Analysis: The Merits of Meritocracy

Test-taking students sit six feet apart. (Jack Hynes, Flickr)

by Iris Peng (COL ‘24)

The Chinese central government passed regulatory rules prohibiting tutoring on weekends and holidays and began to require tutoring centers to register as non-profit institutions in July. In September, new restrictions banned private tutors from offering online classes. This crackdown is part of a larger Chinese government effort not only to relieve the academic burden on students but also to reduce the cost of education, encouraging families to have more children. 

While China inevitably faces difficulties in enforcing comprehensive compliance to private tutoring bans, the swiftness and strictness of these regulations come in contrast to the slow nature of education reform in the United States. School districts in cities across the U.S. are not immune to the inequitable effects of over-competitive standardized testing and tutoring on both students and communities. But as cities including New York City attempt, like China, to make their school systems more equitable, they must overcome local racial divisions and taxpayer politics.

These are problems China does not have—but that does not mean the Chinese government’s solutions will automatically create equity. In the end, a truly equitable education system requires not only changes to public school admissions policies but also a cultural shift in our understanding of meritocracy.

From Cram Schools to In-Home Nannies

In China, tests make meritocracy.

Pre-secondary education in China is characterized by its emphasis on entrance examinations. Policymakers developed the zhongkao for junior high school students in the 1980s as a comprehensive examination with six subject areas: Chinese, mathematics, a foreign language, political education, physics, and chemistry. Only half of all students pass the exam and become eligible for academic high schools; 40 percent attend vocational schools instead, and the remaining 10 percent drop out altogether. The academic high schools further separate students based on the marks they received on the exam.

The tests don’t stop there. Academic high school students dedicate their lives to preparing for the gaokao, China’s National College Entrance Examination, which is notorious for its intensity and influence over a student's life trajectory. In early June, the entire country mobilizes in preparation for exam season. Taxi drivers offer free rides to help students get to their exam centers on time, and celebrities post encouraging messages on social media.

Although some perceive China's examination system to be unfair, others see it as an opportunity for social mobility. As Cathy Wu puts it, "While often criticized for prompting a culture of cramming, the gaokao is also regarded as the fairest way of screening talent in a country with such a large population. For students coming from rural places, the gaokao can be their ticket to big cities and more promising futures."

Under Chinese President Xi Jinping's recent push for "common prosperity," which "aims to narrow the income gap between the rich and the poor," the Chinese government is emphasizing equal opportunity in education and healthcare so "everyone can get a fair shot at success." But officials also aim to maintain the country’s global competitive position in manufacturing. The Ministry of Education intends to introduce basic vocational training to primary and secondary school students and to develop postgraduate programs in vocational schools. Nevertheless, policymakers still hold onto the widespread Chinese belief that the examination system itself is a net good for social mobility.

Supporters for gaokao examinees line up in front of a test center. (Wikimedia)

However, despite the Chinese government’s attempts at leveling the playing field, some parents have begun to exploit loopholes in the regulations. The initial regulations targeted education centers that offer group classes, but one-on-one tutors remained legal. Class prices skyrocketed to around $463 per hour. But, as regulations grew stricter, some of the wealthiest families began hiring in-home "nannies" for about $4,600 per month—think Parasite, but where the parents know and allow the tutor to live in their home. 

Some families didn’t need to fret. They had opted out of the national examination stress long before the current crackdown by sending their children to international schools.

Indeed, one only needs to take a look at South Korea's similar attempt to restrict private tutoring to see that Xi's ambitious reforms will face immense implementation barriers. The South Korean government banned extracurricular private lessons in 1980, but upper-class families continued to hire underground tutors. Even the president of Seoul National University, the country's top school, hired an illegal tutor for his daughter. Today, the most stringent version of the private tutoring ban has been uplifted, leaving only regulations on how much tuition private schools can charge. 

The Korean cram school, hakwon, has even found its way into the U.S. education system. Following an influx of Korean immigrants after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, test prep centers sprung up around Queens, in New York City. As private businesses unaffiliated with the public schools, these test prep centers remain largely unregulated by local education policies despite impacting who gets into New York City’s selective high schools. Today, Asian immigrant community members still run and attend many of these centers, but, in recent years, the number of non-Asian attendees is growing in tandem with the growing popularity of selective New York City public schools.

The Efficacy of Crackdowns

Every year, around 28,000 eighth- and ninth-grade students take the Specialized High School Admissions Test for New York City, seeking to secure one of 5,000 spots at one of eight selective city schools. According to the New York City Department of Education, these schools are designed to "[support]" the educational needs of students who excel academically and/or artistically," a euphemistic description for the controversial term "gifted." But when just seven of 895 new entrants into Stuyvesant, the most selective of these schools, identify as African American, one cannot help but ask: what standards do we use to determine who is excelling?

Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed a solution for increasing school diversity in 2019. 20 percent of these selective schools’ slots for freshmen would be allotted to low-income students whose test scores slightly missed the score cutoff. Paralleling the affirmative action debate in higher education, a group of mostly Chinese Americans filed a lawsuit claiming that the policy would discriminate against qualified Asian American students. As a result, Blasio's proposal ended up failing in the state legislature.

During the pandemic, de Blasio implemented sweeping integration reforms across New York City's public schools system that will take effect this year. Middle schools will eliminate admissions screening for at least one year, and high schools in wealthy districts are forbidden from giving local students priority in admissions. The city also plans to issue grants to support district integration efforts. But none of these changes, while positive, will affect the city’s eight specialized high schools.

While the Chinese government focuses on social class and demographic aging, New York’s key issue is race. This difference makes education reform much more complicated for New York, where historically complex issues of race and socioeconomic status challenge notions of test-based meritocracy. Are selective high school admissions systems a symptom or a cause of racial inequality? Does the existence of selective high schools itself inevitably promote problematic notions of meritocracy? 

New sociological literature points to a false dichotomy between disadvantaged and privileged U.S. students. Anthony Abraham Jack, Assistant Professor of Education at Harvard University, in The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, distinguishes between the “Doubly Disadvantaged” who attended local, low-income public schools, and the “Privileged Poor” who attended elite public and private schools. Low-income students aren’t a monolith, and they should not be treated as one.

The focus on academic equality is too narrow, Jack argues, due to “the gap in cultural knowledge between those who already know what they are and when they enter college and those who don’t.” In other words, the benefit of attending a selective high school is limited in that it cannot make up for the intangible resources that students coming from wealthy backgrounds have—namely, the knowledge of how to network, which is often just as, if not more important, than academic achievement. 

Moreover, Chinese and New York education policymaking differ in who counts as stakeholders. The Chinese government has the authority to pass nearly any reforms, no matter how harsh, with little political consequence. Wealthy Chinese parents can’t complain; they can only quietly evade regulations. By contrast, local taxpayer dollars fund U.S. public schools, a system that, combined with local school district democracy, makes the voting public a key stakeholder in debates around meritocracy. Opponents of reform are much more vocal in their discontent. 

Dramas and Discontents

Parents want what’s best for their children; their children are fed up.

Ironically, Chinese students themselves are discontent with the high-stress culture. Recent netizen buzzwords call attention to the immense pressure they face. Current college students and recent graduates experience neijuan, or involution, which anthropologist Xiang Biao describes as "the experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless." Knowing that, after graduation, they are destined for the "996 work culture" (working 12 hours a day, six days a week), many youths instead connect with the philosophy of tangping, which literally means lying flat—to simply give work their bare minimum effort.

Those who have witnessed the negative effects academic stress has on Chinese youth seem to support the new regulations. Chinese university students "are not just burnt out, they have no motivation," notes Professor Dingxin Zhao. In short, they have good reason to lie flat.

But lying flat is more than just a meme. Some warn that if the attitude becomes widespread, it could have long-run implications for the country's income growth, consumption, marriage, and childbirth. Authorities are censoring the term tangping itself, fearing that the philosophy directly threatens Xi's calls for common prosperity and the Chinese dream.

Moreover, lying flat is merely the latest iteration in a worldwide trend of youth discontent in countries experiencing growing income inequality. From the 1950s Beat Generation of the United States to the 2010s Satori generation of Japan, youth nonconformity is a hallmark of an unequal state.

Popular media expresses this discontent more than outright protest does. A Little Reunion is a 2019 Chinese drama that follows three middle-class families as they prepare their high school children for the gaokao. Inspired by true stories, the drama blew up for its apparent authenticity. Viewers related to the characters’ struggles with sleepless nights before the exam and the high expectations set by their parents. Similarly, the Korean family thriller series Sky Castle highlights the extremes rich families are willing to go to in order to send their children to Korea's top universities: they hire high-profile coordinators—college counselors on steroids—to make study plans and enter students into overseas extracurricular competitions. It is no surprise that Sky Castle was also a hit among Chinese viewers. 

In the U.S., the television series that comes closest to depicting the exclusivity of the New York education system is Gossip Girl. Nonetheless, the show is not so much a criticism as it is a romanticization of life in Manhattan's Upper East Side. The show Dear White People, a comedy series following several Black students at a fictional Ivy League university, does a better job at addressing race in general, but not regarding its role in K-12 public education and school choice policies.

Unfortunately, a television series—no matter how popular or relatable it is—is unlikely to change the high-pressure culture that enables educational inequities to exist in the first place. As long as an elite education is seen as a hallmark of high caliber, governments' attempts to equalize education only engender regulatory evasion and outright resistance by the wealthy and privileged.

Beyond School Name

Local governments in the U.S. cannot simply equalize educational opportunities through broad reforms that target selective admissions processes. While integration efforts among public school districts are certainly and badly needed, they are only a first step toward counteracting the inequities brought about by race and socioeconomic status. Additionally, local U.S. officials lack the Chinese government’s high authority to regulate private tutoring centers, which create and perpetuate disparities in educational outcomes between students who can and cannot afford their services.

Ultimately, equity policies need to be paired with a broader cultural shift in our understanding of meritocracy: students deserve a society that doesn’t measure their worth by their attainment of elite education. After all, attending a prestigious institution is only half of the equation. Schools must empower less privileged students with social capital through efforts such as fostering a positive school climate, teaching students how to network and seek assistance from adults, and providing guidance to parents on how to support their children. 

Changes in how we value each other are unlikely to come from policymakers who were socialized to equate selective schools with ability and intelligence. Rather, it will need to come from youth and students—who, as the tangping movement and its global counterparts demonstrate, are already beginning to question the merits of meritocracy.