Ariana Lindquist for The New York TimesPupils line up at a Shanghai school for children of migrant workers. Some have questioned whether migrants are fairly represented in Shanghai test results.
Is the education system in Shanghai, China’s largest and most internationalized city, really a paradigm of academic excellence and educational equity, or does its stellar performance mask a grimmer reality, in which one of the world’s largest barriers to education opportunities plagues tens of thousands of its residents?
The question has been the subject of intense debate among scholars and educators since December, when the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, released the results of its 2012 tests. These showed students from Shanghai scoring highest in all three categories: reading, math and science.
Conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, PISA is given every three years to more than half a million 15- and 16-year-old students from 65 countries. Shanghai has been the top-scoring region for the last two rounds, followed by other Asian economies such as Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea. In the PISA report, the O.E.C.D. commends Shanghai’s achievement. In particular, it praises Shanghai for its effort to promote educational equity, describing near-complete enrollment of local children at primary and middle schools that is “ahead of the pack in universal education.”
While many Western observers have rushed to uncover the secret to Shanghai’s success, others argue that PISA has portrayed Shanghai in an overly positive light by failing to present the whole picture.
In a series of articles published on the Brookings Institution’s website, Tom Loveless, a former professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and an expert on education policy, questioned the inclusiveness and representativeness of PISA’s Shanghai samples. He pointed out a glaring oddity in the PISA data: Shanghai, a city of 24 million, reports only slightly more than 100,000 15-year-olds, a number similar to that reported in Portugal and Greece, countries with less than half Shanghai’s population.
In a series of articles published on the Brookings Institution’s website, Tom Loveless, a former professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and an expert on education policy, questioned the inclusiveness and representativeness of PISA’s Shanghai samples. He pointed out a glaring oddity in the PISA data: Shanghai, a city of 24 million, reports only slightly more than 100,000 15-year-olds, a number similar to that reported in Portugal and Greece, countries with less than half Shanghai’s population.
“Where did all of Shanghai’s 15-year-olds go?” Mr. Lovelessasked.
His answer is that China’s restrictions on internal migration are to blame. Shanghai has a migrant population of 10 million, about 40 percent of its total population. Because of the country’s household registration system, known as the hukou system, which ties access to subsidized education and health care to hometowns, migrants do not enjoy the same access to Shanghai’s schools and hospitals as local residents.
Currently, migrant children can enroll in selected primary and middle schools in Shanghai, up through the ninth grade. However, around the age of 15, most children must return to their hometowns to attend high school, which runs from 10th to 12th grade. They can take the gaokao, the national university entrance exam, only in their home provinces, according to the current hukou policy.
Such restrictions drive migrant children out of the city as early as primary school, statistics show. In a chart provided by Kam Wing Chan, professor of geography at the University of Washington and an expert on Chinese migration, the percentage of migrant children out of the total child population in Shanghai declines steadily in each age bracket starting at age 8. It picks up again at the age of 16, as migrants, having completed middle school in their home provinces, swarm to Shanghai seeking jobs.
“By the time they reach 15, there are far fewer migrant kids left in Shanghai’s education system,” Mr. Chan said in a telephone interview. Speaking of PISA, he added, “No matter how it samples, it is going to get only very few of them.”
Furthermore, Mr. Chan said, the migrant children who do stay in school tend to come from more prosperous families, with better-educated parents. The result, he said, is a school system that gradually filters out the most disadvantaged children, accentuating Shanghai’s education status as “the cream of China.”
The O.E.C.D. report on PISA discusses migrant children in Shanghai only briefly, stating that the city “has established the notion that migrant children are ‘our children’ and works constructively to include them in its educational development.” The word “hukou” does not appear in the report.
“They are presenting Shanghai in the best possible light” as “a paragon of educational equity, and that’s not accurate,” said Mr. Loveless, who objects to PISA’s comparison of Shanghai to other major world economies. “It’s such a unique system, I wouldn’t compare it to anybody,” he said in an interview.
Andreas Schleicher, who directs the O.E.C.D.’s international educational testing program, acknowledged the dip in Shanghai’s migrant population around age 15 but noted that it happens in other countries as well. “If you look at the United States, the percentage of disadvantaged children is very high in primary school,” he said by telephone, “and they are the first to drop out of school as they grow older.”
Still, even by comparison with other regions and countries with similar levels of economic development and birthrates, the number of 15-year-olds in Shanghai seems startlingly low. In Hong Kong and Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, 15-year-olds account for 1.2 percent and 1.4 percent of the total population, respectively, according to data published by PISA. In Shanghai, they make up 0.45 percent.
“There are limitations in the ways we conducted the test in most countries,” said Mr. Schleicher. “But even when you exclude the 30 percent of worst-performing students in the United States, Shanghai still performs No. 1.”
In past interviews, Mr. Schleicher has referred often to PISA results collected from other provinces of China to make another point: Even children from less advantaged backgrounds are performing well in Chinese schools.
But Mr. Loveless noted that these scores have not been published, and he questioned whether the O.E.C.D. gives the Chinese government special treatment. Mr. Schleicher has said the results have not been published because the sampling and testing were conducted by provincial governments rather than by the O.E.C.D.
In recent years, Shanghai has made remarkable progress in integrating migrants into its education system. It has opened up a large number of primary and secondary schools to migrant children, as well as a number of vocational schools. It has also implemented a point-based residency system, which allows migrants to apply for a residency permit based on their age, education, professional skills and employment status.
Still, the system strongly favors migrant children with highly educated and well-to-do parents, and effectively leaves the majority of the less resourceful families to their own devices.
“Shanghai should be commended for implementing some hukou reforms,” but “that does not justify PISA’s portrayal of Shanghai as a model of educational equity,” Mr. Loveless wrote in his most recent blog post on the subject. “There is considerable distance between taking the first steps towards righting an historical wrong and acting in a way that other nations should follow.”
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