Education and Reform in China

Emily Hannum, Albert Park, Emily Hannum, Albert Park

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135984700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Transformative market reforms in China since the late 1970s have improved living standards dramatically, but have also led to unprecedented economic inequality. During this period, China's educational system was restructured to support economic development, with educational reforms occurring at a startling pace. Today, the educational system has diversified in structure, finance, and content; it has become more market-oriented; and it is serving an increasingly diverse student population. These changes carry significant consequences for China's social mobility and inequality, and future economic prospects.In Education and Reform in China, leading scholars in the fields of education, sociology, demography, and economics investigate the evolution of educational access and attainment, educational quality, and the economic consequences of being educated. Education and Reform in China shows that economic advancement is increasingly tied to education in China, even as educational services are increasingly marketized. The volume investigates the varying impact of change for different social, ethnic, economic and geographic groups. Offering interdisciplinary views on the changing role of education in Chinese society, and on China's educational achievements and policy challenges, this book will be an important resource for those interested in education, public policy, and development issues in China.

1 Introduction

Market Reforms and Educational Opportunity in China

Emily Hannum, Albert Park, and Kai-Ming Cheng

Introduction

In China, market reforms dating from the late 1970s have brought dramatic if uneven improvements in living standards, along with fundamental changes in class structure and unprecedented economic inequality. The school system, a key vehicle for social mobility in any modern society, has changed radically during the same period. Under China’s reform process, the question of how to restructure the educational system to sustain rapid economic development emerged as a significant policy focus. Major changes occurred in educational provision and access, the quality of schooling, and the economic consequences of schooling. By the turn of the century, the educational system had diversified in structure, finance, and content; it had become more marketized; and it was serving an increasingly disparate student body. A combination of economic and educational policy choices ultimately expanded overall access and created new space for local curricular and financial innovations. These choices also exacerbated disparities in school resources across urban–rural, regional, and socio-economic lines. At the same time, market reforms created a labor market that increasingly rewarded the highly educated.

The studies contained in this volume offer a snapshot of China’s educational achievements and persisting policy challenges around the turn of the century. Collectively, the sociologists, economists, and educational researchers included here offer diverse, complementary insights on four important issues in reform-era education: (1) the evolution of educational provision; (2) progress and disparities in educational access and attainment; (3) educational quality and qualitative disparities; and (4) the changing economic consequences of being educated. The introduction discusses the significance of each of these issues, and highlights key findings of chapters in this volume. We begin by setting the context, with a brief depiction of the educational system and policy priorities just prior to market reforms.

Education on the eve of Market Reforms

While many of the educational shifts that have accompanied market reforms in China have global parallels, the starting point was unusual. For over a decade prior to market reforms, China experienced the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” a far-reaching and chaotic social movement that brought a radical agenda to the forefront of politics and educational policy making. In 1966, Mao Zedong proclaimed the start of a new educational era in which political recommendation and class background became the primary means of determining progress through the educational system (Unger 1984).

When schools reopened after the initial chaotic years during which many were closed, the ideological agenda of eliminating class differences, whether urban–rural, worker–peasant, or intellectual–manual, dominated the classroom and the curriculum (Sun and Johnson 1990; Thomas 1986). Labor and political loyalty were valued over academic achievement, and the link between education and occupational achievement was removed (Unger 1984). Urban students were sent to the countryside for re-education (Tsang 2000).

Higher education experienced particularly dramatic disruptions: a discontinuation of the national examination system for admissions; complete stoppage of admissions of undergraduates for six years and of graduate students for 12 years from the start of the Cultural Revolution; initiation of admissions of peasant and working-class students to “attend, manage, and reform universities”; and a 1971 plan to consolidate, close, and reconstruct 106 of 417 institutions of higher education (see Table 1 in Tsang 2000). The Cultural Revolution has been widely viewed as a disaster for higher education in general, and for science and technology training in particular (for example, see Beijing University School of Education and Zhongshan University Institute of Higher Education 2005).

The structure of primary and secondary education was streamlined. Tracking systems were abolished, as were key-point magnet schools, vocational education, and exam-based progressions (Rosen 1984). The educational system was unified so that, in principle, all students studied the same ten-year curriculum in a 5-3-2 structure (Thogersen 1990: 27). Vocational and technical schools were shut down, and, for the first six years, so were secondary teacher training schools (Tsang 2000).

There are few empirical studies of the nature or quality of schools during the Cultural Revolution. However, the curriculum was certainly highly ideological. For example, Julia Kwong’s analysis of the contents of primary language textbooks in the early 1970s concluded that “texts devoted their efforts almost exclusively to inculcating in the young the right political attitudes and outlook, even to the extent of almost excluding the pedagogical function of a language text” (1985: 207). Donald Treiman’s chapter in this volume sheds some needed light on the quality question. He shows that among otherwise similar people, and, importantly, among people with identical levels of schooling, the cohort of an age to have been in school during the Cultural Revolution ended up with a level of literacy a full year lower than counterparts who would have been in school prior to or after the Cultural Revolution.¹

While quality may have suffered for those in school, many who would not have previously had access to schooling did gain access during this period. An essential goal of the Cultural Revolution was to undercut differences between the peasantry and the remainder of the population, and, at least temporarily, this appears to have happened. For example, the numbers of teachers and students in rural areas jumped in the 1970s (Hannum 1999). Mean years of schooling attained in a national sample of adults in 1996 suggests that the urban advantage was 3.1 years for cohorts who turned 7 during the Cultural Revolution, compared to 3.7 years for cohorts reaching age 7 in the early years of the People’s Republic (Lu and Treiman 2005).² Similarly, cross-cohort analyses of census and survey data, as well as published statistics from the Ministry of Education, suggest that the Cultural Revolution era saw a rapid narrowing of gender gaps in primary and secondary education (Hannum and Xie 1994; Hannum 2005; Lu and Treiman 2005).

A few studies have addressed socio-economic disparities in educational attainment during the Cultural Revolution. For data reasons, much of what is available focuses on urban populations. One key study used national 1982 census data on the non-farm population of co-resident fathers and sons (Deng and Treiman 1997). Co-residence in the same households allowed an investigation of the association between the father’s socio-economic status and the son’s educational attainment across cohorts who would have moved through the school system at different times. Results showed that the advantage of coming from an educated family or an intelligentsia or cadre family was drastically reduced during the Cultural Revolution, but there was a rapid return to normalcy soon thereafter.

A study by Xueguang Zhou and his colleagues modeled entry into different levels of schooling using retrospective life-history reports on the timing of educational experiences of a representative survey of residents of 20 cities in 1993–1994 (Zhou et al. 1998). Results showed that coming from an “exploiting class” or middle-class background had no effect on the probability of entering high school or college during the Cultural Revolution, but had significant positive effects in the preceding and subsequent periods. The effects of father’s education on entry into these levels of education also varied significantly across historical periods, and were stronger in the models for the post-Cultural Revolution period than during the Cultural Revolution.

A final piece of corroborating evidence comes from a recent study using data from a national—urban and rural—survey conducted in 1996. In this work, Yao Lu and Donald Treiman (2005) found that the effects on years of schooling of parental education and father’s occupational status (measured when the child was 14) were smallest for cohorts reaching age 7 during the Cultural Revolution, and greater for preceding and subsequent cohorts.

Expanded access for under-served populations is likely to have been closely linked to policy choices affecting costs to families for educating children during the Cultural Revolution. Opportunity costs to families for education were low, due to the lack of income-generating alternatives under communism, and, in rural areas, the collectivization of agriculture. Moreover, under educational finance arrangements during the Cultural Revolution, it is unlikely that families directly bore many costs of schooling, even in rural areas. Policy documents indicate that much of school finance in China during the Cultural Revolution relied on local community support for minban, or people-managed, teachers and schools, which are distinct from gongban, or state-managed, teachers and schools. Under this system, many rural primary teachers were forced to work for “work points” instead of a salary, and were re-classified as rural residents (Tsang 2000). The minban teachers in general were less qualified than gongban teachers and the amount of local support for hiring such teachers undoubtedly varied across communities. Thus, although greater reliance on such teachers increased access to education, significant disparities remained in the quality of education.

Minban education grew rapidly during the Cultural Revolution, first in the countryside and then in urban areas, as educational authorities turned over the direction and financing of state-managed elementary schools to local production teams or brigades, communes, factories, business enterprises, neighborhood revolutionary committees, etc. (Tsang 2000; Wang 2002). During this period, minban teachers were paid in grain rations and supplementary cash subsidies by work units based on earned work points, while state teachers received a substantially higher government salary. Dongping Han’s (2001) in-depth study of Jimo County in Shandong Province, the single available empirical study of school finance during the Cultural Revolution, showed that virtually every rural child in the county was able to attend primary school at no cost during the latter years of the Cultural Revolution.

In summary, the evidence suggests at least a short-term flattening of rural–urban, gender, and socio-economic disparities in educational access.³ These trends were a product of both economic and educational policy choices dictated by the political priorities of the era. They are consistent with the overarching educational goal of the Cultural Revolution: to promote a radical socialist agenda of eradicating social differences.

Educational Provision Under Market Reforms

With the transition to a more market-oriented economy in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a different agenda came to guide educational policy, as leaders sought to promote market reforms and economic modernization. In March 1978, Deng Xiaoping delivered the opening address at a National Symposium on Science and Technology in Beijing (Beijing University School of Education and Zhongshan University Institute of Higher Education 2005). He reiterated the importance of science and technology for economic modernization, and stated that “the basis for training science and technology talent rests in education” (ibid.: 11; see also Shen 1994).

Policy reforms revolved around perceptions that educational quality was a serious problem at all levels, vocational and technical training were insufficient, and the central administration of education was too rigid (Lewin et al. 1994: 19). A complex hierarchy of programs varying in length, quality, curriculum, and financial base supplanted the simple structure of the Cultural Revolution educational system. Educational philosophy in the reform period began to sanction independent thinking (Lee 1996). Classrooms moved away from a focus on egalitarianism and class struggle, instead emphasizing quality, competition, individual talents and the mastery of concepts and skills important in the development of science and technology (Sidel 1982; Broaded 1983; Kwong 1985; Lin 1993: Chapter 1). The exam-based system of progression abolished during the Cultural Revolution was reinstated. Vocational education was reinstated, and the provision of relevant labor market skills was emphasized (Tsang 2000). Higher education, which had been shut down completely for six years at the start of the Cultural Revolution and remained crippled throughout most of the 1970s, was reinvigorated as a means of supplying the high-quality personnel and scientific expertise needed for national development (ibid.).

As part of these reforms, many general secondary schools of inferior quality were shut down or converted to vocational, technical, or agricultural schools, and policy-makers again experimented with alternatives to formal education such as spare-time, paid, correspondence, and television-based schools (Lin 1993: Chapter 2). China’s return to household farming in the early 1980s increased the value of farm labor, raising the opportunity cost of schooling.

One of the most critical changes that accompanied market reforms, with important implications for poor, rural communities, was soaring educational costs related, in part, to privatization. After market reforms, families increasingly were expected to pay a substantial share of the costs of schooling their children. Responsibility for paying minban teachers fell to rural households after decollectivization in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Wang 2002).⁴ Over time, this burden decreased as the government gradually phased out minban education in the name of quality upgrading, a process that was to be completed by the year 2000.⁵

More importantly, in the 1980s, the government decided to decentralize the administration and finance of primary, secondary and tertiary education (Tsang 2000), a key educational policy change discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2 by Wen Li, Albert Park, and Sangui Wang. After the reforms, in most regions, provincial, county, township and village governments took responsibility for schools at the tertiary, upper secondary, lower secondary, and primary levels, respectively (Tsang 2000: 13). This reform of educational finance was part of the larger reform of public finance dating from the end of the 1970s (see Park et al. 1996). The major objective of financial reform in education was to mobilize new resources for education, and the 1985 reform specified that multiple methods of financing should be sought (Hawki...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: market reforms and educational opportunity in China
• Part I: Finance and access under market reforms
• Part II: Educational quality
• Part III: Marketization and the economic impact of education
• Index