Does Rural Hardship Allowance Work? --The impact of Beijing’s rural hardship allowance policy on teachers’ mobility intention and work engagement
Zhao Qian, Li Bingjie, Lyu Lei& Zhao Dongfang
Abstract
Rural education is a weak link in China’s education system, which is characterized in the shortage, low quality, insufficient vitality and serious loss of rural teachers. As an area with strong economic strength and high quality of elementary education, Beijing has issued a policy of post subsidy for rural teachers, input a lot of funds, and tried to solve the above problems through economic compensation. In this study, 1628 teachers from 39 schools in 8 suburban counties of Beijing were investigated. The multi-layer linear model was used to analyze the impact of the policy on teachers' flow will and work enthusiasm. The study finds that the highsubsidy policy reduces teachers' flow will to a certain extent, but it has no obvious effect on preventing the flow of high-level teachers, and does not significantly improve teachers' work enthusiasm. In a word, economic leverage plays a limited role in solving the problem of rural teachers' loss. The most important obstacle to teachers’ vitality is still the restraint of the education system, which the subsidy policy can’t break through. Further decentralization and the improvement of school management are essential to the educational management system.