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.