A Study Of Implementation Deviation Of Policy On Teacher Exchange In County Area

Teachers are the most important resource for the development of rural education,and the unbalanced allocation of teacher resource is the key obstacle limiting the current balanced development of intra-county urban and rural compulsory education.Policy on teacher exchange in county area is an important means of secondary allocation of compulsory education teachers and an important guarantee to promote balanced development of compulsory education at county level.However,the implementation of teacher exchange policy in many counties fails to carry out the spirit of the national policy,and there exists the implementation deviation.So,how is teacher exchange policy being implemented in these counties? What kind of policy implementation deviation exists? How did this governmental deviation in policy implementation occur?What is the underlying mechanism? How to improve the current implementation of teacher exchange policy in county? These are the core issues of this study.In order to investigate the deviation behavior and its mechanism of teacher exchange policy implementation of county government,this study takes “reflecting on reality,appealing to theory,and looking into the future” as the research orientation,takes the implementation of teacher exchange policy in Qiu County as a case study,integrated uses the research methods of literature,interview and field observation,and constructs an explanatory framework for the implementation deviation of teacher exchange policy with environment,capacity,and space as the core elements based on the policy implementation model of Donald S.Van Meter and Carl E.Van Horn and the“ambiguity-conflict” model of policy implementation of Richard E.Matland.The study found that the current teacher exchange policy implementation behaviors of the Qiu county government do not match well with the requirements of the national teacher exchange policy program,and there are different types of policy implementation deviations,ranging from symbolic implementation with a “shell but no core” policy to the alternative implementation with the “seemingly in harmony but actually at variance”and selective implementation with “avoidance of the important but not the important” policy,which directly lead to the “landing” effect of the national policy falling far short of the policy design goal.The case-based interpretive inquiry found the implementation deviation of teacher exchange policy is the result of a combination of three factors: environment,capacity and space,and cannot simply be considered as “deliberate distortions” and “deliberate deviations” by county governments and their educational administrations.The external environment is complex and multifaceted,which makes the county governments and their education administrations face not only the unidimensional task of implementing teacher exchange policy,but also the “task cluster” consisting of the three core tasks of“stability”,“promotion rate”,and “teacher balance”.However,county governments and their educational administrations lack the capacity to deal with these multiple tasks simultaneously,and the pursuit of absolute completion of the task of “teacher balance”greatly threatens the two high-pressure tasks of “stability” and “promotion rate”.Thus,the need for deviations in teacher exchange policy implementation behavior arises.The“space” that exists within the social environment,policy texts,administrative institutions and discursive constructions provides the possibility for this demand to occur in practice,allowing it to largely circumvent punishment from formal structures.Of course,due to the “unified system” of the central government,this space for deviations in teacher exchange policy implementation behavior is limited,so that such deviations do not manifest themselves in complete non-implementation or even open resistance to the national teacher exchange policy,but in the form of external discourse and frameworks that at least fulfil the mandate of the teacher exchange policy.Through the analysis of the mechanism of the formation of deviations in the implementation of county teacher exchange policy,this study proposes the following recommendations in order to effectively manage the deviations in the implementation of county teacher exchange policy and to better achieve the good values and goals of the policy: Promote dialogue and interaction between urban and rural societies,form a consensus on the “balanced” allocation of teachers in county societies,and reduce the pressure of “promotion rate” in county governments and their educational administrations;Strengthen the satisfaction of the basic needs of exchange teachers,enhance the willingness of teachers to exchange,especially those in urban areas,and reduce the pressure on the “stability” of the education system;Clarify the attributes of teacher exchange policy,enhance the transmission of central policy signals,and promote the coordination of policy implementation and the enthusiasm of relevant subjects;Cultivate typical experiences of teacher exchange county implementation in counties to boost the confidence of county governments in policy implementation;Cultivate procedural consciousness of county governments and rally social support with procedural justice;Improve the supervision and assessment of teacher exchange policy implementation to achieve effective control and adjustment of county teacher exchange policy implementation.