The unregulated fees charged by some high-quality primary and middle schools of those willing to pay for their children to attend the best schools have been a hard nut to crack for years. Now the Ministry of Education has announced a timetable of measures to bring the situation under control in five years.

However, truth be told, it seems unlikely the top educational authority will be able to realize its target.

Despite repeated instructions and crackdowns by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in recent years, such charges are increasingly prevalent and continue to rise, as there is a need on the part of schools and a growing demand from parents who want their children to enter quality schools. As all know, unbalanced resources are the root cause behind the fact that some parents choose higher pay for their children to enter quality schools that are far away from where they live.

The MOE document says that it will regulate school recruitment, prevent schools from charging such fees and will proportionally distribute the number of students to all middle schools, so that even students from low quality middle schools will have a chance to enter quality senior high schools. Efforts will also be made to improve the teaching quality of poor quality schools.

The MOE will improve the quality of teachers through training and the creation of a mechanism for teachers and headmasters to regularly move between different schools, so as to realize a more balanced distribution of teaching resources.

All these measures are good. If they are applied to the letter, the MOE will no doubt successfully fulfill their promise to curb quality schools charging such fees.

Yet, it is one thing to propose such measures and have a timetable to put them into practice, it is another entirely to have the measures implemented to the letter.

This is not the first time the MOE has made such promises. It introduced inspection teams to investigate the situation and even published the names of schools that charged such fees. Yet, the charging of such fees has become even more rampant, and the amounts charged have continued to increase.

Now the problem is whether the MOE can push grassroots education authorities to implement the measures it believes will be effective. It may select some pilot areas to trial the measures and then adopt those that prove the most effective in other areas.

Still, people are wondering whether the MOE will be able to fulfill its promise, not because the measures it has proposed are bad, but because they doubt whether such measures can really be carried out and take effect as thoroughly as necessary.