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The Effect of Banning Shadow Education in China on High School Students’ Literacy

Learning

Yue Teng

Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania

EDUC 606-001: Literacy Theory, Research, and Practice

Dr. Alesha Gayle

December 19, 2021

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The Effect of Banning Shadow Education in China on High School Students’ Literacy

Learning

Shadow education is the name of private after-school educational activities for

improving high-stakes test scores that is most popular in East Asia (Wiseman, 2021). This

type of tutoring is often the supplement to students’ learning at school and aims to improve

their test scores. Since the college entrance exam in China is a high-stakes test that uses

almost only the exam score to evaluate students’ performance and determine their acceptance

to the college, cram schools have significant meanings to students and their parents. The cram

school, a type of shadow education, also takes various forms, including small or large groups

in a classroom and online sessions with teachers or recorded teaching videos (Yung, 2020).

Education companies offer systemic tutoring in cram schools to students nationwide and

individual teachers owning small tutoring programs. With the pressure to succeed in exams

increasing, cram schools are becoming more and more popular among parents and students in

recent years. They go to cram schools after classes during school days or on weekends to

listen to lectures and do exercises to improve their test results.

However, a newly implemented policy that bans all private tutoring in China changed

this situation. The policy is part of the “double-reduction” policy, which means to reduce the

time that elementary school and middle school students spend on homework and to ban all

types of cram schools so that the focus of learning shifts from the traditional rote learning to

students’ all-round development (Yan, 2021). For high school students in China, private

tutoring is an inseparable part of their learning, including English literacy learning. As a

result, the ban will largely influence high school students' literacy learning at school,
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especially when a high score in the high-stakes test is still almost the only determinant of

their college admission. This paper focuses on the policy’s influences on literacy education in

Chinese high schools. While the policy intends to promote educational equity and release

students’ pressure under high-stakes testing, it might harm the literacy education equity and

limit students’ literacy activities in the long run.

Intended Results

This section proposes several intended positive results on high school literacy education

that the policy can lead to, including promoting educational equity by reducing the cost and

eliminating the influence of the family's social resources, and improving liberal education in

high school.

Reduce the Cost of Education

The cost of private tutoring is a bottomless pit as parents are often willing to do anything

they can to improve their children’s test scores regardless of students’ current performances.

English is one of the core courses in Chinese high schools and students often spend more

money on the subject with higher grade weight in their entrance exam (Yung, 2014). It means

that Chinese families spend more money improving their children’s English literacy

performance than their history, biology, and geography scores. Attending cram schools has

become the need for all students, regardless of their family’s income statuses (Zhang, 2021).

The purpose of private literacy tutoring is to improve their English scores on the college

entrance exam (Gaokao), in which few people can receive the full mark. Students who are

left behind need private tutors because they need to catch up with their peers and top students

also go to cram schools because they want to excel their peers. Consequently, it is natural that
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parents and students never stop the tutoring process as they are always aiming for higher

scores. It means that they keep searching for a teacher or an organization with better

education quality than they have now, which often costs more money. The price of private

tutoring also varies based on the type of class a student attends. The smaller the class is, the

more expensive it becomes. Since parents often think that the class with fewer students can

ensure their children receive a better-quality tutoring experience, parents will often choose

the most expensive one that they can afford.

Several pieces of research demonstrate that the higher grade students are in, the more

likely they will have private tutoring (Zhang, 2013, as cited in Liao and Huang, 2018).

Although little data shows Chinese high school students’ cost on shadow education, a large

body of literature shows that in 2012 the average expenditure on private tutoring was

2,227.24 CNY (about 342 US dollars) per student annually (Liao and Huang, 2018). This

number keeps increasing and has reached 5616 CYN (about 880 US dollars), a quarter of the

total disposable income in 2017 (Guo et al., 2020). Considering that the cost increases from

elementary schools to high schools, each family’s expenditure for their high school student

should be higher than this number. According to Liao and Huang (2018), normally, the

money spent on English tutoring is one-third of the total expenditure. It suggests that Chinese

families spend a large portion of their tutoring fees on English literacy education.

The cost of shadow education also includes fees other than the tuition fee. Students often

go tutoring at least once a week during school semesters and more than once a week during

summer and winter vacations, which makes the spending on transportation significant. Other

than money used for shadow education, the time and effort that parents and students spend on
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measuring the quality of private tutoring and on searching for a better tutoring organization

and teacher, which requires them to talk to the organization, the tutor, and other parents

should be considered as well. Thus, once the student does not have to go to shadow education

programs anymore, they and their family members can save a large amount of money and

time.

Narrow the Achievement Gap

As stated before, the economic and mental cost of sending students to shadow education

and better after-school tutoring programs often cost more money. It means that students from

different social statuses will receive different types of private tutoring, which affects their

academic performances. As schools provide a unified type of education to all students with

stronger supervision from the education bureau, the policy expects students to enjoy the same

resources and quality of education without the urge to buy good education. Promoting and

achieving equality by giving students equal access in order to reach equal learning outcomes

is the basis of a citizen's life quality (Gadsden et al., 1996). It suggests that increasing literacy

equality benefits not only students from inferior social backgrounds but also brings positive

influences on society as a whole. However, it fails to consider other factors that influence a

student’s grade and achievement other than private tutoring.

Promote Liberal Education

The policy is designed to be the first step of reforming the education system, including

the traditional literacy education that focuses on rote. While cram schools take up too much

time from students, it is expected that students can use this time to attend other types of

activities other than learning school subjects again and again. The policy should leave
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students with less time for learning what they have learned at school repetitively, and thus, it

expects students to spend more time going out with their peers and learning anything other

than their school subjects, such as English, Math, and Chinese. Since literacy is more than

reading and writing on paper (New London Group, 1996), students should engage in various

activities that allow them to learn through different types of modes; however, there should be

more detailed guidance for schools and parents to conduct these literacy activities. Otherwise,

it, in turn, reduces the literacy activities students have outside of schools.

Problems Posed

Though this policy seems to move literacy education to a more all-around developmental

direction and free students from the pressure to thrive at their schoolwork, it misses several

vital components of literacy development and may lead to a result opposite to its original

intention.

Equity Issues

While banning shadow education can reduce the amount of money, energy, and time that

a student and their family spend, it also deprives their opportunities to choose the preferred

type of learning to compensate for their school learning. The name of the policy suggests that

it should reduce students’ pressure; however, the policy does not change the literacy learning

environment, which values scores over students’ personalities. With the same goal and

evaluation methods, simply changing the way and even restraining the way students learn can

hardly improve the system.

One of the aims of the policy is to promote educational equity by reducing the possibility

of buying high-quality education with money and social status; however, taking all the
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accessible resources outside of the classroom leads the question back to the equity issues

caused by the classroom and the family. The third space theory calls attention to the

particular background each student has, which means that the resources they should receive

should be different based on their individual conditions (Morrell, 2017; Gutiérrez et al., 2009).

It suggests that the real equal distribution of educational resources differs from giving every

student the same resource. Without commercial shadow education, students’ literacy

activities are composed largely of their classroom literacy activities, and their daily literacy

activities, both of which are influenced by the sociocultural and socioeconomic status of the

student’s family.

For top or middle students from more developed urban areas in China, their need for

shadow education is less urgent than those who come from less-developed rural areas (Zhang,

2012). Urban students in China usually have more privileged family backgrounds so they

have more resources to improve their social status other than having a good grade compared

with their peers from rural areas. Their family’s social capital and social status can

compensate for their less satisfying test scores. Removing all the literacy activities from

shadow education seems to give every student the same opportunity; however, it deprives the

literacy activities of less-resourced students more than those with higher social status. Its

harm to education equity is more than its benefits.

The Lack of Bottom-Up Supports

This policy seems to put much more pressure on teachers and leave teachers with few

choices. Without shadow education, teachers become almost the only resource for students’

literacy learning, so both students and parents will put more expectations and pressure on
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teachers as well. This policy on literacy learning affects shadow education staff, school

teachers and students; however, their voices are missing. As Morrell (2017) argues, the

opinion of those who are directly impacted by the decision should be valued more. Their

voices claim the need for shadow education. The prosperity of shadow education proves that

students need tutoring outside of schools for various reasons. Simply banning all forms of

private tutoring can hardly represent students’ interests or meet their literacy needs.

Schooled Literacy

The vanish of shadow education will make literacy at school the authorized and standard

literacy because schools become the only place to define and teach literacy. Although literacy

at school matters to students, it is worth noticing that overly emphasizing the importance of

literacy at school can lead to a series of problems. Collins and Bolt (2003) refer to it as

schooled literacy. It demonstrates that schools are becoming a place for ranking and tracking

that restrains literacy development instead of taking advantage of other contexts that it

interacts with (Collins& Bolt, 2003; Green& Cormack, 2015). What they mention is an

isolated, narrowly defined type of literacy that is influenced by its particular social

significance and history. Literacy within schools is often viewed as a neutral and naturally

happening process, but this view ignores the influence of external factors on literacy

(Alvermann, 2009). Banning shadow education further isolates schooled literacy and makes it

the only valued literacy. It almost suggests that no other places have the right to explain what

literacy is and where it should be other than schools.

While this policy may lift the pressure for some students, it fails to think for all students

and their various needs in learning. With the expanding of the definition and context of
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literacy, the expectation for literacy learning should change as well. This comes with the

meaning of the process and the result of literacy acquisition. Morrell (2017) argues that

collaboration and tolerance, instead of judgment or exclusion, should be the component of a

good literacy classroom. In other words, he believes that the purpose of literacy education

should move away from improving students’ test scores to reflecting on what scores cannot

represent. Making scores or any other single form of assessment the only visible result for a

student’s development fails to demonstrate their growth during the process. It includes their

ability to work together, awareness of social problems, and willingness to make changes,

which are equally or even more critical than their proficiency in traditional reading and

writing tasks. The emphasis on literacy education should expand to learning and using

literacy in different contexts. As the policy shuts down students' literacy activities at cram

schools, which provides various learning methods and learning contexts, it only limits

students' literacy experience outside of their classrooms and families.

The Literacies in Shadow Education

Shadow education offers extra tutoring to students, but considering its commercial needs

to make more profits, it usually offers a different learning experience from going to public

high schools. It provides a more innovative, student-centered pedagogy to its consumers so

students will have less diverse literacy experiences if they cannot attend shadow education.

Student-Centered Literacy Classroom

One problem with the disappearance of shadow education is the disappearance of highly

personalized methods to teach literacies. As shadow education has become highly

commercial in China, education technology companies have developed various ways to

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combine new technologies and experimental pedagogies with their curriculum to attract

learners and enrich their learning contents. There were some successful examples that

managed to make students want to keep learning by combining literacy learning with their

project-based learning and culturally responsive pedagogy. While most public schools do not

use these types of learning in their classes, some of those education technology companies

actually redefined English learning. They paved a possible future for literacy education.

The beginning of success in changing literacy learning experiences seems to provide a

solution for the criticism of schooling. Vasudevan and Campano (2009) argue that high

schools fail to prepare today’s adolescents, especially those who are marginalized, for their

future education and career because of their outdated learning resources, and the neglect of

young people’s ability to create knowledge. They suggest that the school should stop inserting

what it believes is the best for teens but start to see what adolescents need based on their

unique backgrounds. Today’s young people spend the majority of their spare time with digital

activities that expand their learning space and modes of literacy regardless of their physical

location. The workplace also requires more than traditional paper reading and writing

abilities from the younger generation. It is pivotal that the education system values students’

funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) and teaches them how to use what they deal with

every day to generate something new. This can include reflecting on their own experience

with the knowledge of textbooks, working with their peers to solve a problem, and learning to

be critical. High school adolescents’ literacy experiences should be elaborated with more

advanced requirements that push them to find their own meanings, which cram schools are

doing better than public high schools.

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Multimodality and Literacy

There has been an increasing number of games and interactive activities embedded into

the online tutoring programs or into the on-ground classroom activities. Those digital literacy

activities include traditional decoding activities, problem-solving tasks for individual students,

and group projects for the whole class. The ability to accomplish project-based learning and

multimodality benefits students’ learning ability and mental health development (Alvermann,

2009). Even when students are doing the simple decoding activities with the platform, the

introduction of multimodality and multiliteracies make this process more meaningful and

useful for teens today. According to Smith (2004), the combination of multiple modes and

literacies is more than their sum because students learn to reflect on the nature of the tools,

the semiotic element, and their own literacy experience in this process. This means that the

learning of using different modes and linguistic elements build students’ literate identities and

their literacy experiences extend beyond traditional paper reading and writing to explore the

larger system that contains literacies. Despite the importance of multimodality in literacy,

high schools often fail to meet students’ needs for multimodal literacy learning.

Although these digital learning games were invented years ago, they were seldom

included in the school curriculum due to the limitation of technology or a narrowed view on

literacy learning. While there have been opportunities for combining literacy learning with

digital activities that can make learning more interesting, traditional schools did not seize the

chance, but cram schools did. This ability to see through the tools people use and critique

both the tool and the selves, The change of symbolic system, from Vygotsky’s point of view

(Scribner & Cole, 2013), is the basis for more profound mental activities. All students should
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be given a chance to develop this ability which prepares them for the future. When schools do

not provide such opportunities and shadow education programs providing such experiences

are shut down, the chances for adolescents to receive formal training for this skill will be

largely reduced. Considering that cram schools have more motivations to invent attractive

multimodule literacy activities out of the commercial needs, if students cannot have shadow

education anymore, their chances to learn through versatile modes decrease as well. Then

they will lose the opportunity to use literacy in various occasions and the chance to use more

creative literacy tools.

Culturally Relevant Literacy

Sometimes schools may not only ignore students’ knowledge but also erase it. Barton

and Tan (2020) use hosts and guests to explain the traditional teacher-student relationship, in

which teachers own the power of distributing knowledge and they decide whether to give

knowledge to the student. This is a reflection of colonization in education where the

education system and those who work for it give absolute power to the dominant group and

their culture, ideologies, and ways of being. While this concept is often related to skin color

in the American context, the hierarchy of who owns the power to define, use, and change

literacy is universal in human society.

Gutiérrez, Morales, and Martinez (2009) have been arguing for students’ right to have

their voices heard at school and the importance of understanding that each student has their

own opinions even if they may come from similar identities. San Pedro (2018, p.334) argues

that the “goals of schooling in a pluralistic society should be to center pedagogies and

curriculum on the rich heritage and cultural practices that students bring with them to
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schools.” It means that reforming literacy learning at schools should not only start from what

to teach but also from whose knowledge is valued and whose is missing or devalued. Simply

banning shadow education does not necessarily help reclaim the privilege of public high

schools since the problems within the education system are the main reasons that urge

students to find more literacy resources. It might be more useful to change the outdated and

narrowed literacy at school than banning other types of literacy learning communities.

Problems to be Solved

As mentioned before, this policy starts with shutting down shadow education, but it is

also the start of a series of education reforms. The policymakers realized that the current

education system put too much burden on students, which constrains their literacy activities.

However, banning shadow education is not the best choice as it does not boost literacy

activities. Since literacy can be seen as social practices and events, the change of literacy

learning is related to social changes, which means a series of changes in the education system

and the general public’s understanding of literacy (Bloom & Green, 2015). It is essential to

enrich the literacy curriculum and teenagers’ literacy activities both within and outside of

schools. If the education reform only looks at the textbook, where students learn literacy, and

how students can receive better scores in high-stakes tests on literacy, then education might

lose its purpose of nourishing people.

Certainly, banning shadow education gives students more spare time after school, which

should free them from their schoolwork and help them do other meaningful activities other

than homework. However, this should only be the start of the reform since it just gets

students out of the shadow education but does not tell them what else they can do under the
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original evaluation system. Thinking about ways to take advantage of cram schools and using

them as a supplement for literacy learning in public high schools may generate more positive

outcomes in education.

Make Literacy a Tool of Empowerment

The need to recruit and keep students leads students’ superiority in shadow education.

While they often need to follow the teacher’s will at school, their voices and perspectives are

more valued in private tutoring. It creates the soil to empower adolescents. The current

education system assumes that adults know what is best for teenagers and requires students to

meet the requirement set by adults, which is a deficit approach (San Pedro, 2018). Educators

should devote more efforts to learning adolescents’ knowledge and culture and make them a

force for social changes (Morrell 2006, as cited in Vasudevan & Campano, 2009; Lee and

Wlash, 2017). It means that high school students should have new identities other than

traditional student roles. The teacher is no longer the only person who has the right to analyze

the textbook or any literacy material based on the social norm and their own understanding.

Students’ experiences, opinions, passions and worries should be added to the curriculum to

make it theirs so that they create the literacy that is meaningful to them.

Create Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

When talking about high school students’ literacy activities, educators should create a

culturally sustaining pedagogy and see students both in groups and as individuals. For

students with different cultural backgrounds from their teachers’, educators need to learn

students’ need for literacy. It is more than respecting young people’s literacy activities and

literacy events by combing their literacies at and beyond schools (Kirkland, 2010). Paris and
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Alim (2017) note that culturally sustaining pedagogy is more than mentioning various

cultures in the classroom, and it should focus on how different cultures merge together to be

preserved and evolve together. They suggest that students should take the responsibility to

inherit their culture, language, literacy, and identity in order to refuse assimilation and bring

new energy into their ways of being.

The word “Chinglish” is an example. It refers to “[a] mixture of Chinese and

English,...typically incorporating some Chinese vocabulary or constructions, or English terms

specific to a Chinese context” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2002). While this type of

language is strictly prohibited and avoided in a traditional English classroom in China

because it is “wrong”, it also cuts a line between the two languages and rejects the fusion of

languages. When it is considered a mistake made by Chinese English learners, it also denies

their understanding of both languages and their creativity because they show their knowledge

of the vocabulary, sentences structure, and grammar in both languages. In places like cram

schools where the learning atmosphere is more casual, teachers can use these Chinglish

slangs as well, which tells students that their creativity in both languages is valued.

Consequently, they realize their power over these languages and are more motivated to use

what they learn at school to renew their culture and cherish their literacy.

It can also help preserve minority cultures in China if cram schools become a place for

minority students to share and inherit their cultures. Although the government made

preferential policies to increase the number of minority ethnic students from K-12 to college,

the tension between keeping their traditional culture and being assimilated into the

mainstream culture still exists (Wang, 2018). It makes forming a “plural unity pattern” that
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allows each group to maintain their unique culture a priority under the economic growth (Fei,

2017). Thus, the need to design a curriculum that allows them to have a sense of belonging to

their own identity is urgent. It is more useful to motivate them to keep and pass on their

culture and tradition in modern society. Once the curriculum is related to their daily lives,

they can see the acknowledgment of their wisdom, giving them more motivation to use what

they learn (Kirkland, 2011). When promoting such pedagogy, teachers should bear in mind

that students are similar but also different. Although students with the same ethnicity share

the same culture, their understanding and internalization of it may differ from each other.

Shadow education can provide safe places for minority students to sustain their culture if

those cultures are not ignored in public schools.

Develop the Ability to Critique

Shadow education is often owned by private companies and cooperation, which means

that it is independent of the public school system. This should give students a chance to

reflect and critique their literacy activities at school rather than merely repeating what they

learned at school. Adolescents should learn to be critical to things happening to them, around

them, and to anyone else during the process in which different literacies and aspects of

culture fuse together (Lee and Wlash, 2017; Gutiérrez and Johnson, 2017). It indicates that

teens need to develop their ability to decide what to keep and what to abandon. It requires

them to have the chance to practice their critical thinking in the classroom and to challenge

the authority that writes the canon. As the users and creators of new cultures and new types of

literacy, they should know what is needed and outdated. The cram school classroom practices

can tell these students who will become adults that they have the responsibility and the ability
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to see the problem and then make changes so that they can apply what they learn there to

reform their schools.

Conclusion

Although the policy has not been released for long, its implementation is already

widespread, and in the intervening months the government has enacted other measures to

regulate the education market as a whole. These phenomena suggest that the double reduction

policy is only the initial move to regulate shadow education and other education related

industries, not the end. While the policy aims to reduce students’ learning pressure, and

improve educational equity, there needs more follow-up policies or regulations to improve

the school system and schooled literacy as well. Although this paper provides suggestions,

the best way to reform education should start within the school system, instead of expecting

other institutions to compensate for its flaw. Making the public high school a place allowing

diverse types and modes of literacy and a safe space empowering students should be the

priority. The policies and regulations to be enacted in the future should think beyond the

limits of traditional literacy, see students as creators of knowledge, and understand the culture

they inherit and create so that literacy can play a new role in a new era.
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