China's Crackdown on Pricey Tutoring Schools Upset Parents

BEIJING - For Helen Cui's daughter, a 10-year-old rising fifth grader facing the September start of classes, tutoring is a nonnegotiable part of a middle-class Beijing childhood.

Her mother, a white-collar worker in a foreign enterprise, has established a grueling weekly extracurricular schedule that includes three hours of English lessons, three hours of math lessons, three hours of Chinese lessons, one hour of swimming lessons, one hour of piano lessons, and 90 minutes of a small online English class taught by an American who tells a story and then leads the handful of kids through a discussion. Cui estimates these additional lessons cost around $16,000 a year, an expenditure she believes is necessary to ensure her daughter's chance at the good life, an opportunity that hinges on excellent grades, excellent test scores and admission to an excellent college or university. But new regulations issued by China's Ministry of Education are placing restrictions on private tutoring, or "cram schools." Some see this as the government's attempt to reduce the cost of raising a child as it calls for couples to have two, or even three, children  after its one-child policy left China with too few workers to support the many retirees.