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This is the 2014 bi-annual report on teaching force in China, the 2nd publishing since the 1st report came out in 2012. This report is an outcome of a taskforce on teachers’ salary research, which is jointly organized by the Centre of Chinese Educational Survey and Data Analysis, Beijing Normal University and the Centre of Teachers Research, Beijing Academy of Education Sciences.

The topic of the 1st Blue Book on Teachers is the stage characteristics of teaching force during 2000-2009. The main conclusion is the teaching force in China has gone out of teachers’ shortage and come upon the stage of equilibrium, even over supply in some provinces. Correspondingly, the strategy on teacher development is supposed to shift from expansion-oriented to the tract of building fundamental institutional settings for improving teachers’ quality.

The topic of the 2nd Blue Book on Teachers focuses on teachers’ salary, which is the key issue of institutional settings of teachers’ policy. The reason behind the choice is not only teachers’ salary, which is the most sensitive, broad coverage issue, but more importantly, it’s a complex macro-level issue which composite multi-subject institutional logics, including personnel management, fiscal policy and education disciplinary. In the meantime, at the micro-level, feasibility of teachers’ salary is strongly constrained by the internal governance mechanism in schools, which lead to examination of teachers’ daily life in schools. So, teachers’ salary provides a good point of figuring out the conceptual bases for the coming systematic reform in education driven by fiscal and personnel policy in future. First of all, the report provides quantitative analysis on teachers’ salary, which is helpful for building strong information base for formulating common senses on this issue.

In this report, we found that policy on teachers’ salary reflects both personnel and fiscal in nature. In personnel perspective, the components of teachers’ salary are designed to reflect different motivation for teachers. For example, ranking salary is designed to reflect education level a teacher achieved, while subside is a reward to the teaching position which isn’t attractive in labor market, and performance pay is supposed to mark the teachers who pass the annual evaluation, merit pay for teachers who have done excellent job in the past year. The fiscal settings on teachers’ salary empower the local authority to decide their budgetary standards of teachers’ salary based on their own fiscal income and expenditure, to set up an agreement on increasing teachers’ salary with the change of prevailing costs, etc.

Based on the conceptual framework provided above, the report found that the fiscal settings on teachers’ salary in China has been very extremely vague in structure and function comparing to the personnel institutions, even though the personnel one is incomplete and inefficient as well. So, the report argued that there is an increasing demand of legitimizing the regional difference of teachers’ salary in the background of budgetary reform in China. Otherwise, teachers’ salary is only partly included in fiscal budgets and local governments have to increase teachers’ salary in an inappropriate way, like the existing models accepted now. The quantitative analysis in both accounting and statistics approaches shows that there is only 20% of teachers’ salary can be explained by the institutional factors set in policy. Regional difference has been existed and formulated in an uncertain pattern, which should be given up in the age of institutionalization. Empowering local governments to decide their own teachers’ salary standards and legitimizing the regional difference in the concept of fiscal feudalism will be the first ideological barrier teachers’ salary reform encounter in the progress of institutionalizing education budgets.

The last part of the report is ‘the outlook of teaching force’, which is reserved part in every Blue Book. The report shows that the intendancy of teaching force in China remains the trend described in the previous report. The aging characteristics becomes more obvious in the ways that the marginal growth of teachers’ education length reduced and the average teaching years is now go beyond 15 years. Worsely, the increasing of productivity has been bogged down in the way of student-teacher ratio decrease while the percent of over class size keep unchanged. The increasing feminization indicated the decreasing attractiveness of teaching profession. The general conclusion we get is the unified campaigns which was accepted as the dominated strategy in improving teachers quality is now decaying. Appropriate institutional settings in which teachers are inspired to engage in learning by doing should be explored in the future.