Shanghai Daily News

A local rule that bans senior teachers from offering paid tutoring sessions outside of class time has met a skeptical response from most local parents and teachers, who doubt the new regulation could effectively end the deep-rooted social phenomenon.

The Shanghai Education Commission, which announced the ban on Thursday, said senior educators are banned from offering any out-of-class tutoring for primary and secondary school students or forcing students to buy academic guidance exercise books.

Teachers who violate the ban could lose their monthly stipend and repeat offenders could be demoted to a junior teacher.

Qu Jun, vice director of the commission, said yesterday that first step of the crackdown would focus on senior teachers who offer large public tutoring classes.

"It is certainly easy for the commission to detect large public classes, but what about senior educators who secretly take up paid personal tutoring," asked Zhou Zhigang, vice headmaster at Jing'an Foreign Language School.

"Personal tutoring is far more rampant under the current exam-oriented education system. But since it's a voluntary deal for both sides, no one will simply and rashly stop it," he added.

Most of the local parents push their children to take extra tutoring sessions so that they can do well on the city's school entrance exams.

A recent survey conducted by the education commission indicated that nearly 43 percent of local primary and secondary school students attended paid classes for tutoring.

"With the large demand, advertisements for tutoring classes frequently appear in newspapers, on billboard and are even stuffed into the mail box of every local family," said Liu Ying, the mother of a 12-year-old student.

Most ads claim that the class will be taught by experienced senior teachers from local key middle schools. Each class will hold about 100 students who pay about 1,000 yuan (US$120) for each semester.

Meanwhile, individual teachers will open paid hourly tutoring classes - holding up to 10 students each session - in their spare time at home, charging about 50 yuan per hour.

Some teachers, especially those with high teaching titles, will even accept several batches of students on a single morning or afternoon, just like.

"The money they make from tutoring has already surpassed their normal salary to become their main income source," said Hu Yucun, a local middle school English teacher, adding that teachers earn about 3,000 yuan a month on average while tutoring can bring in up to 20,000 yuan a month.

Some teachers even deliberately save teaching content for home classes to encourage students to sign up for the tutoring sessions, parents said.