The Issue: Policy Related To Teachers

Since the 1978 Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee, education has been at the center of debates about China's development strategies. The "strategic focal role" of education has been stressed with increasing energy in central-level plans, and teachers have been a frequent topic of public debate and policy reform. Perhaps the most significant example of this is the placement of teachers on the list of targets of the landmark 1985 Education Reform Decision (the jiaoyu tizhi gaige jueding , hereafter called the Education Decision). In the wake of that Decision and the 1986 Compulsory Education Law, central leaders, education bureaucrats, and education researchers argued that teachers—better qualified, in larger numbers, and more highly rewarded—are an essential part of these reforms. Changes in the condition and ranks of teachers are viewed as a precondition for national education reform and, thus, for broader economic and social reform.^[3]

Yet even in this purportedly supportive climate for education, one

finds evidence of education's limits. The education system's bureaucratic weakness, its interdependence with other sectors, as well as its multiple coping strategies, can all be illustrated through examination of policies related to teachers. This issue area provides a window on broader aspects of bureaucratic behavior and educational policy formation.

Below I outline the structural constraints on the education bureaucracy as preparation for discussion of four interrelated features that described dominant patterns of bureaucratic behavior in China's educational system. These features, described through analysis of two case studies of teacher policy, include (1) the groping process of policy activity; (2) the power of subordinates to shape policy; (3) the multiple coping strategies sought by participants in the educational policy process; and (4) the necessity of cross-sectoral work to support sectoral interests.