You can shuffle allocation, but competition is still there:
重磅：广州将不分重点班！小学和初中新生或“一键分班”
Source: 羊城晚报 (Yangcheng Evening News), by 蒋隽, April 15, 2026. Link
Breaking News: Starting September 2026, Guangzhou will ban tracked classes (重点班) in all Grade 1 and Grade 7 cohorts. Students and teachers will be randomly assigned via a centralized “one-click” system.
The core mechanism is DOUBLE RANDOMIZATION!
“9月新学年入学的一年级和初一新生将在教育部门组织及监管下’一键分班’，同时老师也将随机匹配”
“Grade 1 and Grade 7 students entering in September will be ‘one-click assigned’ under the organization and supervision of the education bureau; teachers will also be randomly matched.”
“比如，一个年级6个班，老师也分成6组，随机摇号对应。”
“For example, a grade with 6 classes — teachers are also divided into 6 groups, then randomly drawn to match.”
“教育局或要求分班名单和结果对家长及社会公示，接受监督。”
“The education bureau may require that class rosters and results be publicly disclosed to parents and society, subject to oversight.”
“民办学校同样受到阳光招生政策的约束，同样’一键分班’”
“Private schools are equally bound by the [central educational bureus’] sunshine enrollment policy — they also do ‘one-click random assignment.’”
It’s a big deal because elite student placement has always been a two-step process — school selection, then class placement.
The classic tradeoff is: top-student-in-a-medium-school vs. medium-student-in-a-top-school. Previously, the top school option came bundled with a key class placement — an informal process for a spot in a key class secured through connections or under-the-table payments.
Now, random assignment breaks step two entirely and reshape the whole calculus. Without guaranteed placement into a premier class, a student might get to a prestigious school and land in a random class with a random teacher — it’s small fish big pond with no class bonus — the premium of the top school drops while the downside stays. Being a big fish in a smaller pond starts looking strictly better.
But you might ask, did the informal market of class placement creates efficiency? It’s not fair nor pareto efficient for sure. Apart from thess, it certainly poses fiscal pressure:
“‘掐尖’需要承担财政成本（每个学生每年数万元的生均经费），在经济吃紧的背景下，相信教育管理部门也不会给予太多操作空间。”
“Cherry picking carries fiscal costs (tens of thousands of yuan per student per year in per-capita funding). With tight budgets, education authorities are unlikely to allow much room for maneuvering.”
Prev, the class-sorting system was an informal sorting mechanism that allocated teaching quality based on test performance and parental resources. The new system replaces it with a lottery — deliberately destroying the price signal. Whether this improves welfare (if you can ever define it) depends entirely on whether the quality gap between teachers narrows or whether it simply gets hidden.
“教育要从过度偏向’分流’，重新回到’培养人’的轨道上来。”
“Education must shift from over-emphasizing ‘sorting people’ back to the track of ‘cultivating people.’”
The mechanism is clean. The implementation question is whether local actors will game it. You can shuffle allocation once, but competition and incentives are still there.