An Institutional Analysis Of Teacher Turnover In Rural Schools

Based on relevant literature review and investigation of G County in Jiangsu Province, this paper analyze the current status of teacher turnover in elementary education stage of rural areas, and explore the institutional causes of unreasonable teacher turnover and imbalanced development of education. The main findings are summarized as following.1. Teacher resources in rural areas like G County was characterized "one-way flow", namely, flowing from rural to urban, from ordinary schools to key schools or model schools.2. Compared to ordinary teachers, those teacher who were experienced, with good educational background and excellent teaching skills generally were more inclined to move to more attractive schools.3. Both formal and informal institutional factors have contributed to the normalized teacher turnover. The former were teacher appointment system, teacher salary, and school management etc., the later included campus culture, education philosophy, and personal rewarding etc.4. The main reason of teacher flowing from rural areas to urban areas was material benefits, rather than the geographic differences.5. The current policies which were intended to rationalize the teacher turnover in rural areas deviated from the original purpose during the process of their implementation.6. From the perspective of social macro context, the urban-rural binary structural contradiction was the most fundamental institutional reason for unreasonable teacher turnover and imbalanced development of education.7. From the perspective of education system, the "city first" and "key/model school" policies (both exist in higher education and secondary education system) were the direct causes of "one-way flow" of teacher resources and imbalanced development of education.