An East Asian model of policy implementation: A case study of China's teacher education reform since the 1990s

Since the 1990s, China’s teacher education has been undergoing radical transformations brought about by the policy on teacher education reform to achieve educational excellence. This paper adopts a case study approach to investigate how teacher education institutions have implemented the national policy in the Chinese sociopolitical context from critical perspectives. The following research questions are examined to understand the implementation process: 1. in what ways the national policy is channeled to local policy players, and how they are involved in the implementation process; 2. how the national policy is interpreted by local policy implementers and participants; 3. how the institutional missions and programs have been changed to implement the national reform; and 4. who mostly benefits from the implementation, and how. The author finds that the implementation of the teacher education policy is an asymmetrical one-way process with a top-down flow and is employed as an instrument to redistribute financial and political resources in teacher education institutions. The study depicts the East Asian model of policy implementation in the Chinese context, and unearths some hidden policy problems to better understand the complicated process which is deemed as a key to achieve policy success.