School Effectiveness and Improvement in Mainland China

Abstract

School effectiveness and improvement has long been an important educational issue for researchers and practitioners worldwide. According to Levine and Lezotte (1990), school effectiveness is “the production of a desired result or outcome.” However, “school effectiveness is still a very vague concept, even though it is often used in the literature of school management and improvement” (Cheng, 1996, p. 7). The definition of school effectiveness may vary for individuals as well as for different countries. Relatively speaking, Mortimore has given a clearer meaning when he defines an effective school as “one in which students progress further than might be expected with respect to its intake” (Mortimore, 1998, p. 258). This definition suggests that an effective school should add value to the students’outcomes in comparison with other schools serving similar intakes (Sammons, 1999, p. 76). The author of this chapter agrees with Mortimore’s definition and believes that the most convincing fruits of school effectiveness and improvement practices should be the improvement of quality in disadvantaged schools.1 This point of view is not groundless but builds on China’s unique history in school effectiveness and improvement. Thus, this chapter begins with a brief historical review of school effectiveness and improvement practices in China and then presents the general context of China’s experiences. The second section of the chapter examines the role the Chinese government plays in promoting improvement in disadvantaged schools, by presenting and discussing the contribution of related initiatives and efforts at the system level. In the third section, the factors at the site level that contribute to improvement in disadvantaged school are identified, through studying a typical case of successful practice in improvement in disadvantaged schools. The fourth section provides researchers and practitioners in other countries with the implications and lessons drawn from China’s best practices in improvement in disadvantaged schools. Throughout this chapter, the author argues that the most valuable and convincing experiences of school effectiveness and improvement are not in traditional, high-performing