The impact of reform policies on teachers' work and professionalism in the Chinese Mainland

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of reform policies on the work of Chinese teachers. It explores the policy context in which a fragile teaching profession attempts to develop and discusses the dynamics of interacting societal forces that have created the dilemmas for the teachers. The authors argue that while the continual implementation of reform policies has fostered a new outlook in Chinese schools, calls for profound change in schooling have caused much anxiety among teachers. The teachers' anxiety stems from the incongruence between their professional outlook, which is intimately linked to student academic achievement, and the dictates of state reform measures, which seek to broaden the conception of education to include other areas of human development. Throughout the years of reform, teachers have had to stretch their professional capacity in order to satisfy competing demands engendered by reform measures and educational reality. It is in the tensions caused by the implementation of reform policies that the humanism of teacher professionalism is magnified. In this paper, the authors discuss the educational and social issues that surround the teachers' preference for conventional practices.

Keywords:

• China
• educational reform
• professionalism
• teacher evaluation
• teachers

Notes

1. Key point school refers to the top school in the locality which has passed a rigorous assessment on its performance and receives the greatest resources from local government.

2. During their 12 years of schooling, “activities for integrated practice” will be made compulsory for all students. The scope of this curricular component embodies a broad range of activities related to “information technology education, research oriented learning, community service and social practice, and labor and technical education” (MoE, 2001).

3. To accomplish this feat, school principals and teachers have to work to satisfy a myriad of school quality requirements. For instance, schools in the province of Guangdong which aspire to become exemplary schools would be inspected in accordance with 77 indicators (Lo et al., 2011, p. 23).

4. “Backbone teacher” is an officially approved title denoting sustained accomplishments.

5. The “ordinary teachers” being referred to are those teachers with functional positions in the school. Compared to the school-level administrators, they receive considerably less salary subsidies. These teachers include class teachers (<220%), head of class-level panel (<400%), head of teaching and research unit (<500%) (Interviews, Shanghai, 2012). For those teachers who have no administrative duties, the discrepancies are even larger. Given the fact that teacher salaries in the Chinese Mainland are not high, and that such merit pay constitutes no more than 30% of teacher salaries, the discrepancies are nonetheless significant and annoying to the teachers.