Neoliberalism and teacher appraisal policies and practices in China

Abstract

Neoliberalism as an ideology originated from countermovement to all forms of collectivism, and was materialized into political and economic agenda since 1970s, which was featured by privatizing public assets, withdrawing social welfare and encouraging market competition. Neoliberal reforms were soon expanded from economic field to educational field such as cutting budget for public schools, deregulating tutoring market, holding teachers accountable to high-stakes standard tests, etc. Previous literature on teacher appraisal reforms was heavily focused on instruments and implementation, lacking critical reflection of its ideological connection with neoliberalism. Therefore, this study conceptualized neoliberal education reforms as privatization, commodification and quantification to structure analysis of teacher appraisal policies and practices.

Data collection was based in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, for its status as a pioneer of marketization reforms in China. Given schools’ varying dependence on the market, a multiple-cases design was adopted to include one public senior high school, one non-profit senior high school, one for-profit senior high school and one for-profit junior middle school for comparative analysis. Data collected at school level included principal interviews, teacher interviews, parent interviews, school documents concerning teacher appraisal and participatory observation of teacher-parent interactions. Policies and statistics concerning teacher appraisal, private school and tutoring market were also collected at national, provincial and municipal level. Critical Discourse Analysis was adopted as the guiding theory and the three-layered analytical framework of ‘text-discourse practice-social practice’ analysis was tailored to fit data analysis at different levels.

Neoliberal influences had been identified under all key concepts. Privatization analysis showed that private schools had proliferated dramatically in the past two decades under government sponsorship, exposing more teachers to market-dependent working environment. Commodification analysis showed that the official attitude towards tutoring market had been increasingly ruthless for the sake of educational equality, but more tolerant to labor commodification to avoid responsibility of labor protection. Quantification analysis showed that for-profit private schools fully embraced market-oriented schemes to ensure profitability, while public school and non-profit private school insisted on professionalism but compromised to market pressure to different extent. These neoliberal influences had eroded teacher’s autonomy and undermined teacher’s professional status, making them vulnerable to overwhelming market pressure.

Despite the neoliberal influences, counter-neoliberal factors were also recognized. Teachers’ Congress and the Professional Title Appraisal Committee in public schools were the hard core of democracy that protected teacher’s interests. Fixed quota for permanent contract teachers in public schools reserved fiscal independence from market pressure. Internalized professional ethics sustained teacher’s professional commitment under the marketization trend, and even innovated leading teachers to seek for alternative truth beyond neoliberalism.

These findings implied that: the more dependence on the market, the less autonomy for teachers; the more emphasis on economic values, the less importance to pedagogic values. Therefore, restoration of pedagogic values in teacher appraisal is called for with greater support for professional learning communities, and more efficient ways are needed to include private school teachers in professional-oriented teacher appraisal with more labor protection.