Learning in the Age of AI

These are some of the incentives high schools in China’s Wuhan city offer to lure the top scoring graduating middle school students, according to a story published in the China Education Paper on June 14, 2010 (the story is in Chinese). But using monetary and other types of incentives to attract top scoring students is not limited to Wuhan. It has become a national phenomenon. It has earned its own name: qiajian or skim the top in English. There is even a novel about the phenomenon published in 2007.

Qiajian happens at all levels of schooling. Middle schools try to get the best scoring students from elementary, high schools the best from middle, and colleges the best from high schools.

On the surface, this does not seem to be anything wrong or usual for schools to try to attract the best students. Some, especially those outside the Chinese system, may even applaud, thinking this means that the Chinese truly valuing education. Colleges worldwide give scholarships to worthy candidates and some private schools in the U.S. have similar practices. It is simply meritocracy.

But upon closer examination, this practice is of great concern in China and should sound alarm to those who are pushing for school competition, high stakes testing, and accountability based on student performance, i.e. test scores.

First, the motivation behind the practice is troublesome. These top scoring students, a very small percentage of the total student body, are simply advertisement. Schools bet on that they will continue to score well enough to go on to prestigious universities. And when they do, the school can claim to be of great quality and attract more students and income. Chinese schools, although most of them are theoretically government run and public, are in reality run as businesses. They compete for students (so parents can pay school selection fees or make “donations”) and recognition of the government (so the school leaders may be promoted and staff may be given bonuses and school get more resources).

Second, the selection criterion is only test scores in a number of limited subjects (Chinese, Math, and English in most cases). Nothing else counts. As a result, all students are driven to study for the tests. As I have written elsewhere, particularly in my book Catching Up or Leading the Way, such a test-driven education system has become China’s biggest obstacle to its dream of moving away from cheap-labor-based economy to an economy fueled by innovation and creativity. The government has been struggling, through many rounds of reforms, to move away from testing and test scores, but it has achieved very little because the test scores have been accepted as the gold standard of objectivity and fairness for assessing quality of education and students (as much as everyone hates it).

Third, the practice exacerbates the already huge inequality among schools. Only schools that are already well-endowed can put up more attractive incentives to students. And these schools take the best students away from those already suffering from a lack of resources. While the good schools get better, the others get worse—a perfect case of the Matthew Effect: “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away” (Matthew 25:29).

Finally, qiajian puts tremendous pressure on students, resulting in significant psychological and emotional stress. Imagine yourself as a 6^th grader from poor rural village—how well you do one exam could mean bankrupt your family or lift your family out of poverty, give your parents a job in the city, and the promise of going to a great college.

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One of the popular strategies in the current education reform in the United States is to stimulate more competition through charter schools. I was wondering what would happen if charter schools began to skim the top of the student pool from public schools in order to boost their performance. For this matter, once we get into a full market-driven education system, all schools began to adopt the practice?

The accountability movement in the US is also becoming more ridiculous. Increasingly we are saying student performance, i.e. test scores in two three subjects, have begun to affect the livelihood and social reputation of individual teachers, school administrators, and a community. Will there be similar practices in American schools? Will schools and teachers begin to pick and choose who they want to teach and who will teach those who do not score well?