China Education Daily, a national newspaper published by the Department of Education with daily readership in the millions, published a feature article highlighting REAP research on teacher performance pay structures in rural China.  The article rapidly caught the attention of policymakers and educators across China and was widely circulated on a number of China's largest news media websites. 

What is teacher performance pay, and why does it matter?  Students in rural schools in China are falling behind.  Much of the burden for why students from China’s rural schools perform poorly may fall on teachers, as studies from both developed and developing countries, including China, consistently show that teachers are one of the (if not the) most important factors affecting student achievement.  Despite their importance, teachers in rural schools in China often lack strong incentives to help students--especially lower-achieving students--learn.  Surprisingly, almost nothing is known about how to incentivize teachers in rural China to help their students.  "Performance pay" is designed to address this problem by providing contracts to teachers that tie their pay to students test scores, with the goal of raising teacher quality and ultimately student achievement.

The Chinese government is also highly interested in addressing this problem, and in 2009 launched the Teacher Performance Pay Policy asking schools to implement teacher performance pay.  However, in 2012 REAP researchers found that 46% of rural schools still had not implemented teacher incentive programs, and in most cases teacher incentive programs that were in place did not lead to improved student achievement. 

Therefore, REAP researchers designed an intervention to test three different teacher incentive designs, with the goal of identifying which scheme boosted student achievement the most.  The "Pay-for-Percentile" design, which rewarded teachers for focusing on low-achieving students in addition to high-achievers--and thereby differs sharply from most incentive schemes that have been implemented in China--generated remarkable improvements in overall student test scores (learn more about the project here).  These results have significant implications for how to raise the quality of schooling across China.

Read the full article (in Chinese) here, or see the English translation below.

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An article published in Caixin Online (in Chinese) on March 28, 2014, features REAP research on how to improve high school enrollment rates in rural China. 

Yi Hongmei, an assistant professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and researcher with REAP, found that in China's poor rural areas, 63 percent of high school students are not receiving a complete high school education.  Yi Hongmei identifies four major causes leading to the high dropout rate: high tuition costs in Chinese high schools; rising opportunity costs of attending high school associated with rapidly increasing wages in the labor market; a lack of academic planning and guidance for high school students; and students with lower scores giving up on their education due to the competitive nature of the Chinese education system.  

Yi Hongmei found that both subsidizing high school tuition for poor students and offering conditional cash transfers to students who stayed in school effectively lowered the high school drop out rate, whereas training students in academic and career planning was not an effective means to do so.  Furthermore, solving the problem of secondary education in rural China will also require improving vocational schools, which, despite their growing popularity in China, have very low quality in many rural areas.

Read more here