Testing the Spaces of Discretion: School Personnel as Implementers of Minority-Language Policy in China

Following international trends to reform school management, the Chinese government has proposed school-based decision-making as a measure to raise the “quality†of education, but at the same time it has imposed new institutions of accountability for teachers and school administrators. In order to understand how this inter-play between accountability and discretion affects Chinese educational reforms, this paper analyses policy implementation through the lens of decision-making by principals and teachers as street-level bureaucrats. In the case of minority-language education in Xishuangbanna, a subject where institutions provide comparatively large spaces for discretionary decisions, I argue that the current institutions on accountability in minority-language education in China trigger processes by which implementers must interpret vague institutions in order to make decisions for their classroom. These purposefully wide spaces of “interpretational discretion†enable the party-state to make good on its promise to support local diversity, without threatening its own authority to prescribe educational goals.