Double Reduction Policy

The amount of time Chinese adolescents invest in their studies is among the highest in the world.[4] Students in Shanghai aged 12 to 14 spend 9.8 hours a day on-campus studying.[4] Chinese students' average study time commitment is 55 hours per week, far beyond an international average of 44 hours.[5]

Due to the competitive pressure of the Senior High School Entrance Examination, Junior High School students in China's first-tier cities improve their school academic performance or academic competition through extracurricular tutoring.[4] In Shanghai, more than 45 percent of students attend math tutoring classes at least four hours a week, and more than 20 percent even invest more than four hours in attending tutoring classes.[4] Students from rural areas attend four-hour “evening sessions”offered by boarding schools.[4] In Chinese high schools, “evening sessions" do not end until 11 pm.[6] And Chinese adolescents' tutoring hours during weekends increased from 0.7 hours to 2.1hours from 2005 to 2015.[7]

As students need to finish their homework after cram school, a student's quality/quantity of sleep becomes affected. Therefore, lack of sleep becomes a common trend among Chinese adolescents.[4][6] Lack of sleep problem is mainly caused by time-consuming homework.[8] Research conducted by the Afanti education platform in China has shown that 45% of participants have difficulties finishing homework.[9] 87.6% of interviewed junior or high schools students (aged from 13 to 18) finish homework after 10pm and their average sleep hours reduce to under 8 hours.[8] For primary school students (aged from 6 to 12), 13.3 percent of them suffered from insufficient sleep during weekdays.[10]

There is a positive correlation between the amount of homework given during weekdays and to the proportion of overweight Chinese adolescents.[3] However, sleep duration on both weekdays and weekends shows a negative correlation with adolescent students.[3] The obesity rate among Chinese children aged 5 to 19 exceeded 18 percent in 2016, almost five times the obesity rate (4 percent) in 1975.[11] 7–9 years old young Chinese primary school students have the most significant obesity problem, "5.7% for boys and 8% for girls".[3] 19.6 percent of Grade 1 Chinese students are overweight. And the obesity rate of primary school students in grades 1-3 increase faster than students in grades 4–6.[3]

Suicide is the highest cause of death among Chinese teenagers.[12] Seventy-nine primary and secondary school suicides in 2013 were linked to the pressure of exam-oriented education in China and fierce competition in schools.[13] Sixty-three percent of the suicides occurred in the second semester, which was closer to Senior High School Entrance Examination and 高考 "gaokao" (National College Entrance Examination). Depression caused by stress is one main factor in suicide, and more than 10% of Chinese adolescents have depression problem.[14] Thirty-three percent of suicides are related to family conflicts, which is even higher than the suicide rate directly caused by study stress (twenty-two percent).[14] Moreover, China currently does not provide adequate psychological resources for students with psychological problems and cause difficulty for students solving mental health problems.[13]

Chinese families, influenced by Confucianism and “huge income gaps linked to educational credential”, consider their children's academic performance as an effective means of achieving upward social mobility.[14][15] Parents' high expectations are also linked to the one-child policy, implemented in 1979.[15] Because Chinese families have only one offspring and the Chinese workplace is increasingly competitive, parents place extreme demands on their child to succeed academically.[15] Because of the psychological feeling of "upper-class envy" and "lower-class fears" among Chinese parents, families tend to spend significant educational expenditures, especially on expensive after-school tutoring.[16]

The high cost of education leads to significant economic pressure on Chinese families. The China Institute for Educational Finance Research (CIEFR)'s household survey showed that Chinese families spent $296 billion on preschool and primary education during 2016–2017.[17] This is despite the fact that Chinese governments fund compulsory education and school tuition is free. However, families in first-tier cities still spend an average of 16,800 yuan on education for students during the compulsory education stage.[17] Middle-class parents invested the most among all families in their children's education.[18][19] Middle-class parents want to build 'child capital' by increasing financial investment in after-school tutoring.[19]

Teachers' requirements also lead to extra burdens on Chinese parents. In China, some teachers will obligate parents to help check and supervise their children's homework.[20] 91.2% of Chinese parents do so.[21] Those that fail can be reprimanded by teachers and accused of irresponsibility, leading to stress on the family and their relationships.[20] The Double Reduction Policy aims to alleviate this financial burden by strictly regulating the tutoring industry and to lessen the pressure on families.[1][22] It calls for the development of "home-school cooperative education", which guides parents toward reasonable expectations for their children while the school provides after-school supervision to reduce parents' anxiety about tutoring classes and home supervision.[22]

Opinions on Further Reducing the Homework Burden and Off-Campus Training Burden of Students in Compulsory Education specifies the following policy measures to ease students' learning burden:[2][23]

1. Clarify the total amount of homework by category. Schools should ensure that there is no written homework to be done at home for 1st and 2nd grades, but fixed homework amount can be appropriately on campus; the average time for completion of written homework for 3rd through 6th grades is not to exceed 60 minutes, and the average time for completion of written homework for middle school is not to exceed 90 minutes.
2. Increase the quality of homework design. Give play to the diagnostic, consolidation, and analytic functions of homework, including homework design in the education and research system, systematically design fundamental homework that comports with the traits and learning principles for the age and that embody the orientation towards student centered education. Encourage the assignment of tiered, flexible, and personalized homework, resolutely overcome mechanical and ineffective homework and put an end to repetitive and punitive homework.

The double reduction policy emphasizes the student-oriented learning mode of teaching students according to their aptitude and has further realized "the cultural approach".[1][15] Schools now offer courses across a broader range of interests.[1] Schools respect every students’ “differentiated learning needs”, personal strengths and individuality, so students can achieve well-rounded development through “after-school services”.[1]

Primary and junior high schools in China are also explicitly required to outlaw rankings of students' academic performance.[24] The Ministry of Education has emphasized students' personality rights through the double reduction policy, so as to avoid the negative psychological pressure caused by the public examination ranking.[25] Banning rankings protects students' psychological self-esteem, especially for adolescents who are still in a fragile growth stage.[25] The abolition of rankings and “frequent formal exams” has ensured students' enthusiasm for learning and changed China's long grade-centered and test-oriented education system.[24][25]

About 15 million people in China were employed in off-campus education and training before the policy published.[22] On July 23, The State Council of the People's Republic of China announced that they would no longer issue new for-profit licenses for tutoring institutions and required existing ones to stop tutoring “core curriculum courses” for students having compulsory education.[30] All after-school tutoring institutions became non-profits.[30] Chinese government also stated this heavy regulation on tutoring industry aimed to eliminate the unequal educational resource allocation phenomenon.[31]

After the double reduction policy was implemented, 10 million people experienced unemployment.[22] New Oriental Education Technology Group Co., Ltd. is a prominent player in the Chinese tutoring industry. Its stock price hit its “lowest point of 1.68 in August 2021”.[22] Based on the purpose of cut costs and minimize economic losses, New Oriental Education also cut staff and stopped shifting its business focus from K-12 education consulting to quality-oriented education.[22] Overall, the tutoring industry shrunk considerably. The number of offline tutoring institutions decreased by 83.8 percent, while online tutoring institutions decreased by 84.1 percent.[26] The tutoring industry became highly fungible because schools offered a wealth of learning resources in school and 91% of student attend those activities.[26]

The problem of lack of sleep and mental health problem has been slightly relieved after controlling homework amount.[32] The rate of student with depression dropped from 9.9 percent to 9.4 percent, and student having anxiety dropped from 7.4 percent to 7.1 percent.[32] The proportion of primary and secondary school students able to complete their homework at school has risen from 46 percent to more than 90 percent, so adolescents now have more time to achieve work-life balance.[26][32]

Under the incentive of the double reduction policy, Chinese teachers could break their own inherent educational methods.[33][34] Teachers actively improved their personal teaching ability and the quality of teaching content.[33] In order to enable students to complete their homework in less homework and shorter class time, Chinese teachers started to consciously "improve the teaching efficiency in the classroom".[33]

The double reduction policy also provided a more “favorable ideological environment” and career development space for ambitious teachers with better teaching abilities.[34] Middle-aged teachers born in the 1970s and 1980s were again being inspired to participate research projects and to take the lead for younger teachers.[34] And for young teachers, they could get more career development opportunities under the double reduction policy. Young teachers' awareness of innovation and advantages in information technology helped them stand out easily.[34]

From 2018 to 2020, teachers were negatively concerned about the potential increase in workload and insufficient rights protection caused by the double reduction policy.[34] The reasons evoking some teachers' resistance to the double reduction policy and occupational anxiety are as follows:

1. Home-School conflict：After the implementation of the double reduction policy, parents believed that their children's education should be solely responsible for the school, so parents would reduce their attention to their children's education.[34] However, teachers still expected parents to take responsibility for supervising their children and actively communicated with school about students' situation.[35][34] Besides the conflict within parents and teachers' understanding of double reduction policy. There was also a role conflict because many teachers are both parents and teachers.[35] Teachers were unable to take care of their own families because the double reduction policy requires schools to provide "after-school services and homework design". Many teachers "feel sorry for their children" because of their conflicting identities.[35]
2. Worry students' academic performance: Some teachers discovered that the quality of teaching decreases in the short term after reducing the amount of homework.[34] In addition, some schools only altered the name of the "final exam" or no longer publicly announced students' "ranking", but schools still required teachers to achieve a higher average score of students.[34] Some teachers believe that the essence of exam-oriented education did not change.[34] So, they worried that reducing the amount of homework would affect students' academic performance.[35][34] Teachers' responsibility for students' better future let them face severe anxiety.[35]
3. Difficult to assign homework: Teachers reflected that it was difficult to assign flexible and personalized homework tasks.[34] Especially in the case of large class sizes in China, teachers had difficulties designing flexible homework suitable for different students.[34] Because of the difficulty of assigning homework and designing teaching materials, many teachers(especially unauthorized teachers) began to doubt their teaching ability and show low self efficacy.[35] Moreover, some teachers believed that personalized homework would lead to the failure to understand the actual academic level differences between students in the homework feedback and assessment stage.[35][34]