Multiple Coping Strategies

The groping process of teacher policy described above rests on the interaction of several levels of actors. Each influences policy, although each is also constrained in its ability to form and carry out policies regarding standards for teachers. Acting with few material resources and both organizational and political constraints, education bureaucrats have pressed for their interests by relying on a range of coping strategies.

Many of the constraints on the education bureaucracy can be explained in organizational terms. In the absence of sufficient personnel and regular feedback mechanisms, weak articulation of central and local levels within the education system reduced the Center's ability to inspect performance at the grass roots. But local-level actors were also constrained, given their reliance on approval by the Center, which sets boundaries for acceptable action. All levels within the system are further constrained because the resources available to education are limited, with a budget representing 11.17 percent of government outlays (Yuan 1988, 24).

External factors also impose significant constraints on bureaucratic options within the educational system. The political, social, and economic climate for schools discourages talented people from entering and staying in teaching, and this situation profoundly limits the ability of the

SEdC to make standards for teachers (Paine 1986). A popular phrase sums up the problems about teachers: "You can't get them, can't use them, and can't keep them" (jinbulai, yongbushang, liubuzhu ) (Gu 1983a). Teacher-training colleges, despite reforms, are unable to recruit top students.^[19] Assuring that well-qualified graduates of teacher-preparation programs end up teaching in elementary and secondary schools has likewise proven a formidable task. Despite heightened attention to the issue, there remain many ways in which universities and their students can conspire to escape high school assignments, especially as nonteaching units hire normal-college graduates. The central education bureaucracy's inability to determine and enforce hiring policies (that is, which units employ graduates of teacher-education programs) and the reward structure for teachers simply compounds the difficulties.^[20]

Limited as they may be in resources and by the context in which they work, education bureaucrats use a range of strategies to achieve their policy aims. Three of the most common are linking to other agendas, piggybacking other education reforms, and spreading success stories.

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

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.

Using Momentum of Other Educational Reforms

If grand national changes in the political economy's landscape justify changes in education policy, even more forceful pressure for reform in teacher standards came from other educational reforms. Advocates for higher standards for teachers were able to use the 1985 Education Conference and subsequent Education Decision to increase the pace and specificity of their reforms far beyond what had occurred during the broad discussions in 1978–85. In December 1985 attention focused on teacher examinations, preservice and in-service teacher education, and restrictions on teacher mobility ("Yao zhuajin" 1986, 2–3). Soon after, in March 1986, the SEdC made specific recommendations regarding curriculum, admissions, and job assignments—areas that had previously experienced experimentation but no clear SEdC mandate.^[21] Similarly, policy for teacher standards gained momentum with the April 1986 Compulsory Education Law's discussion of teacher testing and certification; this has encouraged a subsequent increase in both the level of attention and the degree of specificity of policy regarding teacher standards, with the SEdC and provinces moving ahead in developing and administering tests of teacher knowledge.^[22]

Closet Reforms and the Spreading of Success Stories

The groping and incremental quality to the policy change and the constraints felt by individuals at all levels encouraged official conservatism and unofficial experimentation. In the early unfocused stages of reform, the tendency to interpret policy literally and the vulnerability of educational institutions

generally encouraged a wait-and-see attitude. Many university officials whom I interviewed expressed this by saying that local reforms depend on reforms elsewhere; they did not feel that their school could go alone in its reform. (It is also clear, however, that higher-status organizations and individuals acted more boldly in interpreting reforms on their own.)

Despite this general conservatism, however, I observed a striking creativity among subordinates as departments or faculty conducted what I call "closet reforms." These reforms often represented significant changes from previous practices, yet their creators seemed to avoid publicizing them until informal support was gathered horizontally (at other institutions) or vertically (in the MOE, the SEdC, or the provincial BOE). An example would be one normal college's early revision of admissions practices before the dingxiang policy was created. The university, faced with graduates unwilling to teach at the secondary level, began to take proportionally more students from the countryside because they had, in the words of one administrator, fewer "conditions" and were more compliant. Within the space of one year the rural share of the entering class jumped from 40 percent to 60 percent. Soon after, the dingxiang program was introduced nationally. The experimentation observed at the local level was generalized as a popular coping strategy for the education sector as a whole.

In sum, the case study of teacher-standards policy represents many common qualities of the educational policy process. This groping process was shown to be interactive and slow and to involve many levels of the educational system. The SEdC, the BOE, institutions, and researchers all have some influence, but each is limited and is therefore forced to rely on multiple strategies for achieving their policy goals. The strategies vary with the unit's location in the structure of the education system's hierarchy, yet generally three kinds of strategies stand out: linking to changes in the political stream, riding the coattails of other educational reforms, or disseminating successful experiments.