School Micropolitics in the Context of Reforms for Educational Decentralization and Accountability in Mainland China.

摘要

Decentralization and accountability have been two major themes in educational administration reforms in mainland China since the 1980s. They continue to loom large in the agenda of educational reforms in mainland China. Therefore, understanding how Chinese schools operate in the reform context is important for policy making. However, empirical studies on the issue remain scant.;To improve our understanding on the issue, one line of inquiry is to probe into the micropolitics in schools as they respond to the reforms. The perspective on school micropolitics examines how people articulate and reconcile their differences in interests within the formal and informal power context of schools. It points to a basic problem for the school organization: how to bring together people with different interests to work toward a common goal?;This study inquires into school micropolitics in the context of reforms for educational decentralization and accountability in mainland China. It focuses on the principals, middle managers, and teachers in public secondary schools in City G, which has been a pioneer in implementing the reforms since 2003. It seeks to unveil what micropolitics in the schools is like and why.;According to the empirical context of City G and the theoretical discussions in the related literature, three schools have been sampled based on two dimensions. One dimension is whether a school is a municipal school or not; the other the competitiveness of a school in the local school system. Ethnography methods have been used to probe into the micropolitical cultures of the sample schools, that is, to reveal the ways people in the schools define and deal with micropolitics. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews have been conducted with 46 participants with different backgrounds (gender, subject, position, seniority, Party membership, teacher representative or not). Participant observations have been made in offices and internal meetings. Abundant relevant documents have been gathered.;The interpretation of the data has pointed out that a pattern of status-centered micropolitics permeates in the sample schools. Status refers to one's relative standing symbolically recognized by supervisors and co-workers for one's role performance as a teacher or middle manager in a school. While micropolitics focusing on money and on curriculum and pedagogy can also be detected in the sample schools, money and issues of curriculum and pedagogy are of lesser concerns to the participants. The study has also revealed varieties of strategies that are employed by the participants within the power plays of status, money, and curriculum and pedagogy. It has shown that participants' central concern on status shapes the features of the strategies they use in micropolitics of status, money, and curriculum and pedagogy.;The study further suggests that status-centered micropolitics could be accounted for by contextual factors such as the performance-based evaluationism in the schools, the ambiguity in performance evaluations, the peculiar nature of teachers' work as "liangxinhuo" (literally, "conscience work"), and employment security of teachers. Based on the findings, the study puts forth five propositions, which, taken together, provide a general account of micropolitics in the schools under study.;The study has produced indigenous understanding of micropolitical perspectives of people in public secondary schools in mainland China. It adds to the thin literature of empirical studies on school micropolitics in mainland China. The pattern of status-centered micropolitics suggests that we reevaluate the importance of monetary incentives in educational leadership in mainland China. The pattern also holds important implications for policy makers, school practitioners, and designers of professional training programs in mainland China. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)