Actors in the Process: The Power of Subordinates

At the Center the SEdC has moved to regulate and strengthen standards for teachers by improving teacher education—through the promulgation and revision of curricular guidelines and the establishment of an elaborate network of in-service and preservice teacher-education programs—and by introducing a system of professional examinations and certificates.^[14] Yet, we need to be wary of attributing too much leadership to the

MOE and the SEdC. A review of participants highlights the limits of the Center and the resultant power of subordinates within the education bureaucracy.

The MOE and the SEdC are constrained horizontally in ways that weaken their efforts: the upgrading of teacher education depends first on attracting students of higher quality, something the MOE could not do on its own. Vertically constrained as well, the Center is limited in the extent to which it can direct and supervise activity. In the early 1980s, for example, the MOE's Teacher Education Bureau had a staff of only six. Shorthanded, it was only able to convene meetings with representatives from normal colleges to "exchange experience" and hold up for emulation the exemplary activities of individual programs. Its staff made occasional school inspections, but regular systematic review of all programs was impossible.^[15]

The result is a kind of autonomy that is rationalized as education intelligence: responding to local needs, encouraging grass-roots initiatives, and so on. While the references in the Education Decision to reforms in higher education grant official legitimacy to this, my 1982–84 interviews at eighteen higher-education institutions indicate that this constrained autonomy predated the Decision.

The autonomy outlined above lends strength to the influence and power of lower-level units. Subordinates have participated in the policy process in four main ways: experimenting, interpreting, and undermining policy, as well as reshaping policy conceptualization.

Experimentation

Local and provincial education authorities exert their power to shape policy by initiating experiments that later are disseminated provincially and nationally. In 1984, for example, a provincial official told me about one province's reforms in job assignment, which included movement toward more contractual arrangements in hiring recent graduates in teacher education. Because the reform was described as an "experiment," it did not require MOE approval.

This situation—played out in provincial, municipal, and institutional practices—illustrates the significance of local experimentation. Many times local and provincial officials and school administrators talked

about reforms they had initiated "as experiments"—in admissions to teacher education, curriculum, and professional standards. A commonly told story line runs like this: Some change in practice occurs that will serve the interests of local institutions, enterprises, or the local community's educational needs. An agreement is worked out, later noticed and encouraged by provincial or central officials, and finally widely implemented as a new development of the policy.

The process of experimentation, when it is successful, becomes one form of policy formation. The central bureaucracy, in fact, is organized to support that sort of persuasion-through-successful-experience. The teacher education and the teachers' conferences convened by the SEdC serve this function, as do the regularly featured stories of "successful" experiments of schools and local education authorities described by the education press, particularly Renmin Jiaoyu and Zhongguo Jiaoyubao . The value given to experimentation strengthens the negotiating position of local-level units. The recent distribution of rewards for reforms further encourages this.^[16] Speaking of the power of grass-roots experimentation, one provincial official explained in 1984, "In recent years the big reforms in teacher-training colleges have come mainly from the teacher-training college itself."

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

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.

Undermining Policy

A third pattern of participation is to undermine or contradict policy. A variant perhaps of Manion's concept of "policy remakes" (see chapter 8 in this volume), this autonomy allows grassroots actors to willfully recast policy according to their interests. This policy process can produce reforms that are inconsistent and at times conflicting.^[17]

Reforming professional standards offers a good case of contradictory action. At one institution, one part of the curriculum was undermined by another, as each department interpreted "higher quality teacher educa-

tion" as meaning expanding its own course hours and offerings. In effect, departmental plans that simultaneously called for strengthened preparation in education and more advanced work in the students' major fields produced an increase in specialization at the expense of professional training in education. In the school's 1980 course plan, for example, education courses for all departments constituted only 2.7–5.8 percent of student course hours, in contrast to an earlier 10–20 percent. Struggles within colleges demonstrate ways in which lower-level units deflect decisions in ways they find congenial.

Shaping Conceptualization of Policy

In addition to provincial and university or school actors in the teacher policy process, researchers and consultants play an increasingly important role. Halpern (see chapter 5 in this volume) describes the growing role of research centers and experts as one of "competitive persuasion." In education the influence of researchers and consultants is evident in their ability to shape the conceptualization of policy.

The SEdC conducts its own research within each of the various bureaus and departments and assigns responsibility for policy research to its Office of policy Study and its Educational Development and Research Policy Center. The Policy Center researchers, as described by one educator, write for "leaders" in ways contrasted with the "more open" ability to "expose problems," which the many recently established research centers possess.

The contribution coming from these research institutes and consultants outside the SEdC grew in the late 1980s. The SEdC frequently called on researchers based at university research institutes to serve as consultants on teacher policy. At one university, for example, the SEdC asked one research group to prepare a paper on the academic specializations appropriate to teacher education, another to investigate the qualifications of all teacher educators involved in teacher-training institutes, and a third to analyze teacher standards in other countries. While noting that it is still "authority-driven policy," not "research-based policy," that is developed, researchers claim that the role of research in the policy process has increased since 1978. They find themselves called on more often for a wider range of tasks.

There seemed to be a common formal interpretation of the policy process: the administrative and political center raises an issue, the SEdC responds, and researchers get consulted. Still, this passive or reactive version of the consultant's role does not entirely coincide with the evidence of frequent and informal interaction between key researchers and SEdC officials. In 1987 several different researchers mentioned being

consulted by phone by newly appointed SEdC vice-ministers,^[18] called by an SEdC official to spend a morning talking about teacher education and this researcher's own research, and appointed on short notice to a small SEdC task force to evaluate the success of the reform efforts.

These phone calls, conversations, and last-minute committee assignments all suggest a rather close, informal, and personal network of scholars and officials, one that has grown stronger and perhaps tighter in recent years. Implicit in these anecdotes is the sense that the knowledge of and familiarity with academics is not insignificant in SEdC work. The expansion of the consulting role appears closely related to status—institutional status, personal connections, and status accrued from time overseas. (In teacher policy, researchers from Beijing Normal University and East China Normal appear to be most frequently consulted by SEdC officials.) As these ties grow, researchers also stand to influence policy—particularly the conceptualization of policy issues. As Kingdon found for the United States, these consultants are more likely to affect "alternatives" than national agendas (1984, 58).