Organizational Social Capital and Teacher Professional Learning Communities: Comparison of Rural and Urban Schools in China

Abstract

The learning gap between rural and urban schools is an entrenched problem in China Although the Chinese government has made remarkable progress in universalizing nine-year compulsory education in the countryside, the academic achievements of rural students still lag far behind those of their urban peers. Improving teaching quality in rural schools has become an imperative task at the current stage. Scholars have debated two main approaches to raising teaching quality. The first approach emphasizes personnel change and focuses on strategies to attract top talent into the teaching profession to replace less effective teachers (Kennedy, 2010; McKinsey & Company, 2010). However, this approach can hardly be effective on a systemic scale given the fact that in general the top candidates tend to choose high-paying professions such as business and law, and even when they do join the teaching profession, they are less likely to serve and stay in dysfunctional schools in high-poverty communities (Wang & Gao, 2013; Johnson, 2012). The second approach emphasizes building school capacity by directly improving teaching rather than teachers. It champions the idea of teachers working in professional communities to develop, share, update, and preserve teaching methods so as to build a professional knowledge base for sustained instructional advancement (Hiebert & Morris, 2012). This approach privileges collective endeavors over individual talent in promoting schools’ instructional capacities. It further presupposes a school organizational structure that fosters collective responsibility for teaching and discourages individualism and isolation. This collective approach lends inspiration to the analysis of the rural-urban teaching gap. Disparity in teacher professional capacity can be closely related to the differences of schools’ organizational contexts, which can advance or constrain teacher professional development. This study will examine the rural-urban teaching gap from the perspective of social capital (Coleman, 1988). Comparison between rural and urban schools will be conducted on three features of social capital at school organizational level: 1) the structure of information channel, 2) expectation, obligation and trustworthiness of the structure, and 3) collective norms and effective sanction. Findings suggest that urban schools often have higher social capital than rural schools in all three features, which significantly advance the effectiveness of school-based teacher professional learning communities. These differences in social capital are largely caused by variations of school management practices. Urban schools often employ collective evaluation and attach emphasis on teachers work process instead of end results of examinations, whereas rural schools tend to focus on final examination results to evaluate teacher performance and encourage competition rather than collaboration among teachers. The research suggests that rural teachers’ professional capacity is largely shaped and constrained by rural schools’ management and leadership. Policies aiming to improve teaching need to invest effort to reform school management to foster higher organizational social capital for teacher professional development.