Todays NY Times profiles a Chinese standardized test prep factory that prepares students for college entrance exams: Even as cram schools have proliferated across urban areas, Maotanchang is a world apart, a remote one-industry town that produces test-taking machines with the same single-minded commitment that other Chinese towns devote to making socks or Christmas ornaments. The glut of university students may have eroded the value of a college degree, especially as unemployment and underemployment rises among new graduates. And many wealthy families are simply opting out of the system, placing their children in private international schools in China or sending them abroad for an education. But for those of limited means, like Yang, the economic uncertainty has only intensified the gaokao competition; a few points either way could determine whether a student qualifies for a degree that is worth something — or nothing. “The competition is fiercer than ever,” says Jiang Xueqin, an assistant vice principal at Tsinghua University High School. “And rural students are getting left behind.” Isolated in the foothills of Anhui, two hours from the nearest city, Maotanchang caters mostly to such students and prides itself on eliminating the distractions of modern life. Cellphones and laptops are forbidden; the dormitories, where roughly half the students live, were designed without electrical outlets. Romance is banned. In town, where the rest of the students live, mostly with their mothers in tiny partitioned rooms, the local government has shut down all forms of entertainment. This may be the only town in China with no video arcade, billiards hall or Internet cafe. “There’s nothing to do but study,” Yang says. Town planning is not the only means through which the school instills discipline in kids like Yang, a normally fun-loving teenager from Yuejin whom his father calls “the most mischievous kid in the village.” Maotanchang’s all-male corps of head teachers doles out lessons, and frequently punishments, with military rigor; their job security and bonuses depend on raising their students’ test scores. Security guards roam the 165-acre campus in golf carts and on motorcycles, while surveillance cameras track students’ movements in classrooms, dormitories and even the town’s main intersections. This “closed management practice,” as an assistant principal, Li Zhenhua, has termed it, gets results. In 1998, only 98 Maotanchang students achieved the minimum gaokao score needed to enter a university. Fifteen years later, 9,312 students passed, and the school was striving to break the 10,000 mark in 2014. Yang and Cao hoped to be among them. At first, the school offered extra exam-prep courses outside the regular curriculum for a modest fee. When the government banned tuition-based courses from public schools in 2004, the local administrators turned the entire public-school curriculum into an intensive cram course. (In 10th and 11th grades, students are allowed two elective hours per week — music, art or physical education. In 12th grade, no electives are permitted, only gaokao courses.) More audaciously, they opened a private for-profit wing that catered to “repeat” students — high-school graduates who were so desperate to improve their scores that they would pay for the privilege of going through the gaokao mill again. The move paid off. The “repeater” wing, which sits on the same campus as the public high school and uses many of the same resources, is now the school’s biggest profit center, with more than 6,000 students paying anywhere from a few hundred dollars to nearly $8,000 a year in tuition alone. (Students with low scores pay the highest fees — a tuition structure designed to ensure a high rate of success and revenues for the school.) Source: nytimes/glogin?mobile=1&URI=http%3A%2F%2Fmobile.nytimes%2F2015%2F01%2F04%2Fmagazine%2Finside-a-chinese-test-prep-factory.html%3Freferrer%26_r%3D0
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 11:45:02 +0000
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