NY’er (without kids), that seems true…

7 Daniel Weber May 22, 2017 at 2:49 pm

Some things take time to build up, like reputation, and it’s very hard to bootstrap. Although I could see a bunch of insiders from one private school splitting off and riding the coattails of the old organization’s reputation.

When you are rich enough, the #1 goal is making sure your kids only interact with other rich kids, which is impossible to compete against.

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8 Alain May 22, 2017 at 2:55 pm

> Although I could see a bunch of insiders from one private school splitting off and riding the coattails of the old organization’s reputation.

That absolutely happens. A school I was just interviewing for my daughter followed exactly that model. It worked out very well for them!

> When you are rich enough, the #1 goal is making sure your kids only interact with other rich kids, which is impossible to compete against.

The #1 goal is to have “great kids” at the school (and much of that is avoiding “bad kids”). And indeed those are in limited supply. Parents have a very hard time understanding how “great” the kids are at the school so, indeed, they have to go by reputation. They also use how hard it is to get into the school as a proxy for quality of the children who attend.

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9 Bob from Ohio May 22, 2017 at 3:08 pm

“The #1 goal is to have “great kids” at the school (and much of that is avoiding “bad kids”).”

You are just re-phrasing Daniel

Obviously “great kids = rich kids”.

And, yes, everyone sending kids to a private school in NYC or SF is rich.

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10 Alain May 22, 2017 at 7:21 pm

Rich does not equal great.

I was dirt poor and I went to a similar school. Although looking back I don’t know if they should have accepted me, due to my family situation I was quite different than the student body. While I wasn’t a negative, I do not think that I added much, other than some academic pressure, to the student body.

11 albatross May 23, 2017 at 12:44 pm

No, great kids = smart, well-behaved kids. Parents matter because:

a. Intelligence is partly heritable and partly early childhood environment, and smarter parents tend to help on both fronts. Also well-educated parents can help their kids with homework when they get stuck.

b. Middle class and up values mean the parents care how the kids behave, care about their grades, will lean on them to do their homework, etc. That matters a lot.

c. Middle class and up wealth/income means the kids won’t have a lot of unmet material needs that interfere with being at school–they can see a doctor when they’re sick, get enough to eat, buy supplies for projects and such, etc.

12 alex May 22, 2017 at 2:55 pm

I thought I saw an article (maybe linked here!) about how lots of new private schools have been springing up in SF.

Prestige can’t be manufactured overnight, however.

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13 Alain May 22, 2017 at 2:56 pm

Few parents actually care about the “prestige”. See above.

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14 prior_test2 May 23, 2017 at 3:47 am

So Catholic schools – too commonplace?

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15 Will Barrett May 23, 2017 at 2:19 pm

A fancy for profit did open in NYC in 2012. Avenues World School. They planned more openings around the world but haven’t seen new campuses yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenues:_The_World_School

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16 JWatts May 22, 2017 at 2:28 pm

“…but also parents and grandparents.”

Pay walled article. Does it address why they are filtering on parents and grandparents, beyond the standard alumni exemptions.

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17 Jonathan May 22, 2017 at 2:31 pm

Regression to the mean…

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18 improbable May 22, 2017 at 2:41 pm

I agree, but why? I think a test score now is probably a better predictor of this kid’s exam results in 4 years’ time.

Indian marrige markets do roughly this, for the reason that they care about offspring… but why would the school care?

BTW there is a google AMP version you can read, by searching for the quoted text.

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19 Mark Thorson May 22, 2017 at 4:43 pm

Steve Sailer, the bat-signal is illuminated.

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20 BC May 22, 2017 at 8:02 pm

Not paywalled, at least not for me. One needs a login, but registration was free.

From the article: “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.”

It sounds like they may have been trying to make admissions less competitive, which just turned the admissions process into a competition among parents and grandparents. There’s a lesson in there: trying to de-emphasize meritocracy among children doesn’t actually help mobility. Rather, it cements immobility by helping those with the “right” parents, whether it’s high-IQ parents in China or politically connected parents in the West. Meritocracy is not the enemy, and trying to produce equal outcomes inevitably leads to all sorts of unintended consequences.

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21 Thiago Ribeiro May 22, 2017 at 2:33 pm

Red Fascism’s mask has fallen. Brazil has many exclusive schools that test children as young as five, but none would ever be allowed to investigate one’s forefathers as a condition to accept children.

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22 Thiago Ribeiro May 22, 2017 at 2:54 pm

Soon the oppressed masses in China will rise uo against their masters, just as the desperate terrorized peoples of the so-called America will do.

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23 Thiago Ribeiro May 22, 2017 at 2:56 pm

Stop impersonating me right now.

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24 Thiago Ribeiro May 22, 2017 at 6:32 pm

You stop impersonating me first.

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25 dearieme May 22, 2017 at 2:34 pm

What sorts of tests and checks?

Something to indicate that they are likely to stump up the fees? Something else?

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26 Bob from Ohio May 22, 2017 at 3:10 pm

Communist Party membership so as to avoid unpleasant interaction with government?

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27 Maitreya May 22, 2017 at 2:52 pm

The entire article does not have a single mention of Shanghai’s PISA rankings: No.1 in the world in 2009 and 2012. OECD has officially said that Shanghai has the best public school education system in the world. It is not clear why this fact has been left out in the article, especially since the same journalist is not averse to mentioning irrelevant facts that portray China negatively (e.g. https://www.ft.com/content/cc311e58-264f-11e7-8691-d5f7e0cd0a16 – see last sentence)

Moreover, this article says nothing new. This is standard practice in elite schools of developing countries. Even in India (whose two nominated states scored second-to-last in PISA 2009), elite private schools in Mumbai and Delhi take interviews, make children take tests, and also assess parents’ educational qualifications for filtering pupils. Even the area of residence is a criteria for admissions – even for private schools.

Moreover, since only the elite can get into such schools, citing the average monthly salary for all Shanghai citizens is utterly useless. The target audience and sample are entirely different. The children of the average Shanghai citizen is not the target audience of such schools.

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28 FG May 23, 2017 at 9:32 am

My understanding is that Shanghai’s strong scores depend a lot on the elite background of most of its students (and the hukou system that keeps rural kids, or the kids of poorer people who moved from the countryside to the city, from being Shanghai students). Is this wrong?

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29 Barkley Rosser May 22, 2017 at 3:01 pm

Checking on parents and grandparents is a return to the old Confucian mandarin system of exams. It was always said that it took three generations for a family to move from being peasants to being high level mandarins, even for the most brilliant of such peasants and their brilliant offspring.

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30 Thiago Ribeiro May 22, 2017 at 3:34 pm

Maybe it is a return to the old Communist system of punishing the children by the misdeeds or class of their parents. It is an inhuman system and should be abolished asap.

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31 anonymous May 22, 2017 at 10:16 pm

Li Po and Tu Fu would agree with Jacques Riviere.

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32 Thiago Ribeiro May 23, 2017 at 5:42 am

What they said?

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33 Thiago Ribeiro May 22, 2017 at 3:03 pm
34 rayward May 22, 2017 at 3:04 pm

Chinese who can afford it send their children to prep school in America, believing that it improves their chances of getting accepted to an elite college or university in America (and improves their chances of learning English). The culture that is Shanghai is the culture that is America.

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35 Li Zhi May 22, 2017 at 3:41 pm

I’ve long believed, and the studies confirm, that parents have a, if not *the*, major influence on kids (K-12) educational attainment. Parent involvement and the home environment are indisputably important factors. So, it makes sense to appraise those factors. I went to a private boarding high school, and there is zero doubt in my mind that the forced study had a dramatic effect on the AMOUNT and DEPTH of the material that could be covered in class be it History, English literature or Calculus. Reversion to the mean has the implication that by 1. eliminating the bottom-feeders and 2. increasing the mean study hours (whether quality time or not) you’ll push up the mean. Just as a sanitation system improves average health. I DO wonder if the parent evaluation is looking at the appropriate factors (I doubt it does), and I see no obvious reason to look at grandparents (unless they’re part of the child’s household). It seems to me that such a system is quite vulnerable to bias, abuse and corruption; especially if it isn’t transparent.

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36 Gopchik May 23, 2017 at 12:10 am

Did your boarding school teach you about paragraph breaks and ALL CAPS?

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37 Paul May 22, 2017 at 4:25 pm

Because Shanghai is the top in PISA rankings with Singapore breathing down its neck they have to go to extremes to avoid losing the top spot. Falling from 1 to 2 is much worse than rising to number 2 and staying there.

Put it this way, for Shanghai to lose to Singapore would be interpreted as a loss to the whole of China, not just the city of Shanghai losing to the city of Singapore. If you were the administrator in charge you would do everything to improve your chances.

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38 not jeeves May 22, 2017 at 10:18 pm

rem acu tetigisti

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39 Anonymous May 22, 2017 at 6:18 pm
40 BC May 22, 2017 at 8:07 pm

“…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….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.”

Reducing the number of open slots at the most popular schools — sure, that should help…

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41 Evans_KY May 22, 2017 at 9:17 pm

Eugenics to build a “better” society. At least they are upfront about their intentions. We are more covert in our sorting methods.

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42 Thor May 24, 2017 at 12:04 am

We have sorting methods? (Other than the “self sorting” done by parents to avoid having their kids contact bad kids.)

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43 dux.ie May 22, 2017 at 10:22 pm
44 dux.ie May 23, 2017 at 12:01 am

Schools in Shanghai seem to be the most meritocracy based. This is reflected from the distribution of 15 yo students in various grades from the OECD PISA data. In Shanghai the distribution is G9 40% G10 54% G11 0.6%. Whether it is intentional or not the sum of those in G10 and G11 are roughly the % of those with IQ greater than 115 in Shanghai, those that are scheduled to enter university later. This is higher than the 35% for China overall.

In US the distribution is G9 12% G10 71% G11 16%, contratry to the policy of no child left behind. The sum of those in G10 and G11 is very much greater than that that are expected to enter university later. Thus there is significant academic mismatch at G10 creating unnecessary anxiety which depressed the innate ability of the disadvantaged students who might performed much better among their peers. This will actually increases the performance gap.

In UK the distribution is G9 0.03% G10 1% G11 95% G12 3%. Well, almost ALL students in UK are equally gifted 🙂 UK could score higher if less stress are placed on the students. Finland which prides herself with a less stressful and competitive education environment, the distribution is G9 85% G10 nil G11 0.15% Finland performed better than UK in PISA.

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45 sohois May 23, 2017 at 11:48 am

Was Teacher at 2 Shanghai schools, specifically the international programs of those schools, feel i should drop a few details.

First of all, anyone who has ever worked in the system will tell you the same thing: PISA is bullshit. There are plenty of super talented students in the schools but a huge chunk of their high scores are likely reflected in: 1)the selection bias of just using Shanghai, which is much wealthier than a lot of the rest of China and 2)the fact that students in Chinese high schools and middle schools are subject to absurd 15 hour days of endless study.

As for intake at my programs, we never had to resort to anything like testing for parents. It just wasn’t necessary. I think at my second school we had something like 400-500 applications for ~70 positions, but as we were an international program it was easy to filter out the less capable through english tests and interviews; most students just didn’t meet even the basic standard of english needed for an international program. Inevitably we’d get about 10% ‘math geniuses’ in a cohort, a.k.a. hopeless students whose parents simply paid whatever they could to get them in a program. And just as inevitably these students would last a term before dropping out, a colossal waste for the parents involved.

I expect that the 2 schools caught up in this scandal were newer, less established schools that wanted to build up a reputation through basic selection bias. Once they’d demonstrated “academic excellence” by picking out all the highest IQ kids, they could do the same as we did and just price discriminate against 10-15% of students to drive up profit margins, and coast along on reputation.

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46 dux.ie May 24, 2017 at 1:47 am

You seems to be confused about regional and country PISA scores. The score for Shanghai was stated as is, not as the score for China. Take the example for US, the overall 2015 PISA score for US is 487.7 while the score for US_Massachusetts is 518.7. Is the score for US_Massachusetts also, as you termed it “bullshit” ??

Shanghai is located in the general Jiangnan/Gangnam area which historically produced many intellectuals. It is impossible to formulate a representative sample which relect the overall profile of China in Shanghai. However, in 2015 four regions of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Guangdong were included in the sample with enough range (e.g. Guangdong is next to the Hainan province with average IQ of 90.7) to reflect the overall profile for China and the 2015 score of 514.3 is more or less the equivalent of IQ 103 for China rather than the IQ 115.3 for Shanghai. Note PISA scores for 2012 and 2015 cannot be compared directly as there is a change in scaling.

Long hours of study might be equivalent to level of motivation the data of which was collected in PISA 2015. Unfortunately from the national data sumarized from the 540000 students worldwide, opposite to general belief the academic performance actually decreased with increasing motivation,

PISA3 = -53.5598*Motiv +479.174; # n=57; Rsq=0.1888; p=0.0007323

Increased motivation (longer study hours?) increased stress and anxiety which might degrade the performance,

PISA3 = -43.5129*Anxiety +479.632; # n=57; Rsq=0.06521; p=0.05522

However it is borderline statistically not significant. For some students axiety might have different effects for degrading or improving the score. The root cause is the competition levels which can explain significantly both the performance and anxiety levels,

Anxiety = +0.00800819*WantBestPct -0.425905; # n=57; Rsq=0.2675; p=3.798e-05

PISA3 = -1.28487*WantBestPct +558.715; # n=57; Rsq=0.2372; p=0.0001222

Interestingly, about 25% of the countries like Canada, Australia, BSJG_China in the first quadrant with the average point as the origin actually strived under competition,

PISA3=+1.54352*WantBestPct+400.991; # n=14; Rsq=0.3779; p=0.01931

Thus competition and studying hard are good for Canada, Australia, China, etc, but disadvantage other countries. That explain the atitudes in US.

The data showed that tiger mums are only effective with tiger children, otherwise the result will be worse than do nothing.

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