A delegation of British education officials visited Shanghai in February on the first stop of a tour of Chinese cities. They were looking for pointers on how the United Kingdom could raise the quality of its secondary schools.
The group's leader, Elizabeth Truss, the UK Parliament undersecretary of state for education and childcare, said Shanghai was an important stop because of its students' impressive achievement on the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment in mathematics. Shanghai placed No 1 — the UK trailed at a distant 26th.
"We wanted to find out the reason for Shanghai students' high performance in PISA. These schools are excellent because of their teaching and mathematics," Truss said.
With good reason! The city had been tweaking its educational system for 30 years with successive waves of reform, Shanghai Normal University President Zhang Minxuan told China Daily.
"Shanghai's development in education does not fully represent the whole country, but, to some extent, it represents the future trends of China's education development," Zhang said.
The central government has long shown tenacious support for the development of education through increasingly larger budgets. On March 5, the Ministry of Finance projected in a report to the National People's Congress that the government would boost education spending by 9.1 percent this year to 413.35 billion yuan ($67.3 billion).
In 2012, the government raised that budget by 15.7 percent to 378.1 billion yuan, and that was only part of the funding. With the addition of local governments' contributions, the spending grew to a whopping 2.2 trillion yuan. With that, China reached its long-held goal of putting 4 percent of its GDP toward education.
With such riches at its disposal, one might think that education in China entered a golden age that year. Not so!
Local governments had put up the lion's share, and their contributions were not divvied up for the good of all. Shanghai, the financial capital — whose cost of living, incidentally, is now higher than New York City's, according to a report this week — could ensure that its students got an internationally admired education.
Their achievements and the city schools' innovative teaching methods that spawned them shine like a beacon that attracts followers, but the "future trends" Zhang said Shanghai is pioneering still seem light-years away in rural communities.
There, strained budgets are the rule, and the consequences can range from difficulty in recruiting top-grade teachers to a lack of basic necessities in schools.
A China Daily report in September illustrates just how stark that contrast can be with the situation in Shanghai. It tells of a teacher going several years ago to Ningtan, the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, to begin work at a primary school. On arrival, she found the school had no playground and no toilets. There were not enough desks and chairs for students, and the only source of water was a shallow, nearly dry and unsanitary well.
"I wanted to flee," she said. But she stayed on.
Eventually, she was able to make the school's situation known via charity websites, and donations poured in. Equipment was bought, renovations made and the situation was resolved.
The central government has resolutely worked to ease the plight of rural schools and improve the education of rural students over the years. Two years ago, it poured 86.5 billion yuan from its central budget into stimulating nine-year compulsory education in rural areas. That money sent 120 million children to school for free and paid for all of their textbooks. More than 13 million poor students at boarding schools in central and western China received allowances. And 15 billion yuan was paid in subsidies to improve the nutrition of rural primary and junior high students.
This year the government is again devoting special attention to rectifying the inequities between urban and rural education. Among the initiatives, Education Minister Yuan Guiren announced plans this past week to encourage teachers through allowances and subsidies to move to rural villages to improve the quality of education.
Institutions of higher learning will be made to open their doors to underprivileged rural students, and vocational school programs expanded.
The stakes are enormous for the nation. As China transforms from a manufacturing economy to a consumer-based one with thriving service industries, and as it strives to lessen the wide gap between rich and poor, and urban and rural, education becomes more important than ever before. As Yu Zhengsheng, chairman of the National Committee of the CPPCC, said last week, "Education is the foundation of the nation's revival and social progress."