The Changing Nature of Teacher’s Professional Autonomy: Trends and Tensions in China’s Policy Promotion of Educational Governance

For the past four years, educational governance has been one of the most essential ideologies of educational reform in China, which exerted an extensive and profound influence on school’s autonomous running and teacher’s acquisition of professional autonomy. However, there were practical difficulties when pushing forward reforming policies at a regional level and school level.

In this article, the author firstly discussed the core connotations of China’s educational governance policy by expounding its vital significance to the modernization of governance and the intensional development of school, and then emphatically analyzed the changing nature of teacher’s professional autonomy that influenced by the implementation of education reform. At this stage, the analytical framework of teacher’s professional autonomy was designed and constructed.

Following, this research focused on teacher’s professional autonomy of public elementary and secondary schools from a regional perspective, conducted empirical investigation in the central region of Henan Province which contained 3 urban areas, 3 county-level cities, 1 county and its villages and towns district. Self-edited questionnaire and unstructured interview outline that based on the analytical framework were adopted as research tools for the investigation. Finally, this research received 3467 valid questionnaires, altogether interviewed 29 persons of teachers, school leaders and staffs of education administrative department, and also visited 8 schools of different characteristics to collect cases concentrated on autonomy of teaching profession inside schools.

In the process of data analysis, AMOS21.0 and SPSS 20.0 softwares were used to analyze the influencing factors for teacher’s acquisition and using of professional autonomy, and the current situation of autonomous degree of teacher profession was comprehensively described on the basis of data analysis. Based on the above research works, the author listed the existed cruxes that restrained teacher’s professional autonomy and put forward the local guarantee system concerning the regional social environment and educational practice.