This fascinating and informative comment was just posted in response to Tom Loveless’s earlier article about how Shanghai gets high scores by excluding the children of migrants from its schools and how OECD allows China to exclude the PISA scores from provinces with less than stellar results. As you will see, there is no coddling” in China. Instead, the pressure on students to study and compete for college entry is relentless.

The reader writes:

As a Chinese native living more than 50% of time in US during the last 20 years, I’m not at all surprised by the result.

Let me talk a little bit about China style. I’m not judging which is better, China or US – it’s just different ways of living, it’s just plain facts.

Two facts are unbelievable for normal US people in terms of the education of kids in China, and as I knew, somewhat similar in Japan and Korea.

First, you can never imagine how crazy the Chinese parents go for the next generation education. A statistic in Beijing two years ago showed that the average cost for each kid for before-college education is roughly 800K RMB – equal to 120K USD. Suppose the kid goes to college at the age of 18, so is about 7K USD every year. You know the average household income in Beijing? It’s about 16K USD. This is a simple math, people spend 45% of their income for their kid education. Bear in mind that not all families has only one child, in my daughter’s class, it’s about 1.4 per family. Well, this number might have been boosted up by some rich people, but it’s not unusual at all. My sister, who lives in a small town in a not-so-poor area, spends even up to 60% sometimes.

The parents just get insane to send their child to a better school. It cost about 15K~30K USD to get a kid into a good primary school if you are not living in the school district, just to bribe the school. Well, “bribe” might be a heavy word, you “voluntarily donate” that money to the school since the state policy forbid tuition overcharge. 15K is a huge number considering the average family income.

Second, it’s purely hardworking and fierce competitions. I still remember my high school days. The school did not have weekends. I got one half-day break each week and one weekend every four weeks. Every day, I got up 6:00 am, followed by a running of 3K meters, and then one hour so called “early reading”, then the breakfast. And after a whole day’s class, at around 5:00pm, there was another 3K meter running. After dinner, there was another two-hour “night reading”. The students were then forced to go to sleep at 9:15 sharp, by cutting off the home electricity.

Thank God, nowadays the education admonition forbids such hell-style training. No after-hour classes are allowed, and no more than half-hour homework are allowed for kids lower than 5th grade. Actually, three school heads were fired for doing so in my hometown last year. But that’s not a relief for the kids – the competition is still there. The teachers do not assign required homework now, but instead, leave the same amount of “optional” one which no parents take as optional. Many kids spend all their after school time on homework of all kinds–literature, math, English, running, sit-ups, craft, class projects, presentations, etc. When the sweet weekend finally arrive, they have to go to after-school classes, not offered by school now, but instead by commercial education companies – the most popular schools are advanced math, English, piano, Karate, dancing. You see, this is so called “the same herbal tea boiled by different water.” No policies could relieve one slight piece from the kids’ shoulders.

The competition arrives from the national college entry exam (so called “Gaokao”). You have to pass the line to go to a college. The good part is that this provides an equal opportunity to everyone, rich or poor. No matter which family you are born from, you have this chance to change your life. The bad part is that this is the only chance. In the remote poor rural area, “no college, no future” is what everyone believes, which now is becoming “no good college, no future”. And the fact is, China has so many kids, and not too many universities. The “Gaokao” is said to be like a huge troop trying to pass a river by a single-log bridge. You get on the bridge, you go to college, otherwise you just fall.

Gaokao is the ultimate goal of all students and the single most important thing before you graduate from high school. The kid’s future, the parents’ hope, the teacher’s performance and salary, the school’s reputation are all connected to this. In China, nobody knows about PISA, and nobody cares about PISA, Gaokao is everything.