In Getting Schools to Work Better, Yifei Yan considers teacher training and accountability in government middle schools in Beijing and New Delhi. Yan proposes a new type of accountability that would focus on teacher support and progression rather than bureaucratic metrics to significantly improve both their experience and students’ learning outcomes. This comparative, mixed-methods study is an invaluable contribution to education policy research, writes Anushka Sinha.

Read an interview with Yifei Yan in LSE Research for the World about this research and its extension to other settings such as the UK and Brazil.

Getting Schools to Work Better: Educational Accountability and Teacher Support in India and China. Yifei Yan. Routledge. 2024.

Home to a third of the global population, India and China both comprise dramatically expanding basic education systems poised to face significant demands for capacity-building over the coming decades. What’s more, the United Nations, as part of the Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) on inclusive and equitable education for all, supports the growing acknowledgment that among developing countries, a good record of school education is likely to ensure higher economic competition and prevent democratic backsliding. It is in this context, that Yifei Yan situates her book Getting Schools to Work Better: Educational Accountability and Teacher Support in India and China. Published in 2024, Yan’s book marks a unique shift in the existing discourse on education policy. Beyond critiquing mainstream accountability measures taken to enhance teacher performance, the author puts forward the foundational premise for a new type of accountability that would bolster the schooling systems of India and China.

The author puts forward the foundational premise for a new type of accountability that would bolster the schooling systems of India and China.

One of the book’s greatest insights is the exploration of “Accountability 3.0”, which concerns itself with the substantive and procedural aspects of pedagogic improvement, rather than being preoccupied with bureaucratic control and the hierarchical market. A certain reading of Accountability 3.0 may suggest that it is inspired by what British social theorist Anthony Giddens called the “third way”, between neoliberalism and social democracy. However, Yan makes it abundantly clear that rather than reconcile with previous models of educational accountability, this approach “focuses more on the common pitfalls of earlier generations of thinking about accountability” (29).

In presenting granular details of the idiosyncrasies etched into the functioning of Indian and Chinese schools, an attempt is made to steer the discussion towards non-Western educational contexts and decolonise patterns of knowledge production that remain skewed towards the Global North. While quantitative research on accountability has informed the disciplinary lineage of comparative education, Yan also breaks methodological ground by bringing multiple field realities to the fore through a mixed-methods approach that combines a primary survey with in-depth interviews of teachers across government middle schools in Beijing and New Delhi. Crucially, she reckons with two support instruments available to teachers, upon which their motivation and competency hinge. Firstly, in-service training implies an ongoing exercise of sharing good practices and training needs among teachers to advance professional development. Secondly, timely career advancement ensures that the teachers who excelled at training are considered valuable assets of the school system.

Yan weaves together threads of empirical data on the basic education systems from two field sites into a compelling tapestry. The highest organisation within Delhi’s school system is the Directorate of Education, followed by district zones and clusters, with each cluster comprising ten to forty schools. To further assess the impact of institutional support on teachers, the author provides a detailed snapshot of teaching categories in Delhi, divided into primary, trained graduate, and post-graduate teachers. Yan problematises the lack of training and promotion for temporary teachers compared to those who are permanently employed, and in so doing deftly unpacks the rampant contractualisation of teaching labour in India.

Yan problematises the lack of training and promotion for temporary teachers compared to those who are permanently employed, and in so doing deftly unpacks the rampant contractualisation of teaching labour in India.

While precarity may not be a concern for the permanent cadre, the book critically examines the vertical career path of Delhi’s teachers as they progress through pay grade up-scaling. In the context of Beijing, Yan furnishes an account of compulsory education through the operational frameworks of the Division of Basic Education I and Division of Basic Education II, under the Beijing Municipal Education Commission. Much like Delhi, individual schools remain the last unit of school governance in Beijing, but Yan is fastidious in her study of the horizontal advancement structure for Chinese teachers, highlighting the distinct separation of career trajectories where “primary, junior, middle, and senior secondary schools are treated as separate domains of expertise” (58).

Chapters Four, Five, and Six are informed by an understanding of system-level teacher training and the challenges in career advancement to obtain a comprehensive picture of the “schooling ain’t learning” puzzle. For Delhi’s teachers, the survey suggests a significant disparity in the quality and coverage of training between permanent and temporary teachers. This issue is further complicated by the fact that even among permanent teachers, twenty-five percent reported irregularities in training timeframes, inaccessible venues, inexperienced trainers, and the off-loading of duties to non-governmental organisations (NGOs), with little involvement by the school. Yan also observes that vertical mobility in teacher rank disregards decades of experience when teachers are promoted to higher positions in a discipline other than their original field.

Despite a consultative approach, teacher training in Beijing remained top-down and consultations were limited to broad directives without addressing specific details.

Through diverse statistical representations, Yan keeps returning to the collected dataset, facilitating an active dialogue between the ideas of holistic accountability proposed initially and the eye-opening contrast found in the evidence later. Teacher training in Beijing is perceived to be more exhaustive, with shorter durations, longer continuations, and multiple state-authorised providers. Nevertheless, Yan refers to the term “consultative imposition” (Zheng Hun Shi An Pai) derisively to highlight that, despite a consultative approach, teacher training in Beijing remained top-down and consultations were limited to broad directives without addressing specific details. Intermediate leadership positions in school management were found to contribute to a higher proportion of teachers in Beijing receiving quicker promotions compared to their counterparts in Delhi. However, interviews with teachers revealed that it had the unintended consequence of making the promotion process stressful, leading to a sense of discontent.

Yan manages to seamlessly integrate her argument about the shortcomings of “best practices” for accountability such as privatisation, inspection, and threat-induced improvement, with her advocacy for a new tool of accountability that mitigates the limitations of existing policy. To harness the full potential of Accountability 3.0, Yan proposes a dual approach that includes both capacity- and incentive-based support for teachers. Her policy design emphasises the necessity for government stewardship, complemented by parental and local community involvement, in overcoming the capacity challenges within the school sector. The book also argues that supportive measures aimed at teachers are more effective when coupled with incentives rather than surveillance and punishment, as the latter stifles teachers’ voices and diminishes their satisfaction and success.

Getting Schools to Work Better leaves us with several pressing questions about how school accountability is conceived and practiced in India and China, reconceptualising accountability in a way that centres the support of teachers

Getting Schools to Work Better leaves us with several pressing questions about how school accountability is conceived and practiced in India and China, reconceptualising accountability in a way that centres the support of teachers. While the prose is concise, and loaded with empirical insights, we do not get an immersive sense of the different facets of the classroom as a space and the lived experiences of teachers as front-line workers. The aegis of qualitative methods, particularly ethnography, could perhaps have rendered more prominently the complexity of teachers’ involvement in the process of policy implementation. Nevertheless, the book makes an invaluable contribution to comparative education policy research and presents important lessons to countries facing similar challenges. It succeeds in conveying to its readers that learning outcomes will only improve if we support those who are charged with delivering them.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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