Linking To Other Agendas

Kingdon (1984) argues that changes in the "political stream" and, more important, agendas are significant. Changes in China's national agenda gave force to the reforming of teacher standards. Education actors were keen to link their interests with those of national reform. It is noteworthy, for example, that in an authoritative book on major policy documents of the educational reforms, the 1984 Economic Reform Decision and the 1985 Science and Technology System Reform were included (Jiaoyu gaige 1986). The reform of education is regularly and symbolically connected to other broader changes. Teacher-education respondents frequently related the bureaucratic reforms within their system to changes in economic enterprises or the agricultural responsibility system. For administrators at the grass-roots level there was a keen awareness that the bureaucratic changes associated with reforming teacher standards were part of a

[19] Reforms include early university admissions for teacher education applicants and the continued use of stipends to teacher-training students despite the elimination of stipends in much of the rest of higher education. (See, for example, GMRB, 13 January 1985; FBIS, 28 July 1986, R1; Liu Bin 1986, 6; ZGJYB, 12 July 1986, 1, and 6 June 1987, 1; Xue 1986). The early-admissions program, for example, was described by SEdC, provincial BOE, and university admission officials as effective in attracting a stronger student-to-teacher preparation, yet all noted the limits of this approach. As one university official explained in 1986, the candidates were "not the best, but [academically] upper-middle students."

[20] The SEdC vice-commissioner Liu Bin argued that recently there has actually been a decrease in the proportion of graduates entering precollegiate teaching, with some schools only managing to send 50 percent and others only a few percent (Liu Bin 1986, 6).

larger national agenda. For them, this connection gave persuasive power.

Thus, many of the changes at the local educational institution intended to raise the quality of teachers corresponded with the restructuring of political economic patterns nationally. As part of the process of policy change in teacher standards, for example, autonomy in some areas of educational work increased: using the rhetoric of decentralization, some provinces were able to vary from the national plan to institute early-admissions policies in teacher education that were to increase their chances of attracting strong candidates into teaching. This phenomenon of increased autonomy was justified by the renewed emphasis on expertise and decentralization elsewhere in the system.