A Study Of National-Education-Policy' Impact On Educational Management At The Grass-Roots Level

Education policy implementation applies to different levels, including national, provincial, municipal, district, and school. In the past we paid too much attention to the major national macro-policies, and ignored the implementation of policy at the grassroots level. In the course of the implementation of national policies, grassroots represent both national and local departments. They are the objects of policy implementation as well as policy executors. The course of understanding, absorbing, and transforming of policy exists in each level of policy implementation. Different values and interests of the needs will penetrate to implementation process. District (county) and school, also called grassroots, have more complicated and diverse implementation behavior. The goal of this case study is to investigate the impact of the "performance-based pay for teachers in compulsory education" policy on district and school education administration and school management by analyzing the process of its implementation in urban district of eastern China.Chinese performance-based pay for teachers' policy in compulsory education is different from other countries. The policy of education quality, education system, education funding, and personnel are necessary and basic policy for education reform. The reason why performance-based-pay for teachers is special is that it's closely connected with all above four types of policy. However, education administrators and principals on the grass-roots level, as the key executors, have different view of this comparing to teachers. This national policy, because of the decisions made by local governments and school principals, will have different effects in different schools. In this study, based on the field survey and analysis of the execution of performance-based pay for teachers in S district, from the policy's key executors' point of view, the understanding of performance-based pay policy was enhanced, and questions existing in the policy implementation were explored.The first part of this study includes theorial analysis of performance-based pay for teachers in compulsory education, and influence factors of policy implementation in S district. From the perspective of systems analysis, to understand the implementation of policy behavior, it is necessary to understand and analyze their environment. What's the basic situation of education development in S district? How are education department communicate with school principals? To above questions, research has been done and data were collected. The second part of this study is field investigation. The process of development and implementation of this policy has been described. Behavior of implementation were described and analyzed. Part of the representative education administrators and principles were chosen for observation,investigation and interviewing. They were required to describe how they deal with all kinds of requires, and how they relate the policy to teachers'behavior. The third part of the study analyzed the influence of four components of performance-based pay for teachers. They are system policy, funding policy, and personnel policy and quality polity. These four types of policy are very important in education administration and school management. Performance-based pay for teachers reflects all the policies which have important influence on all aspects of education management. Description and analyzing of this influence will help us understand why this policy will lead to so much attention. At the last part of this study, direction of education management and school management at the grassroots level were discussed. The importance of responsibility and performance evaluation was dressed as well.