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09-03-2014, 10:48 AM
THE WONDER YEARS
Angus Grigg With Lucy Gao
3351 words
8 Mar 2014
The Australian Financial Review
AFNR
English
Copyright 2014. Fairfax Media Management Pty Limited.
Inside story
Shanghai's stellar educational results have stunned the Western world. Angus Grigg goes inside one of the city's cram schools to meet an extraordinary elite.
It's the last day of winter school holidays yet this classroom in downtown Shanghai is packed.
As the first snow of the season falls outside, softening the edges of China's commercial capital, a group of 13-year-olds are finishing up a three-hour maths tutorial. Like children the world over, they slouch on their desks, twirl pencils and generally look without interest at the whiteboard filled with quadratic equations.
There is, however, a different dynamic to this classroom with its white walls, matching vinyl floor and posters demanding that mobile phones be switched off.
At first the silence appears to explain it, but then a thick red line on the floor comes into view. It divides the classroom perfectly in half and marks the boundary for the "parents' listening area", according to a sign written in English and Mandarin.
All 20 chairs behind this painted red line are occupied, but these middle-aged parents dressed in tracksuit tops and soft shoes are doing more than listening. Like their children seated beyond the line, they are furiously taking notes, shuffling pages and trying to keep up with the algebra written in precise blue marker pen.
Most have spent three hours a day for the past week – including Saturday and Sunday – at this holiday algebra program with their children in an effort to learn next semester's maths syllabus before school starts again.
"The ethos of this school is that children should not fight alone," says maths teacher Wang Bin. The 31-year-old, who won a prestigious maths contest as a child, has an easy patter, but turns serious on the importance of his chosen subject. He says children are naturally lazy and need to be pushed to perform by their parents.
"Normally one parent will attend the whole subject with their child so they can help with homework and generally understand the course," he explains.
Three years ago, such a primer for the coming semester would have provided students with an advantage in China's highly competitive school system, but not today. These "cram schools" are now so widespread across China that those who don't attend are likely to fall behind.
The Xueersi school (which translates to "thinking and studying") has seen its numbers triple over the past three years. It expects enrolments in Shanghai alone to triple again to 100,000 children by 2017, mirroring the growth of the Beijing schools run by its parent company, the TAL Education Group, an "after-school tutoring services provider".
What was once an optional extra is now an entrenched part of China's school system for the aspiring middle class; richer parents tend to employ private tutors.
It's an arms race and the parents involved would make the famed Chinese-American "Tiger mum" Amy Chua appear easy-going.
Yet unlike Chua and her controversial 2011 book The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which shocked the Anglosphere with its demanding parenting ethos, there is little debate in China about the expectations on these pupils. Most parents are resigned.
As a result of that intensity, the Anglosphere is reeling all over again. These Chinese students are scaling the scholastic heights, leaving Westerners in their wake.
In the latest results from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, Shanghai's 15-year-olds perform better than any of their peers around the globe. The city is regarded as a benchmark for standards other nations are straining to reach.
The OECD report, from its 2012 survey, revealed the children of Shanghai cleaners were doing better than the kids of Australian lawyers. Perhaps not so surprising given that, in maths and science, those 15-year-olds are three years ahead of their Australian equivalents. And that Australian students are going backwards across the major categories of reading, maths and science.
For many Australian parents – and students – the media attention those PISA results have received has confirmed worries about local educational standards, rigour or the lack of it, and about proposals for the new national curriculum, with its attempts to weave knowledge of indigenous culture, the Asian century and sustainability right through subjects including maths and science.
The stakes are high: a country's future rests on how well it educates its populace. Ben Jensen, from Melbourne's Grattan Institute, who has been studying Shanghai's school system, says there is a strong correlation between PISA results and future growth in gross domestic product. Research cited by the Grattan Institute shows increasing the "effectiveness" of teachers by 10 per cent would add 0.2 percentage points to Australia's annual long-run growth, adding $90 billion to GDP by 2050.
As for individual success in today's world, that is increasingly decided everywhere by educational attainment.Brutally competitive
Part of Shanghai's success can be attributed to the brutally competitive nature of Chinese society. There is also a general insecurity, felt by much of the population, because there is no adequate social safety net. These anxieties manifest themselves in a commitment to education, not for the sake of higher learning but as a means for survival. While unemployment in China remains low, there is a huge pay discrepancy between white- and blue-collar work.
For the past month, AFR Weekend has attended its own "cram school" on Shanghai's schooling system, yet one question remains unanswered: if this is what it takes, do we want our kids living like this?
Put another way: is this the new reality of a world dominated by a fast-rising China?
Take 13-year-old Tang Zhihao, a junior middle school student, with closely cropped hair and glasses. Not only did he and his mother, Wang Ziping, an IT project manager, attend the seven-day tutoring course to learn next semester's maths syllabus, but they did the following year's course work as well. That means that over the four-week Spring Festival holiday, the pair spent 42 contact hours doing additional maths classes, plus at least another seven hours of homework. "He needs to do well in maths so he can get into a good senior middle school," his mother Wang told us outside the classroom.
Wang, whose son attends a relatively cheap selective private school costing $3500 a year, epitomises the commitment to education by Chinese parents.
Not only did she give up much of her annual holiday to attend the cram school, but each night, she sits with her son and goes through past exam papers and other schoolwork. "He gets most of his homework done at school," she says. "Then he will spend two to three hours each night doing additional cram schoolwork or preparing for maths contests."
Between school, homework and the tasks Ms Wang sets her son, he has half an hour of downtime each day. "He usually spends this cleaning his desk or reading magazines," she says, claiming this is normal for 13-year-olds in China. All 50 students in her son's class at school, she says, attend additional maths tutoring, while around half would do extra English and Mandarin.
"I would spend 70 per cent of my free time on my son's schooling," she says. "Even when we go away, I will think about what work he should be doing."
For the majority of parents, there is no choice but to buy into this race. Unless they can afford to send their children overseas, they are stuck in a high-pressure system where the competition begins early.
It's a constant cycle of exams in maths, English and Mandarin and excellence in extracurricular activities like music, calligraphy, chess and, to a lesser degree, sport.
The first challenge for a child comes around age 11: getting into a prestigious junior middle school. Preparing for this state-run exam usually begins at the age of nine, but with competition getting tougher all the time, parents of all backgrounds, from lawyers to government workers, are starting their kids earlier. Once again this is done through the privately run "cram schools".Studying for a better life
During AFR Weekend's visit to the Xueersi school, we met six-year-old Gao Yanhong, whose mother insisted she was getting off lightly as the child prepared for sitting the junior middle school entrance exam.
For the past eight months, Gao, dressed this day in Dora sneakers, a bright pink jacket and matching face mask, has been doing four hours a week of additional maths and English during the term and a week of intensive study for each subject during the country's two main holidays.
"We are going easy on our daughter," said the mother. "Some kids her age spend all weekend doing programs along with two to three hours of homework each night."
In Australia, what Gao is doing would be like beginning preparations for a selective high school exam in kindergarten.
There's method in this fierce competition. Each district has supposedly "good" and "bad" public schools. The worse the school's reputation, the harder it will be for the pupil to gain entry to a prestigious tertiary institution such as Peking University or Shanghai's Fudan University.
But even if a child gets into a top junior middle school, the cycle of testing is not over. Three years later, they must sit an even more demanding exam for entry into senior middle school. After that comes the famous gaokao or leaving exam. This is supposedly easier than the previous exam, yet Australian parents would be shocked at what some students put themselves through.
Last year, in the central province of Hubei, students hired a nurse to connect them to amino acid drips so they didn't require a study break for their vitamin supplements. In another province, parents poisoned all the frogs in the school pond because their croaking was proving a distraction.
Less extreme examples of intervention are the halting of construction work during the gaokao in many cities and banning drivers from horn-blowing near exam centres.
Maths teacher Wang explains the stakes. "Study is the only way for ordinary people to change their lives. Otherwise they will have a miserable life like their parents. This country does not have a welfare system so you have to find a good job and the only way to do this is by studying hard."Private sector still catching up
The attitude is largely a function of China's present stage of development. While the country has invested heavily in education and expects to turn out 7.3 million university graduates this year, its private sector has not kept pace. Lack of economic reform over the past decade has resulted in a dearth of well-paying white-collar jobs; rigid state-owned enterprises still control the most lucrative sectors of the economy such as telecommunications, banking and transport.
This explains why, although unemployment remains low and blue-collar wages are going up faster than white-collar pay, there is still a huge gap. A cleaner in Shanghai can expect to make 2500 yuan ($450) a month; a mid-ranking government official would make five times that, plus perks such as cheap housing and preferential access to the best schools for their child.
This will change if the new administration makes good on its promise of wholesale economic reform, but parents are not taking any chances.
Shanghai students have topped the PISA scores since 2009. The test is taken every three years. And while some have questioned the accuracy of the test results, Ben Jensen is a believer. The program director for education at Melbourne's Grattan Institute has spent much of the past three years studying Shanghai's school system and is mightily impressed. Next Saturday, the think tank will release a major study into how Australia can deliver teacher training programs like those in Shanghai.
"It's an amazingly well-run system," he says via phone. "Australian children are going to be competing with these kids for university places both here and abroad."
It brings to mind the joke by comedian Chris Lilley that his character Ja'mie is the "smartest non-Asian" in the class. And while it's no doubt sobering for Australian parents who want their children to win a place at one of the world's top-ranked universities like Harvard, Oxford or Yale, Shanghai's performance has far broader implications.
"The correlation between economic growth and PISA test scores is very strong," says Jensen. "PISA scores are the strong predictor of future growth. Both the World Bank and OECD are saying this really matters."
He says the most conservative research shows that raising test scores by one standard deviation would lift GDP growth by one percentage point. "Naturally it takes a significant period of time for improvements in the skills of students to feed into the labour market. However, because the effects are cumulative, the long-term increase in wealth can be dramatic," he says.
In a highly globalised world, this also suggests that multinational companies will locate their offices where the talent is being produced. That move is yet to materialise in China, partly due to its relatively closed economy and the difficulty of doing business in the country but, says Jensen, it is a natural progression. For him, the formula behind Shanghai's success is autonomy and training – both buzzwords in the current education debate in Australia.
"Shanghai has great autonomy and ability to innovate," he says. "They are very good at doing what all the research says they should be doing."
The research, which was mostly done in Western countries, says strong, content-based teacher training must be backed up with high-quality on-the-job assessment and feedback. Says Jensen, "In Shanghai, they are perhaps the best in the world at mentoring and evaluating teachers. They are also very good at doing research in individual schools about what effect a change in teaching a particular subject had on student performance."
This stems from an effort more than two decades ago by authorities in Beijing to improve the quality of education across the country. "Shanghai sent people all over the world to see what worked," says Jensen.
Yet in just 20 years that flow of teachers and policymakers from China to the West has been reversed. In mid-February, Britain announced it would send a delegation of teachers with Education Minister Elizabeth Truss to Shanghai to study its success in maths and science.
"Shanghai is the top-performing part of the world for maths. Their children are streets ahead," said Truss. "Our new curriculum has borrowed from theirs because we know it works – early learning of key arithmetic and a focus on times tables and long division, for instance."
For Truss, the key success of Shanghai was that its students perform at a high level regardless of gender or their parents' income. OECD research released in mid-February looked at a student's PISA test results alongside their parent's occupation, the traditional theory being that children of the professional classes perform better than their blue-collar peers.
But the comparison didn't hold up between Shanghai and the UK. It found the children of cleaners and factory workers in Shanghai outperformed those of doctors and lawyers in Britain. The revelation led to much hand-wringing in Britain. When similar findings came out in Australia's results, there was concern here, too.Success in the long run
Yet there are plenty of questions that need to be asked about China's system and in particular Shanghai's success in the PISA tests.
As noted by Harvard University education expert, Tom Loveless, 12 Chinese provinces took part in the 2009 PISA test but only the results for Shanghai were made public.
"There is a lack of transparency surrounding PISA's relationship with China," he says. Jensen acknowledges these problems, but maintains that Shanghai's system is still one to be admired.
He says its other strength is autonomy. Jensen says Beijing gave Shanghai the power to control its own schools, albeit within the confines of the Communist Party in the 1980s, during the early days of reforms under Deng Xiaoping.
Initially it was viewed as a pilot project, but many of the reforms adopted by Shanghai were rolled out across the country. And contrary to popular beliefs, the system is not built around rote learning.
"If you are rote learning you will do very badly in the PISA test," he says.
Despite Shanghai's success, a key divide emerges: while academics, teachers and politicians admire the city's school system, those who experience it every day find it exhausting.
Both teachers and parents worry about the pressure on children in a system which provides no path beyond academic success. Many also see the system as dehumanising and corrupt. Principals accept "donations" to admit students to the best schools and teachers also expect an annual red envelope stuffed with cash or a gift voucher.
Perhaps the most damning assessment comes from China's business and political class, who still covet a foreign education for their children. If possible they want their kids studying overseas well before university. President Xi Jinping's only daughter was, until recently, studying at Harvard under an assumed name.
As for Western parents who have children in the Chinese system, they provide a unique perspective. They admire the teachers' dedication and the ambition of the pupils, yet many worry what it is doing to their own children.
One Australian couple took their daughter out of an elite Chinese boarding school at the start of this year and sent her back to school in Sydney. They felt she was becoming "too Chinese".
"She had become a bit anti-social and intense," said her mother, who asked not to be named. Her daughter had even asked to do extra classes on Saturday at one of Shanghai's cram schools as that's "what all her local friends did".
Says the mother, "There was no pressure from us. It's just what kids here tend to do."
Another British mother, a teacher herself, worried about lack of initiative. "It can be very rigid," she says.
"When I'm helping my children with their maths homework, they will often say 'we're not allowed to do it that way'. There is a set way of doing things."
For her, the difference between the Chinese and Western school system is that things are done much earlier in China.
"Most kids have learnt their times tables by the time they get to primary school," she says."They are already doing maths in their head before primary school. I don't think they are better off in the long run, they just work a lot harder a lot earlier."
Grattan's Jensen says Shanghai authorities are aware that the pressure and workload on children is excessive and, as in any arms race, are struggling to find a workable solution.
"It's a very competitive city, Shanghai, and it's almost as though the kids can see what's ahead for them," he says.
It may also be what lies ahead for Australian kids if they wish to compete in a new world dominated by the rise of China.
A 10-year-old in China can solve these problems. Can you?
Question 6
How many triangles are in the diagram below?
Question 18
The diagram below consists of two squares. One measures 4 x 4cm. The other 5 x 5cm.
How big is the shaded area?
Question 19
Divide the diagram below into eight segments with exactly the same shape and area.
SOURCE: ZHONGHUAN CUP MATH CONTEST
Did you solve it?
Answers to Chinese maths puzzles (on previous page)
Question 6: 67
Question 18: 32/9 cm2
Question 19:
Fairfax Media Management Pty Limited
Document AFNR000020140307ea380002u
Angus Grigg With Lucy Gao
3351 words
8 Mar 2014
The Australian Financial Review
AFNR
English
Copyright 2014. Fairfax Media Management Pty Limited.
Inside story
Shanghai's stellar educational results have stunned the Western world. Angus Grigg goes inside one of the city's cram schools to meet an extraordinary elite.
It's the last day of winter school holidays yet this classroom in downtown Shanghai is packed.
As the first snow of the season falls outside, softening the edges of China's commercial capital, a group of 13-year-olds are finishing up a three-hour maths tutorial. Like children the world over, they slouch on their desks, twirl pencils and generally look without interest at the whiteboard filled with quadratic equations.
There is, however, a different dynamic to this classroom with its white walls, matching vinyl floor and posters demanding that mobile phones be switched off.
At first the silence appears to explain it, but then a thick red line on the floor comes into view. It divides the classroom perfectly in half and marks the boundary for the "parents' listening area", according to a sign written in English and Mandarin.
All 20 chairs behind this painted red line are occupied, but these middle-aged parents dressed in tracksuit tops and soft shoes are doing more than listening. Like their children seated beyond the line, they are furiously taking notes, shuffling pages and trying to keep up with the algebra written in precise blue marker pen.
Most have spent three hours a day for the past week – including Saturday and Sunday – at this holiday algebra program with their children in an effort to learn next semester's maths syllabus before school starts again.
"The ethos of this school is that children should not fight alone," says maths teacher Wang Bin. The 31-year-old, who won a prestigious maths contest as a child, has an easy patter, but turns serious on the importance of his chosen subject. He says children are naturally lazy and need to be pushed to perform by their parents.
"Normally one parent will attend the whole subject with their child so they can help with homework and generally understand the course," he explains.
Three years ago, such a primer for the coming semester would have provided students with an advantage in China's highly competitive school system, but not today. These "cram schools" are now so widespread across China that those who don't attend are likely to fall behind.
The Xueersi school (which translates to "thinking and studying") has seen its numbers triple over the past three years. It expects enrolments in Shanghai alone to triple again to 100,000 children by 2017, mirroring the growth of the Beijing schools run by its parent company, the TAL Education Group, an "after-school tutoring services provider".
What was once an optional extra is now an entrenched part of China's school system for the aspiring middle class; richer parents tend to employ private tutors.
It's an arms race and the parents involved would make the famed Chinese-American "Tiger mum" Amy Chua appear easy-going.
Yet unlike Chua and her controversial 2011 book The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which shocked the Anglosphere with its demanding parenting ethos, there is little debate in China about the expectations on these pupils. Most parents are resigned.
As a result of that intensity, the Anglosphere is reeling all over again. These Chinese students are scaling the scholastic heights, leaving Westerners in their wake.
In the latest results from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, Shanghai's 15-year-olds perform better than any of their peers around the globe. The city is regarded as a benchmark for standards other nations are straining to reach.
The OECD report, from its 2012 survey, revealed the children of Shanghai cleaners were doing better than the kids of Australian lawyers. Perhaps not so surprising given that, in maths and science, those 15-year-olds are three years ahead of their Australian equivalents. And that Australian students are going backwards across the major categories of reading, maths and science.
For many Australian parents – and students – the media attention those PISA results have received has confirmed worries about local educational standards, rigour or the lack of it, and about proposals for the new national curriculum, with its attempts to weave knowledge of indigenous culture, the Asian century and sustainability right through subjects including maths and science.
The stakes are high: a country's future rests on how well it educates its populace. Ben Jensen, from Melbourne's Grattan Institute, who has been studying Shanghai's school system, says there is a strong correlation between PISA results and future growth in gross domestic product. Research cited by the Grattan Institute shows increasing the "effectiveness" of teachers by 10 per cent would add 0.2 percentage points to Australia's annual long-run growth, adding $90 billion to GDP by 2050.
As for individual success in today's world, that is increasingly decided everywhere by educational attainment.Brutally competitive
Part of Shanghai's success can be attributed to the brutally competitive nature of Chinese society. There is also a general insecurity, felt by much of the population, because there is no adequate social safety net. These anxieties manifest themselves in a commitment to education, not for the sake of higher learning but as a means for survival. While unemployment in China remains low, there is a huge pay discrepancy between white- and blue-collar work.
For the past month, AFR Weekend has attended its own "cram school" on Shanghai's schooling system, yet one question remains unanswered: if this is what it takes, do we want our kids living like this?
Put another way: is this the new reality of a world dominated by a fast-rising China?
Take 13-year-old Tang Zhihao, a junior middle school student, with closely cropped hair and glasses. Not only did he and his mother, Wang Ziping, an IT project manager, attend the seven-day tutoring course to learn next semester's maths syllabus, but they did the following year's course work as well. That means that over the four-week Spring Festival holiday, the pair spent 42 contact hours doing additional maths classes, plus at least another seven hours of homework. "He needs to do well in maths so he can get into a good senior middle school," his mother Wang told us outside the classroom.
Wang, whose son attends a relatively cheap selective private school costing $3500 a year, epitomises the commitment to education by Chinese parents.
Not only did she give up much of her annual holiday to attend the cram school, but each night, she sits with her son and goes through past exam papers and other schoolwork. "He gets most of his homework done at school," she says. "Then he will spend two to three hours each night doing additional cram schoolwork or preparing for maths contests."
Between school, homework and the tasks Ms Wang sets her son, he has half an hour of downtime each day. "He usually spends this cleaning his desk or reading magazines," she says, claiming this is normal for 13-year-olds in China. All 50 students in her son's class at school, she says, attend additional maths tutoring, while around half would do extra English and Mandarin.
"I would spend 70 per cent of my free time on my son's schooling," she says. "Even when we go away, I will think about what work he should be doing."
For the majority of parents, there is no choice but to buy into this race. Unless they can afford to send their children overseas, they are stuck in a high-pressure system where the competition begins early.
It's a constant cycle of exams in maths, English and Mandarin and excellence in extracurricular activities like music, calligraphy, chess and, to a lesser degree, sport.
The first challenge for a child comes around age 11: getting into a prestigious junior middle school. Preparing for this state-run exam usually begins at the age of nine, but with competition getting tougher all the time, parents of all backgrounds, from lawyers to government workers, are starting their kids earlier. Once again this is done through the privately run "cram schools".Studying for a better life
During AFR Weekend's visit to the Xueersi school, we met six-year-old Gao Yanhong, whose mother insisted she was getting off lightly as the child prepared for sitting the junior middle school entrance exam.
For the past eight months, Gao, dressed this day in Dora sneakers, a bright pink jacket and matching face mask, has been doing four hours a week of additional maths and English during the term and a week of intensive study for each subject during the country's two main holidays.
"We are going easy on our daughter," said the mother. "Some kids her age spend all weekend doing programs along with two to three hours of homework each night."
In Australia, what Gao is doing would be like beginning preparations for a selective high school exam in kindergarten.
There's method in this fierce competition. Each district has supposedly "good" and "bad" public schools. The worse the school's reputation, the harder it will be for the pupil to gain entry to a prestigious tertiary institution such as Peking University or Shanghai's Fudan University.
But even if a child gets into a top junior middle school, the cycle of testing is not over. Three years later, they must sit an even more demanding exam for entry into senior middle school. After that comes the famous gaokao or leaving exam. This is supposedly easier than the previous exam, yet Australian parents would be shocked at what some students put themselves through.
Last year, in the central province of Hubei, students hired a nurse to connect them to amino acid drips so they didn't require a study break for their vitamin supplements. In another province, parents poisoned all the frogs in the school pond because their croaking was proving a distraction.
Less extreme examples of intervention are the halting of construction work during the gaokao in many cities and banning drivers from horn-blowing near exam centres.
Maths teacher Wang explains the stakes. "Study is the only way for ordinary people to change their lives. Otherwise they will have a miserable life like their parents. This country does not have a welfare system so you have to find a good job and the only way to do this is by studying hard."Private sector still catching up
The attitude is largely a function of China's present stage of development. While the country has invested heavily in education and expects to turn out 7.3 million university graduates this year, its private sector has not kept pace. Lack of economic reform over the past decade has resulted in a dearth of well-paying white-collar jobs; rigid state-owned enterprises still control the most lucrative sectors of the economy such as telecommunications, banking and transport.
This explains why, although unemployment remains low and blue-collar wages are going up faster than white-collar pay, there is still a huge gap. A cleaner in Shanghai can expect to make 2500 yuan ($450) a month; a mid-ranking government official would make five times that, plus perks such as cheap housing and preferential access to the best schools for their child.
This will change if the new administration makes good on its promise of wholesale economic reform, but parents are not taking any chances.
Shanghai students have topped the PISA scores since 2009. The test is taken every three years. And while some have questioned the accuracy of the test results, Ben Jensen is a believer. The program director for education at Melbourne's Grattan Institute has spent much of the past three years studying Shanghai's school system and is mightily impressed. Next Saturday, the think tank will release a major study into how Australia can deliver teacher training programs like those in Shanghai.
"It's an amazingly well-run system," he says via phone. "Australian children are going to be competing with these kids for university places both here and abroad."
It brings to mind the joke by comedian Chris Lilley that his character Ja'mie is the "smartest non-Asian" in the class. And while it's no doubt sobering for Australian parents who want their children to win a place at one of the world's top-ranked universities like Harvard, Oxford or Yale, Shanghai's performance has far broader implications.
"The correlation between economic growth and PISA test scores is very strong," says Jensen. "PISA scores are the strong predictor of future growth. Both the World Bank and OECD are saying this really matters."
He says the most conservative research shows that raising test scores by one standard deviation would lift GDP growth by one percentage point. "Naturally it takes a significant period of time for improvements in the skills of students to feed into the labour market. However, because the effects are cumulative, the long-term increase in wealth can be dramatic," he says.
In a highly globalised world, this also suggests that multinational companies will locate their offices where the talent is being produced. That move is yet to materialise in China, partly due to its relatively closed economy and the difficulty of doing business in the country but, says Jensen, it is a natural progression. For him, the formula behind Shanghai's success is autonomy and training – both buzzwords in the current education debate in Australia.
"Shanghai has great autonomy and ability to innovate," he says. "They are very good at doing what all the research says they should be doing."
The research, which was mostly done in Western countries, says strong, content-based teacher training must be backed up with high-quality on-the-job assessment and feedback. Says Jensen, "In Shanghai, they are perhaps the best in the world at mentoring and evaluating teachers. They are also very good at doing research in individual schools about what effect a change in teaching a particular subject had on student performance."
This stems from an effort more than two decades ago by authorities in Beijing to improve the quality of education across the country. "Shanghai sent people all over the world to see what worked," says Jensen.
Yet in just 20 years that flow of teachers and policymakers from China to the West has been reversed. In mid-February, Britain announced it would send a delegation of teachers with Education Minister Elizabeth Truss to Shanghai to study its success in maths and science.
"Shanghai is the top-performing part of the world for maths. Their children are streets ahead," said Truss. "Our new curriculum has borrowed from theirs because we know it works – early learning of key arithmetic and a focus on times tables and long division, for instance."
For Truss, the key success of Shanghai was that its students perform at a high level regardless of gender or their parents' income. OECD research released in mid-February looked at a student's PISA test results alongside their parent's occupation, the traditional theory being that children of the professional classes perform better than their blue-collar peers.
But the comparison didn't hold up between Shanghai and the UK. It found the children of cleaners and factory workers in Shanghai outperformed those of doctors and lawyers in Britain. The revelation led to much hand-wringing in Britain. When similar findings came out in Australia's results, there was concern here, too.Success in the long run
Yet there are plenty of questions that need to be asked about China's system and in particular Shanghai's success in the PISA tests.
As noted by Harvard University education expert, Tom Loveless, 12 Chinese provinces took part in the 2009 PISA test but only the results for Shanghai were made public.
"There is a lack of transparency surrounding PISA's relationship with China," he says. Jensen acknowledges these problems, but maintains that Shanghai's system is still one to be admired.
He says its other strength is autonomy. Jensen says Beijing gave Shanghai the power to control its own schools, albeit within the confines of the Communist Party in the 1980s, during the early days of reforms under Deng Xiaoping.
Initially it was viewed as a pilot project, but many of the reforms adopted by Shanghai were rolled out across the country. And contrary to popular beliefs, the system is not built around rote learning.
"If you are rote learning you will do very badly in the PISA test," he says.
Despite Shanghai's success, a key divide emerges: while academics, teachers and politicians admire the city's school system, those who experience it every day find it exhausting.
Both teachers and parents worry about the pressure on children in a system which provides no path beyond academic success. Many also see the system as dehumanising and corrupt. Principals accept "donations" to admit students to the best schools and teachers also expect an annual red envelope stuffed with cash or a gift voucher.
Perhaps the most damning assessment comes from China's business and political class, who still covet a foreign education for their children. If possible they want their kids studying overseas well before university. President Xi Jinping's only daughter was, until recently, studying at Harvard under an assumed name.
As for Western parents who have children in the Chinese system, they provide a unique perspective. They admire the teachers' dedication and the ambition of the pupils, yet many worry what it is doing to their own children.
One Australian couple took their daughter out of an elite Chinese boarding school at the start of this year and sent her back to school in Sydney. They felt she was becoming "too Chinese".
"She had become a bit anti-social and intense," said her mother, who asked not to be named. Her daughter had even asked to do extra classes on Saturday at one of Shanghai's cram schools as that's "what all her local friends did".
Says the mother, "There was no pressure from us. It's just what kids here tend to do."
Another British mother, a teacher herself, worried about lack of initiative. "It can be very rigid," she says.
"When I'm helping my children with their maths homework, they will often say 'we're not allowed to do it that way'. There is a set way of doing things."
For her, the difference between the Chinese and Western school system is that things are done much earlier in China.
"Most kids have learnt their times tables by the time they get to primary school," she says."They are already doing maths in their head before primary school. I don't think they are better off in the long run, they just work a lot harder a lot earlier."
Grattan's Jensen says Shanghai authorities are aware that the pressure and workload on children is excessive and, as in any arms race, are struggling to find a workable solution.
"It's a very competitive city, Shanghai, and it's almost as though the kids can see what's ahead for them," he says.
It may also be what lies ahead for Australian kids if they wish to compete in a new world dominated by the rise of China.
A 10-year-old in China can solve these problems. Can you?
Question 6
How many triangles are in the diagram below?
Question 18
The diagram below consists of two squares. One measures 4 x 4cm. The other 5 x 5cm.
How big is the shaded area?
Question 19
Divide the diagram below into eight segments with exactly the same shape and area.
SOURCE: ZHONGHUAN CUP MATH CONTEST
Did you solve it?
Answers to Chinese maths puzzles (on previous page)
Question 6: 67
Question 18: 32/9 cm2
Question 19:
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