Overview

Yifei Yan’s ambitious multi-method case study of government middle schools in Beijing and Delhi provides fresh insights into how educational accountability can be designed to work, in part and as a whole. Getting schools to work better is a challenge just about everywhere. Many policy experts prescribe measures for strengthening school accountability, either through government command and control or through alternative market and societal actors. In challenging this conventional wisdom, this book examines how China and India are tackling the challenge with a specific focus on supporting teachers along with traditional accountability-strengthening measures. The book draws implications from its case studies for how education systems can be designed towards the fulfilment of Sustainable Development Goal 4. It further develops the concept of ""Accountability 3.0"" to elucidate a novel and more holistic reconceptualisation of the appropriate means needed to fulfil multiple purposes of accountability, in which providing support to frontline workers is viewed as an integral component. This book will appeal to a wide spectrum of scholars and practitioners in the fields of comparative education, public administration, public policy and development studies, among others. It will be especially interesting to those from the developing world facing similar accountability challenges as described. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

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A compelling study that challenges conventional perceptions of teacher accountability in schools, demystifying the raison d’etre of poor quality of learning outcomes. Based on an in-depth, empirical and comparative analysis of two large education systems – India and China, Yan deconstructs and re-conceptualizes teacher accountability, designing a holistic approach built not exclusively on bureaucratic but on a professionally motivated teacher support system. With the timely emphasis that a competent and soundly supported teaching workforce is essential for educational improvement, the book offers a fresh, non-Western perspective on educational governance and is an invaluable contribution to the larger theory of public administration. Anjana Mangalagiri, Senior Fellow, Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi Accountability is a key issue in the field of education. In this timely and original book, Dr Yifei Yan addresses education accountability in two of the world’s largest developing countries, China and India. The book provides a novel conceptualisation of accountability, in which the support provided to teachers is seen as a crucial component. Through surveys and interviews with teachers, school principals, government officials and NGO workers in Beijing and Delhi, Yifei Yan shines a light on support provided to teachers, policy challenges, potential solutions, and implications for accountability. This important book should be key reading for policy makers, teachers, teacher trainers, scholars and others concerned with strengthening education governance and school systems. Anne West, Professor of Education Policy, Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science This is a brilliant and innovative book on how to improve school quality and performance through a focus on teachers. Based on a multidimensional concept of accountability 3.0 and a deep, fine-grained, and compelling comparative study of India and China, Yifei Yan shows how it would be possible to improve policy design in support of educators to make schools work better. This is a book that needs to be read because of its ability to show how well-done analysis can lead to promising and potentially highly effective policy solutions. Giliberto Capano, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Bologna, Italy In this book, Yan uses an original teacher survey and follow-up interviews as the main instruments of analysis. She draws conclusions from her empirical findings in relation to the government middle schools in Beijing and Delhi for how education systems can aim towards fulfilling the Sustainable Development Goal. This leads to her highly innovative concept of ‘Accountability 3.0’ which incorporates teachers’ experiences and voices, integrating ‘institutionalised support to teachers as organ□isational instruments’ (37) into the accountability discourse. Existing research on the current performance-based mainstream accountability policies is mostly confined to developed countries and tends to stop at criticism. In contrast to this, Yan focuses on India and China, the two largest developing countries, and systematically proposes practical and feasible policy recommendations for improvement. Her work aims to provide valuable insights for other developing countries. In Chapter 2, Yan identifies specific issues within ‘Accountability 1.0’ and ‘Accountability 2.0’ in the basic education system. Based on these insights, she uses an existing policy instrument selection model to construct the framework for ‘Accountability 3.0’. The top-down ‘Accountability 1.0’ system had government failures like inefficiency and widespread principal-agent conflicts, while the complex and varied setups of performance-based accountability in ‘Accountability 2.0’ also faced numerous market and network issues. Both systems exhibit problems of ‘design mismatch and capacity deficits’ (29), leading to accountability overload on teachers and adversely affecting resource allocation to students. In response, Yan insightfully points out that institutional support 458 BOOK REVIEWS for teachers—beyond performance pay, including teacher in-service training—should also be incor□porated into the accountability discourse as an organisational tool. In Chapter 3, Yan provides an overview of educational governance in the capital regions of India and China. This overview is based on an original teacher survey, follow-up interviews with survey respondents, and semi-structured interviews with other stakeholders such as principals, heads of schools, and government officials. This background helps readers understand the empirical findings presented in the subsequent chapters. Chapters 4 and 5 report the findings from each site, detailing the different ways in which teacher in-service training and career advancement are designed and delivered, as well as the varying perceptions of these support systems expressed by the interviewees. This sets the stage for Yan’s reform measures, outlined in ‘Accountability 3.0’ in Chapter 6. In Chapter 6, Yan systematically compares the support provided to teachers in Beijing and Delhi, highlighting two key issues. First, top-down, one-size-fits-all regulations for teacher training often do not align with teachers’ daily experiences, leading to a mismatch between training and teachers’ needs. Second, when in-service training is perceived as low quality and impractical, it fails to support teachers’ professional development as intended. Furthermore, Yan perceptively points out that ‘incentives and capacity can thus be taken as common imperatives for different types of accountability measures to function individually under the overarching framework of “Accountability 3.0”’ (116). Yan, in Chapter 7, concludes her book by summarising the purpose and implementation methods of ‘Accountability 3.0’, reflecting on the practical feasibility of this system. As she points out, there are still challenges in concretely translating the valuable knowledge gained from improved training into daily practice. Further research should strive to engage a broader range of policymakers and support providers, which would help to comprehensively reveal the entire process of designing and imple□menting these measures. An important strength of this book is that the author conducts on-the-ground research and pro□vides a breakthrough perspective, from the viewpoint of teachers, to examine the overall education systems in India and China. Her proposal of the ‘Accountability 3.0’ system is therefore persuasive. However, changes in national policies and varying progress in policy implementation between different regions requires continuous adjustment when implementing ‘Accountability 3.0’ into specific practices. Overall, this book is highly suitable for those wishing to understand the basic edu□cation systems in India and China. It will serve as a valuable supplement for undergraduate and graduate students interested in education in China and India, as well as for policymakers and scho□lars researching education policies in developing countries, particularly India and China. Yan Ziwei University of Science and Technology Beijing, China d202210541@xs.ustb.edu.cn © 2024 Yan Ziwei https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2024.2383540

A compelling study that challenges conventional perceptions of teacher accountability in schools, demystifying the raison d’etre of poor learner quality and learning outcomes. Based on an in-depth, empirical and comparative analysis of two large education systems – India and China, Yan deconstructs and re-conceptualizes teacher accountability, designing a holistic approach, built not on bureaucratic, but on a professionally motivated teacher support system. That learner quality must necessarily be a function of a competent teaching workforce, the book offers a fresh, non-Western perspective on educational governance and is an invaluable contribution to the larger theory of public administration. Anjana Mangalagiri, Senior Fellow, Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi Accountability is a key issue in the field of education. In this timely and original book, Dr Yifei Yan addresses education accountability in two of the world’s largest developing countries, China and India. The book provides a novel conceptualisation of accountability, in which the support provided to teachers is seen as a crucial component. Through surveys and interviews with teachers, school principals, government officials and NGO workers in Beijing and Delhi, Yifei Yan shines a light on support provided to teachers, policy challenges, potential solutions, and implications for accountability. This important book should be key reading for policy makers, teachers, teacher trainers, scholars and others concerned with strengthening education governance and school systems. Prof. Anne West, Professor of Education Policy, Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science

Author Information

Yifei Yan is a Lecturer in Public Administration and Public Policy at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. She received her PhD degree from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. Her doctoral dissertation, on which this book is based, is the recipient of the Best PhD Dissertation Award from the Indian Public Policy Network (IPPN) in 2019.

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