Interpretation

The influence of local institutions is also made possible in part by weak connections within the educational bureaucracy. Loose coupling between the Center and local areas has its parallel within individual institutions and schools. A de facto delegation of authority has important consequences for the power of lower-level actors to interpret and redefine policy.

The Dean of Studies office (jiaowuchu ), the unit responsible for overseeing academic work within the normal college, like the SEdC, conducts only limited regular close inspection of its charges. The jiaowuchu typically has only a few staff members in each of four or five sections. Given personnel shortages and weak or nonexistent hardware for management in most of these schools, these offices, like the SEdC, are kept busy simply reviewing department schedules and plans and doing occasional in-depth sampling. Even during the 1980s reforms they could not afford to do regular lengthy studies of program quality, the impact of standards, or the fate of curriculum programs in use. There is no regular feedback mechanism. As a result, the jiaowuchu must delegate much

[16] See, for example, the SEdC and Finance Ministry's award of 200,000 yuan to thirty-seven counties (ZGJYB , 10 September 1988) and the Shandong Provincial Government's decision to give the Pingdu County Education Commission a 100,000 yuan bonus and four individuals involved a 2,000 yuan bonus and a salary raise ("Zhonggong Shandongshengwei Shangdongsheng renmin zhengfu" 1988.)

supervisory authority to leaders of each academic department. What occurs is the regular delegation of responsibility to lower levels—whether from ministry and provincial bureau to the grass-roots institution or from the institution to its academic departments.

Given this delegated authority, departmental-level interpretation of central-level policy is significant. Personalized decision making enters in. Within institutions there were unclear goals, little sense of how they were to be achieved and of who should make decisions. As a result, who participated in the decision in each department was significant, as the arrival of a "problem" allowed participants to match the problem to their pet solutions. The decisions, therefore, varied from unit to unit.

One example of this personalism and the range in policy interpretation comes from the Center's effort to provide more qualified teachers to rural and remote areas. The dingxiang (fixed destination) program of admissions and job assignment was introduced nationally in 1983 as a means of filling rural teaching positions with rural graduates and thereby avoiding urban students' resistance to rural teaching assignments. Although the program officially commenced in 1983, interviews in 1983–84 with eleven department chairs at one teacher-training college revealed a range of interpretation of the policy and consequently of its implementation. Some department chairs described plans to implement the policy, others assured me that they were not planning to do so, and one leader said that he did not know what the policy was.