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Tingting Qi's chapter titled, “Moving toward Decentralization? Changing Education Governance in China After 1985,” provides the historical and policy context for the volume. This chapter integrates the post-1978 Chinese educational reforms into the socioeconomic context of China. The special contribution of this chapter is that it explores the complexity of educational decentralization in China through an in-depth analysis of changes in education finance, administration, and curriculum. Qi reviews prior studies, government documents, laws, and regulations related to Chinese education reform since 1978 within the context of education decentralization in China. Qi also demonstrates that China's educational policy reforms are moving China toward “centralized decentralization” because decentralization is driven by a common, centralized national goal of economic modernization. The chapter presents evidence that “centralized decentralization” is a strategic maneuver that maintains centralized control while providing the reform legitimacy of decentralization. By focusing on decentralization as the core of Chinese educational policy reforms, this chapter situates the following chapters within the social, cultural, and political context of post-1978 China.

As China's educational policy and reforms continue to evolve and adjust to shifting social, economic, and political conditions, this chapter provides a template for conceptually framing education research on and in China. To do so this chapter first identifies focus areas in comparative education research related to China, which reflect researcher perspective, perceived advantage, and demonstrated resistance to these educational policy reforms. The authors develop a conceptual framework for comparatively understanding education research on and in China, which focuses on the intersection of comparative education themes, institutional change agents or methods, and Chinese educational reform topics. This conceptual framework specifically accounts for overlap, complexity, and the evolving nature of educational policy reform in China. This chapter concludes by emphasizing the importance of comparative education researchers, national policymakers, and consumers of the research using new data and methods as they become available to continue to revise understandings of Chinese educational policy and reform.

The purpose of this study is to review the landscape of empirical evidence on school leadership preparation and subsequent school-level effectiveness while conceptually exploring how societal transformations and educational changes shaped leadership development within the mainland of the People's Republic of China. Conceptually, this study is informed by Murphy and Vriesenga's (2006) comprehensive review of empirical work on leadership preparation, evaluative work on the pathway from preparation to school-level practice (cf, the UECA taskforce on evaluating the effectiveness of leadership preparation; Orr & Kottkamp, 2003; Orr & Orphanos, 2011) and empirical literature on school improvement. Data come from extensive reviews of English and Chinese language articles, conference papers, doctoral and master's theses, and other reports of research on the preparation of school leaders in Mainland China. Using a combination of inductive and deductive strategies, the lead author analyzed all selected sources using a three-pronged framework: who is being prepared for school leadership positions in China, by what design and delivery methods they are being prepared, and how well they are fulfilling leadership practices and expectations for which they are being prepared. The current analysis adds to the international knowledge base of the pathway between preparation and practice. It also highlights the importance of considering the cultural, social, and political context that shapes conceptions of leadership and the design and implementation of educational leadership preparation programs.

Chentong Chen is an undergraduate at Nanjing Normal University studying law and English. She has research interests in education policy, education assessment and evaluation, and child development. She is currently working on two research projects: policy issues related to the college entrance exam in China, and theories and practice of preschool assessment in the U.S.

Using Kunming, the capital of China's southwest Yunnan Province, as an example, this mixed-methods research examines three interacting dimensions of social change in contemporary China: migration, ethnicity, and education. In particular, it sheds light on the issue of educational achievement of migrant children, especially children of ethnic minority background. The quantitative portion of the study is based on data gathered from over 700 sample students, teachers, and principals who participated in the “2008 Kunming Migrant Children's Survey.” A two-level hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) is employed to identify student- and school-level factors and to estimate the impacts of these factors on migrant children's academic achievement. The qualitative portion of the study is based primarily on the data collected through in-depth individual interviews and focus-group discussions with 97 migrant students, teachers, and school principals from 10 government and nongovernment migrant children's schools in Kunming between 2008 and 2009. The qualitative and quantitative results highlight four interrelated groups of educational barriers experienced by migrant students in pursuing compulsory education: institutional, socioeconomic, cultural, and psychological barriers. In particular, cultural and psychological barriers, including difficulty in school adaptation, low self-esteem, lack of family support, and discrimination against ethnic minorities due to their different religious beliefs and ethnic traditions, are found to have exerted particularly significant negative influences on academic achievements of ethnic minority students.