Analysis of the implementation of urban-rural teachers exchange policy in China

• In Event: Teacher motivation and professional development

Proposal

1.0 introduction
Because of the serious economic disparities and education inequalities between rural and urban areas, rural compulsory education in China is still confronted with problems related to teacher resources such as teacher shortages and inferior teacher quality. To resolve the issue of the unbalanced distribution of qualified teachers and reduce urban-rural disparities, in 2003, the State Council issued The Decision on Enhancing Rural Education. The teacher exchange program between urban and rural areas is reaffirmed in the Compulsory Education Law revised in 2006. It is suggested that the educational administrative institutions of the county-level government should organize the principal and teacher exchange program and strengthen the development of the schools with poor resources. Since then, the teacher exchange program has been initiated in many other local governments across China.
At present, there are policy studies on exchange of teachers in China which are mostly from the viewpoint of policy design and while there has been relatively little attention to county-level empirical studies on policy implementation. Also, it can be realized that people evaluate the policies based on their own interests and goals to a large extent, thus, it is necessary to analyze stakeholders including governments, schools of different types, teachers' interests in this policy adoption and implementation especially under the influence of key school system which is city-oriented. However, there has been no systematic analysis of the interests of these stakeholders and it is not clear how teacher exchange policies are being adopted with the existence of different interests. The proposed research study takes the county-level administrative region as the research unit to study the implementation situation of teacher exchange policies by focusing upon the stakeholders' perspectives on the rationales, priority problems of the policies and proposing ways to address the problems.

2.0 literature review
2.1 National context and responses toward teacher deployment challenges
Many countries make rules about teacher deployment and transfer to reduce educational inequality in the society and guarantee the job security of teachers. For example, in India, there are set reservations and quotas for tribal and indigenous youth to their own communities in order to alleviate teacher shortage in some particular places (Lewin, 2011). In Japan and South Korea, teachers are periodically rotated across schools in reducing gaps in teacher quality across the schools (Luschei et al., 2013). In addition to being a tool for governments to ensure equitable teacher distribution, the rules of teacher transfer can be used to get rid of poor-performing teachers. In the United States, seniority-based transfer rules were applied by many districts, which gives senior teachers the priority to fill the job vacancies (Levin & Quinn, 2003).
According to Luschei et al. (2013), more centralized education system tends to be better at providing students with equal access to qualified teachers with less concentration on teachers’ preferences. There are many examples supporting this idea. As Carreño (2002) reported, in European countries where teacher deployment is arranged by the government of high level, teachers tend to be forced to transfer to other schools in order to achieve an equal distribution. Teachers normally cannot bargain locally with schools and districts to secure the most desirable working conditions and increase the likelihood that the students have equal access to qualified teachers. On the other hand, Akiba et al. (2007) found in a cross-national study that a decentralized management system and a localized teacher labor market such as that in the United States can worsen the situation of uneven distribution of teacher resources.

2.2 Home studies on the teacher exchange policies
There are several common rationales supporting rural-teacher exchange policies in rural China. The prominent one is that it can optimize the allocation of educational resources effectively. On one hand, the way urban teachers flow to rural areas can help ease the pressure of teacher shortages in rural areas. On the other hand, the exchanged rural teachers often return to their original schools with advanced concepts learned from urban areas, which narrows the urban-rural educational gap to some extent. Secondly, urban-rural teacher exchange is regarded as an effective method for improving teacher professionalism through adapting to a different teaching environment (Zhong et al., 2013).
In terms of teacher deployment, China is a case between high centralized systems and decentralized systems, which contributes to some problems of teacher exchange policies. On one hand, it is reported that the exchange mechanism is inflexible leaving little autonomy for teachers and exchange schools to choose the exchange time or exchange locations (Bao, 2010). On the other hand, since the financing and managing of compulsory education in China is localized, the level of responsibilities for financing and managing compulsory education fall largely on county governments, which leads to some policy distortions reported by the researchers. Some schools and officials in education offices use their power to seek privileges during the implementation of teacher exchange policies. They are reluctant to dispatch excellent teachers from their school or districts instead dispatch teachers with a poor-performance as a means of ‘punishment’ especially at hard-to-staff schools (Zeng, 2009).

3.0 Research Design
This proposed study uses a multi-level embedded comparative case study using a mixed methods research design. The ways in which county government and schools interpret and respond to state mandates on teacher exchange meets Stake’s (1995) standard of an event occurring within a specific context and timeframe because it examined a single county-wide program and the experiences of those participating in the program either in a planning and implementation role or as a service participant. The primary objective of the study is to acquire an in-depth understanding of the what the actual implementation of the teacher exchange policies are like and how stakeholder perspectives on the teacher exchange policies differ, which makes the case study suitable for the research.
The study intends to use four data sources:
1. Documents consisting of policy documents and media reports were reviewed with the purpose of understanding the operations of the Ministry with regard to the exchange of teachers.
2. Semi-structured in-depth interviews with stakeholders at county level and school level.
3. Questionnaire surveys with stakeholders at county level and school level to collect quantitative data on teacher deployment, pupil enrolments, teacher pay-points, transfers and training.
4. Field observations for verifying the availability of teachers, teacher accommodation and the condition of the schools.
In determining the case study county, a consideration was given to the balanced degree of development and whether it has implemented the urban-rural teacher exchange program. The criteria are as followed:
1. County with strong regional development imbalance.
2. Local authorities have made concrete policies and detailed plan to carry out urban-rural teacher policies for more than three years.
Based on these criteria, the proposed study aims to select H county as a case. Firstly, I will offer research-based information on the current situation of rural teachers and policies in H county based on document analysis. I will then investigate the experiences and perspectives of teachers, headteachers, and government officials on the teacher exchange policies through making multiple contacts with participants during a 12-month period. The qualitative component comprises the dominant component of the missed-methods study. Interview data and document analysis will be employed to get a better understanding of various stakeholders’ evaluation of teacher exchange, while the quantitative component with data on teachers’ posting will help understand the implementation of teacher exchange.

4.0 Research questions
In this research study, I will explore opinions about the policies and the practical difficulties during the implementation process. By using the conceptual framework of organizational change proposed by Bolman and Deal (1997), I hypothesize about the implementation situation of teacher exchange policies in a political process of negotiation and bargaining of varied stakeholder interests.
The study explores the following questions:
1) What are the policies developed for urban-rural teacher exchange and how are the policies formulated?
2) What are the stakeholders including governments, education bureau, rural schools, urban schools and teachers' perspectives on the strengths and weakness of the policies?
3) How do these stakeholders articulate and reconcile their differences in interests during the adoption and implementation of the exchange policies?
4) To what extent do these policies rationales for exchange policies align with the actual implementation in the schools in H county?
5) What are the priority problems in teacher exchange policies and how should those problems be addressed?

Author

• Yuhuan FENG, Graduate School of Education, Peking University