Substitution or Complementation: The Relationship between School Education and Shadow Education

Abstract

In order to explore the relationship between school education and shadow education, this study applied two-level Bernoulli Model to estimate the school-level determinants of private tutoring by analyzing the data of PISA 2015 of four regions of China (Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Guangdong). The results indicated that: (1) the four regions have large scale of private tutoring ranging from 58.7% to 74.0% for science, mathematics, and reading; (2) the participation rate of private tutoring in villages is much higher than that in cities; (3) the quality of school teachers significantly negatively affects the likelihood for receiving tutoring. Shadow education plays both substitutional and complementary roles for school education, and the growth of shadow education is in accompany with the low quality of school education in rural areas but with high quality of school education in urban areas. Instead of increasing Education resources and improving infrastructure, increasing teacher quality will reduce the participation probability of private tutoring.