Debate: School selection fees

Li Jianzhong

Motto should be education, not profit

School-selection fees have soared along with commodity prices. In Beijing, for example, the fees have risen from about 7,000 yuan ($1,095) in the 1990s to more than 30,000 yuan. Some media reports even said that the school-selection fees, in some "premier" schools were as high as 250,000 yuan this year.

Last year, the Ministry of Education vowed to eradicate school-selection fees in three to five years. Earlier this year, the Beijing municipal education commission issued a regulation banning all arbitrary charges, including school-selection fees and "sponsorship fees", for enrollment in primary schools and pre-schools.

The school-selection fees and "sponsorship fees" charged by schools may have been banned, but schools still take such fees and parents still pay them.

If not, how could Wang Cuijuan, former principal of Zhongguancun No 3 Elementary School, one of the city's top schools, be charged with embezzling more than 100 million yuan from the school's "off-the-book" funds that came mostly from "sponsorship fees" paid by students' parents? In Zhongguancun No 3 Elementary School's case, mostly people who do not live in the district and should not have admitted their children to the school had paid such fees.

In another case, the former principal of Beijing No 54 Middle School, surnamed Li, was convicted of misappropriating 270,000 yuan from the amount collected as school-selection fees to buy a house built by the government for lower-income families. Li was sentenced to three years' imprisonment last year.

Schools charge and parents pay school-selection fees and "sponsorship fees" for various reasons. Parents pay them to get their children admitted to a "good" school. The phenomenon mirrors social inequality, and parents are desperate to choose "premier" schools for their children because education is a ticket to social mobility and opens the door to a higher social class.

It's a pity that some prestigious schools have buried their integrity and are trading education for profit. And they are least bothered about having commercialized public educational resources.

Besides, Chinese parents are more worried about children's education than their foreign counterparts. Their concern, which in some cases resembles vanity, and the high expectation they have from their children have made enrollment in schools a lucrative, though illegal, business.

This business has to be eradicated to restore sanity and ensure a balanced development of education. Last year, the central government released the State guidelines for middle- and long-term educational reform and development plan (2010-2020) and promised to spend 4 percent of its GDP on education by 2012. Its aim is to standardize the now diverse quality of education in schools and strike a balance in the distribution of educational resources and quality of education in urban and rural areas.

To eradicate such practices, the government has to enact laws that would make charging school-selection fees and "sponsorship fees" a crime. Although some authorities have issued quite a number of regulations to prohibit school-selection fees, they have done little to translate them into concrete action.

Perhaps China could learn from India in this case. India's Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act says the penalty for charging arbitrary fees will be ten times the amount charged. China could implement similar punitive measures against arbitrary school fees to fight the menace.

Schools should be student-oriented and dedicated to cultivating talents instead of making profit.

The author is a researcher with the China National Institute for Education Research, affiliated to the Ministry of Education.