Zhabei No. 8 Middle School: taking down the words "poor students"

Basic facts

This section is about a school, not a sight. The school does not receive visitors; please do not linger or take photographs at the school gate.

1963: No. 970 Zhonghua Xin Road

In 1963 Zhabei No. 8 Middle School was founded at No. 970 Zhonghua Xin Road (some sources say No. 977).

The position is interesting. Zhonghua Xin Road runs east-west through the belly of Zhabei; the school stood here with shanty housing around it and the city's most famous second-hand market nearby. The Xinxin Department Store is a few hundred metres east of the same crossroads, at No. 567 Zhonghua Xin Road.

A middle school founded in the 1960s, landing between shanty housing and a second-hand market — that opening almost determined its fate for the next twenty years.

Some figures from 1986

In the mid and late 1980s there was a set of statistics about Zhabei No. 8 that was quoted again and again. They do not make pleasant reading, but they have to be set out, or what follows cannot be explained.

This set of figures was followed by a phrase: "a dumping ground for poor students". It is not a nice name, but that is what people called it at the time.

1987: a deputy head of the teaching-research office arrives with a team

In 1987 the deputy director of the Zhabei District teaching-research office, Liu Jinghai, came into No. 8 with a group of researchers.

What they did was officially called "a comprehensive reform of Chinese, mathematics and English in weak junior middle schools, raising the quality of pupils across the board". The point of entry was small: start with one year group as a pilot.

The research came out with an unexpected conclusion. Pupils failed academically not mainly because they were dull, nor because they disliked studying, but because —

repeated failure had settled the identity of "failure" on them for good.

A child who had repeated a year in primary school, then been put in a "bad class" in the junior years, then failed the first test, failed the second... three years on, he no longer expected to get a single question right. It was not that he did not want to learn; he had decided in advance that learning was no use.

So Liu Jinghai put forward a sentence that later travelled a long way:

Success is the mother of success.

The sentence is aimed at "failure is the mother of success". To a child who has already failed a dozen times, telling him again to "learn the lesson from failure" is to make him fail once more. To break the cycle, you have to give him a success first.

Lou Rongxi's classroom

How concretely did the method reach into the classroom? The school recorded one teacher.

Lou Rongxi taught at No. 8. In her earlier view the "poor students" in her class had scarcely a merit between them. Success Education said: bring out the child's bright points and fill him with delight and excitement. She thought about it, and concluded that her pupils were not wholly without good qualities.

In the new term she stood at the front of the class and introduced her pupils' bright points to the whole room:

The pupils named were "beaming, feeling they were no worse than anyone else".

After that, whether it was military training, an arts performance, a blackboard-newspaper competition or a themed class meeting, Lou Rongxi asked her pupils to play their part in the collective. In the collective ritual one sentence was shouted again and again:

"We certainly can."

Gradually everyone said that Teacher Lou's class had a lot of talent in it.

This is the plainest layer of Success Education: first let a child be seen in one thing, then let him believe that he may be capable in others too.

Three stages, three kinds of classroom

From one year group in 1987 to the whole school in the 1990s, Success Education grew three stages. The three stages answer to three classroom models:

The three stages are not three year groups; they are three changes taking place one after another in the same set of pupils. From "you hold me up" to "let me try" to "I will do it myself".

The result: between 1990 and 1994 the school's rate of qualified leavers in the junior leaving examination climbed to 98–100 per cent, and its average marks in the unified examinations reached the middle level of the district.

From 22 per cent to 98 per cent took less than ten years.

1994: giving up a section-chief post to be a principal

In 1994 Liu Jinghai made a decision that looked rather odd at the time: he resigned as head of the research office of the Zhabei District Education Bureau and went to No. 8 as principal.

A middle-ranking cadre of a district education bureau going to be principal of what had been "a dumping ground for poor students" — the choice was itself part of Success Education: a reform has to land in one concrete school, in the daily timetable, in the proportion of lecture to practice in each period, in each class's class meeting.

Early in 1995 the State Education Commission formally listed "Success Education" as one of the three findings in educational research to be promoted nationally in basic education.

A weak junior school on the edge of shanty housing became a banner for quality education across the country.

From one school to sixteen schools

Success Education did not stop inside No. 8's walls.

In 2005, to serve the building of a new countryside and the equalisation of education, Liu Jinghai pioneered the "commissioned management" of weak rural schools — the No. 8 team, commissioned by the Pudong New Area Social Development Bureau, took over the management of Donggou Middle School. It was the first case in the country of one middle school being commissioned to manage another. The experience was afterwards written into Shanghai's and the state's medium- and long-term plans for the reform and development of education.

By the 2010s the number of schools to which Success Education had spread was more than ten.

In 2009, after the PISA results were published, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) selected two experiences from among many educational practices — "Success Education" and "the commissioned management of rural schools" — and made them into a documentary, Strong Performers and Successful Reformers — Shanghai, China, broadcast on the OECD website.

A middle school in Zhabei appeared in a report by an international organisation.

The three refusals

Liu Jinghai later spoke of his "three refusals":

These three bear exactly on the essence of Success Education: if a school can only produce results by relying on good intake, good teachers and more hours, then it has proved nothing. What No. 8 wanted to prove was something else — that an ordinary school, ordinary teachers and ordinary pupils can succeed too.

The school's later motto was eight characters: confidence, self-reliance, breadth of mind, diligence; its song was called The Starting Point of Success.

Connections

• Sub-district：Zhijiang West Road Subdistrict
• See also：Xinxin Department Store, Zhijiang West Road Subdistrict, Pengpu Town

Sources: the founding in 1963 at No. 970 Zhonghua Xin Road (some sources say No. 977), the school's situation at its founding near shanty housing and a second-hand market, the 22 per cent rate of qualified graduates in 1986, the highest rate of pupil crime in Zhabei District (9 pupils), the rate of qualified junior leavers under 30 per cent, the repeaters making up one third of the two classes of the 1987 intake (13 of them repeaters more than once), intake scores ranking 33rd among the 35 middle schools of Zhabei District and third from the bottom among the district's 35 junior schools, the 37 per cent of pupils who had repeated a year in primary school, the mere 4 per cent of parents with more than 12 years of schooling, the nearly one in five teachers below the required qualification in the late 1980s with not one of the qualified having trained as a teacher, and the 1987 figures of 80 per cent of pupils depressed at entering No. 8, more than 60 per cent with no interest in study and 10 per cent having lost all confidence, are based on the Wikipedia entry "Shanghai Zhabei No. 8 Middle School" and the Introduction to Shanghai Zhabei No. 8 Middle School and A History of Contemporary Educational Experiments in China (Shandong Education Press, 2005) which it cites, together with Shanghai Education News Network's From a Weak School to a Banner of "Success Education": What Did Zhabei No. 8 Get Right (Grade B / Grade C); Liu Jinghai's arrival in 1987 as deputy director of the Zhabei District teaching-research office with a team, the one-year-group pilot, the formulation "success is the mother of success", the three examples of Teacher Lou Rongxi with Wang Cheng (egg fried rice), Zha Wenbin (singing) and Wu Suoqiang (insect specimens), and the collective ritual of "we certainly can", are based on the same piece in Shanghai Education News Network and on If There Is a Dream, Every Child Can Succeed — on Liu Jinghai, Principal of Shanghai Zhabei No. 8 Middle School on the school's own website (Grade B); the three-stage classroom models (Help to Succeed — lecture-and-practice, Try to Succeed — lecture-think-practice, Succeed on One's Own — study-try-lecture-practice), the rise of the rate of qualified leavers to 98–100 per cent between 1990 and 1994, Liu Jinghai's resignation as head of the district education bureau's research office to become principal in 1994, the listing in 1995 by the State Education Commission as one of the three achievements to be promoted nationally, the pioneering commissioned management of Donggou Middle School in Pudong in 2005, the "three refusals", and the OECD feature film of 2009, are based on Thirty Years, One Thing Done Wholeheartedly: Success Education on the school's own website and on the same piece in Shanghai Education News Network (Grade B); the new school built at No. 80, Lane 2950, Changzhong Road in 2001, the opening of senior classes in 2003, the move to No. 3000 Changzhong Road in 2006, the digital transformation of education in 2012 and the sixtieth anniversary of the school in 2023, are based on the Wikipedia and Baidu Baike entries "Shanghai Zhabei No. 8 Middle School" (Grade C, reproductions of one source); the motto "confidence, self-reliance, breadth of mind, diligence" and the school song The Starting Point of Success are based on the same Baidu Baike entry (Grade C). The full bibliography is in Appendix 4.