A Study On The Correlation Between The Quality Of Rural Junior Middle School Teachers And The Academic Performance Of Students

In the key stage of economic transition,China need to improve its human capital to promote the improvement of labor productivity and ensure the upgrade of industrial structure.Unfortunately,there is only 24%labor force who have high school education degree or above and less than 10%labor force who graduated from college or above.Even more seriously,in contrast to the same age students from urban area,rural students who are the main labor force in the future received fewer high school education.The fact that the high school quality they received is far behind that urban students received means the high school quality in China lag behind other countries' and it maybe threaten the future development of China.So finally to solve this problem,we should focus on education.A large number of studies based on the Education Production function shown that as the important part of school education source,teacher quality is one of the crucial factors that have impact on student achievement.In developed,developing countries and even in China,there is a consistent conclusion of studies that teacher is the key factor to improve student performance.Moreover,the differences of teacher quality will lead to the different student achievement.Therefore,the gap of teacher quality could be one of the significant factors which contribute to the huge gap of eduation between urban and rural areas and it certainly will influence the overall level of education and human capital in China.In this paper,we will measure quality from five aspects—teacher education degree,the subject-specific degree earned and teacher subject-specific certification,teaching experience and teacher rank.To measure teacher quality and improve student achievement in rural junior high school,in our research we randomly selected 200 rural junior high schools and 11560 students in Shaanxi,Gansu and have both the baseline survey and endline survey.In these two surveys,we collected the standardized math test score,individually basic information of student,teacher quality information and teacher individual information and so on.Based on these two surveys,we do research on the correlation between teacher quality and student achievement.The results are as follows.With the increase of the investment on rural education resource,the situation of teacher quality in rural area has been changed a lot.Our results found that rural teachers' education degree has been improved and the percentage of college degree or above is aout 81%.And the combination of different teaching experience was changed.Now in rural junior high school the middle-aged teachers and young teachers account for larger proportion than elder teachers.But there is still the big gap of teacher quality between rural and urban schools.Now the phenomena that teacher don't have subject-specific degree is still serious,there are 50%math teachers who don't have math degree.And there is nearly 34.66%of rural math teachers who don't have math teacher certification.Moreover,the investment in rural education resource is not enough.Although teachers who hold the second rank accout for half of the whole teachers in rural junior high school.But in comparison with urban teachers,the proportion of teachers who have highest rank is very low.So it can't incentive teachers to work hard effectively.We also found some results of the correlationship between teacher quality and student achievement.Firstly,teachers who have subject-specific degree earned and hold the first rank or above could improve student achievement significantly.Secondly,with the accumulation of teaching knowledge and teaching experience,teachers who have two to ten years' teaching experience have the positive and significant relationship with student performance.But if teaching experience is too long(above 10 years),it will have no correlation with student performance.The results also show that teacher education degree which Chinese policymakers usually forcus on don't improve student performance significantly.At last,students taught by teachers who have no math teacher cerification unexpectedly perform better than teachers who have it.But the impact is very small.Teacher quality also has different relationship with the math score of different student group.Although there is no significant relationship between teacher education degree and student performance,teacher who has higher degree could improve female student performance.And the impact is very small.Teachers who hold math teacher certification or have 15 to 20 years teaching experience have positive relationship with family poverty students achievement.Lastly,what's more important is that low-achieving students taught by teachers having subject-specific degree will perform better.To improve teacher quality and human capital in rural area,the policy suggestions are as follows;Firstly,policymakers should forcus on the problem of teacher quality in rural schools.Not only should they increase the quantity of rural teachers,they but also need to control the teacher quality,such as teacher subject-specific degree earned,teaching experience.Secondly,policymakers ought to improve the continuing education system and increase the training investment for rural teachers.Thirdly,they should reform the system of education personnel management and increase the number of teacher rank for rural teachers.