Personnel Rules and Education Equalization

It is widely understood that the interplay between personnel norms and education policy is critical to the implementation of education equalization. This chapter first emphasizes the significance of personnel rules for shaping the incentive structure of provincial leaders. Section 3.2 details the “one level down” and the “two levels down” reforms. Deng’s policy of cadre modernization and the formal policy of performance evaluation are discussed in Sections 3.3 and 3.4. Section 3.5 briefly illustrates the implicit factors of promotion and the difficulty of figuring out or measuring these factors objectively. Then the study demonstrates that the speed of promotion arguably represents how well leaders have understood and made use of the promotion rules. It thus provides an effective measurement of the influence of personnel rules on policy implementation. Section 3.7 constructs the causality between provincial leadership and education inequality by examining the process of budgeting at provincial level. The three case studies in Section 3.8 attempt to empirically establish the causality through research on the work reports of provincial governments. Section 3.9 concludes the chapter.