The Ritualistic Communication In Education Policy-making Process

With the ongoing development of education, educational policy has become more and more important. However, many kinds of glaring injustice and lack of effectiveness of the education policy have piled up numerous barriers to solve the education issues. The author insisted that the root of this plight lay in the miscommunication and unjust communication procedures between the main bodies during the progress of making policies.This article aims to carry out extensive and value-free analysis into the internal political relationship between the main participators and their interaction and communication. The research went on to explore what role this communication would play in policy formulation and public release, so that appropriate analytical framework would be constructed to reveal the basic attributes of education policy and propose some advice on how to improve the effectiveness of education policy.Preliminary studies indicated that a key factor influencing policy communication is the existence of the political spectacle, blurring people's attention, separating the public from education policy process. Therefore, the author drew upon from and modified the theory of the political spectacle by the U.S. political scientist Murray Edelman and translated it into the new framework for policy analysis - spectacling the path of political analysis. The author then traced the four phases of education policy——the formation of policy issues, the establishment and assessment of policy items , the legalization of policy. Having given a clear picture of policy process, the author combined the linear features and participator interaction to define and analyze the political interaction and communication between policy agents from the perspectives of interest expression and integration. Besides, the research took the faculty employment policy making process of a W university as a case to review and prove the feasibility of the above analysis framework. Studies found that there is broad political spectacle in today's education policy community, where even every policy is tainted with political spectacle element, combining the contradictory real policies and spectacle policies .Although each of the education policy can not fully reflect the elements of the spectacle policy, its traces can be spotted . Politicians use symbolic language to build a different political role to conceal their true policy objective and display the illusion of democratic participation, allocating the symbolic policy value to the public, while the real interests of entities are solely possessed by a small number of interest groups. There are sharp differences between the real communication in policy making process and"bilateral communication"in ideal situations, which was constructed on purpose to polish leadership image, weaken reform resistance so as to produce the legal identity of policies. In fact, the entire communication process is under the control of policy makers to cater to their policy subjective. The research gave caution to policy makers that"ritualistic communication"should give way to"bilateral communication"in order to strengthen real policies while cutting spectacle policies.