The incident where officials in Leibo County, Sichuan, made teachers of low-scoring classes take photos with "shame" is a news story that is extremely worth digging into.
The county mayor's proposal to have teachers whose classes have an average score below 15 and 30 take photos with "shame" displayed on the big screen at the meeting is a shocking act nationwide and an excellent entry point, or rather, the pretext for the news. However, the county mayor forcing teachers to take photos with shame is not the whole story of this news; behind such extreme phenomena, there must be many astonishing facts yet to be uncovered.
The crowds watching say, how did the teachers teach when the class average score was below 15 and 30? It's too irresponsible, aren't such teachers shameful? The county mayor who made these teachers take photos with "shame" personally attended the county's education meeting, showing such importance to education, making him a good county mayor, especially since he also participated in the photo.
The local authorities reported that the county mayor also participated in the photo, but whether this is true is temporarily difficult to say, as no one has found the county mayor in the photo so far. Even if it were true, he was not the target of condemnation by the "shame" screen; he appeared on stage as a supervisor and accuser, like a prison warden at an execution ground. He would never think that the "shame" on the scene referred to himself.
Speaking of which, I strongly suggest again that Liangshan Prefecture arrange for the county party secretaries and county mayors of several economically backward counties to take a photo in front of the "shame" screen and then announce it to the public, so that they can "learn from shame and strive for progress."
In fact, what should be most focused on behind this news is: why has this phenomenon of class average scores below 15 and 30 occurred in Leibo County?
Judging from the photo of the group, there were quite a few teachers on stage. So, why does Leibo County have so many low-scoring classes? This is a bigger and more noteworthy news story. Unfortunately, no institutional media or self-media has clarified the reasons behind it so far.
The day before yesterday, in my article "The Astonishing Truth Behind the Incident of Teachers Being Forced to Take Photos with "Shame"", I briefly mentioned some points: the local area is poor and is a concentrated area of ethnic minorities. Many people cannot speak Mandarin and only speak Yi dialect. They do not value education, and the "uselessness of studying" theory has re-emerged. The dropout rate in the local nine-year compulsory education stage is very high, leading the local education bureau, schools, and teachers to spend a lot of energy on "controlling dropouts and ensuring enrollment," which means persuading dropout students to return to school. A large number of students who were originally dropouts, even if persuaded to return to school before the exam, do not study seriously, which will inevitably lower the class average score.
Of course, the high dropout rate in the local area has its reasons, but the fact that a large number of dropout students do not study seriously after being persuaded to return to school is my inference.
However, my inference is not entirely unreasonable. Yesterday, I asked a friend working in local media about the current state of education in Leibo. My old friend, who has worked in local media for more than ten years, said that this average score is not uncommon locally. Other counties in the area were still excited about breaking the zero undergraduate mark in the college entrance examination a few years ago.
This information provided by my local media friend also shocked me. I checked, and it is indeed true.
On March 5, 2025, the official website of the Liangshan Prefecture People's Government reposted an article from the "Liangshan Daily" titled "Liu Xintai: The Zhejiang-Sichuan Sentiment in Volunteer Teaching Diaries," which revealed: In 2023, Meigu County Middle School achieved a "breakthrough" in undergraduate admissions for liberal arts subjects for the first time in nearly 20 years.
Meigu County, like Leibo County, belongs to Liangshan Prefecture, and they are sister counties. Meigu County Middle School is the only high school in Meigu County and is a public school.
Can you believe that the only high school in the county achieved its first "breakthrough" in undergraduate admissions for liberal arts subjects in nearly 20 years in 2023?
On April 16, 2025, "China Youth Daily" also published an article promoting Liu Xintai. The article revealed: In the summer of 2022, Liu Xintai, director of the Ningbo Beilun District Teaching and Research Office in Zhejiang, went to Meigu County Middle School for aid teaching. When he first saw the test scores of the students at Meigu Middle School, the 53-year-old was surprised: the average score in many subjects was twenty to thirty points.
Let alone him being surprised, it is estimated that half of the population in the country would be greatly surprised to see this data.
Liu Xintai told reporters at the time that when he took over as principal of Meigu Middle School, the school had a total of 73 classes from junior high to high school, but only more than 60 teachers.
Everyone, with only over 60 teachers for 73 classes in the entire school, how can they teach? Are the students' poor grades entirely the teachers' fault?
Teacher Liu also told reporters that Meigu Middle School had not cultivated a single qualified student in the past decade or so, and in recent years, the number of students admitted to undergraduate programs in liberal arts has always been between 0 and 1, while the number of students admitted to undergraduate programs in arts and sports has also remained in the single digits.
Another reality that cannot be ignored is that due to the severe lag in local education, even slightly better students flow to other places, such as Leshan and Xichang, resulting in even poorer quality of students remaining in the local area.
What about the students who remain in the local area? Liu Xintai also found that "nearly half of the students work outside to earn living expenses and only return to school successively after the National Day holiday." This means that nearly half of the children did not go to school in September.
It can be seen from this that class average scores below 30, or even below 15, are not only the norm in Leibo County but also the norm in other counties in the area. The long-term and widespread educational situation in multiple counties clearly cannot be solely the responsibility of local teachers.
After a semester of Liu Xintai's efforts, the average score only rose to the forties. In the 2023 college entrance examination, 273 students from Meigu Middle School registered, and finally, 26 were admitted to undergraduate programs, more than half of whom were art and sports students.
The only high school in the county, for the twenty years prior to 2023, did not have a single child who could be admitted to an undergraduate program based on liberal arts scores. This is the current state of local education. The long-term existence of this situation is definitely not due to the irresponsibility of local teachers.
Sitting at home, I can only figure out these limited things, so I really want to go to Leibo County to figure out the following types of problems:
First type: How did the situation of class average scores below 15 and 30 occur? How many teachers are teaching a class with an average score below 15, how many children are enrolled, how many are studying normally at school, and how many are temporarily brought back to campus to fill the headcount for the exam to complete the "control dropouts and ensure enrollment" task? What is the highest score in the class? How is the usual teaching conducted.
The frequent convening of special meetings on "controlling dropouts and ensuring enrollment" by local authorities is also an important detail indicating that local education urgently needs attention from the whole society.
Among them, it is very important to let the teachers who were forced to take photos with “shame” speak out. Whether they were incompetent, irresponsible, did not teach seriously at all, or for other reasons, let them explain themselves.
The second category: schools where the average class score is below 15 points. What is the overall educational standard? How many classes are there in total? What are the specific scores for each class? How many such low-scoring classes are there? How great is the pressure on a township middle school to “control dropouts and ensure enrollment”? The third category: What kind of county is Leibo? What is the local attitude towards children's education? Is the high dropout rate caused by poverty, or because parents think studying is useless, or for some other reason? What is the professional standard of the local teaching staff, and what are their salary and benefits? How much energy do teachers have for “controlling dropouts and ensuring enrollment,” and how much energy do they have for teaching…
Teachers, schools, parents, and children – the voices of all of them are indispensable.
The fourth category: average class scores of twenty to thirty points are the educational norm in the area. Leibo County Magistrate is not like the Liangshan Prefectural Party Secretary who was transferred from an economically developed region to a backward one. He is also aware of the backward educational situation locally. Why did he treat the local teachers in such an extreme and barbaric way? Besides forcing teachers to take photos with “shame,” what other efforts and attempts has the local government made to change this backward educational situation? What were the results, and what will happen in the future?
The fifth category: What can the onlookers do for the education in Leibo and even Liangshan Prefecture? Those who believe that the current backward educational situation is mainly due to the irresponsibility and incompetence of teachers, can they go to Leibo County to teach? We cannot just sit and watch the excitement and scold the local teachers.
The doubts born at home are certainly not as profound as those discovered by going to the scene, and the problems that can be thought of are certainly not as complex as those discovered on the scene. Unfortunately, as a self-media, I cannot go to the scene. I look forward to institutional media going to Leibo for in-depth investigation to provide more accurate facts and judgments.
