Analysis On The Implementation Process Of Curriculum Change: Perspective Of School Organization

Centralization system in China determines that the implementation of the top-down curriculum change will be the mainstream of the Chinese curriculum change for a long time. This research integrated the macro curriculum change and the micro school change, and studied the process of implementation of curriculum change from school the very place where change happened. This research addressed 3 questions: a) What are Chinese school organizations like? b) How have the school organizations implemented the top-down Curriculum Change? c) How have the curriculum changes and school organizations interacted with each other?The theory frame mainly built on the investigation of two theory clues, one was the theory and the study of the public policy implementation and curriculum implementation, the other was the study of organization and organizational change theories, as well as the theories of school operation and change. This research finally formed the layer model which included school organization field, systematic level, managerial level and technological level. The process of implementation was not only the process of dealing with the resources but also the operation process of power and culture.Utilizing field research, this research chose key case, and collected various data from the process of organization and implementation. According to the research's issues, the main findings were as follows:Firstly, Chinese high school organization was a kind of tight organization which pursued efficiency. Different levels of local governments, parents and similar types of schools constituted a political, hierarchical while market-oriented, elite-approached organizational filed which controlled schools in the aspect of power, cognition and behavior. These control systems were contradictious, thus schools had to use tactics such as decoupling, high-degree differentiation and conservative progressivism to address the conflicting demands. The most powerful control lied in the school efficiency, school organization became tighter and tighter during the process of pursuing efficiency. This tightness could be found not only on the resource allocation, but the consistency and centralization of culture and power.Secondly, the implementation of curriculum change embedded in the process of the daily operation of school organization. The module curriculum policy which was closely connected to instruction was assimilated more intensively by school organization's daily operation than by school -based curriculum policy which was far from the instructional core. In the implementation of the two curriculum policies, the resources trend of the upper level often influenced the actual operation of the lower level, especially lied in the issue about time and personnel. As to the non-resources activities, because of the limitation to the hierarchies' decision-making, implementation would not present obvious linear activities but relative abundant and diverse routes. The implementation of different hierarchies also depended on the hierarchy 's critical figure's understanding,willing and capability to the curriculum change.Thirdly, the adjustment from school organization to curriculum change was more intensive than that from curriculum change to school organization. In the process of implementation, the concept connotation, value orientation, and ideal practice were all adjusted greatly by school organization. On the contrary, although curriculum change has made the formal structure of school organization more or less different, but the hierarchy inside and among basic action structures has not changed at all.The significance of this study lied in integrating the organization theory, curriculum implementation theory and policy implementation theory, remedying defects of the current curriculum change's basic knowledge, breaking the boundaries among theories, generating the theory vacancy on the converging point of the related theories. This study appealed the state of our contemporary school organization, intended to open the black box of the curriculum change, and supplied a policy model to school's management of the three-level curriculum management, forming the methodology of our school curriculum change's implementation.