ABSTRACT

Chapter 5 focuses on Teach For China’s strategy to alleviate educational inequities by bringing student-centered teaching philosophies and practices to rural schools. The author provides an overview of curriculum reform that China is undertaking, which promotes student-centered education but has not taken root in rural areas. Teach For China’s conception of high-quality, student-centered education is analyzed both from the perspective of the organization’s leadership and of its teaching fellows. These ideas are juxtaposed with an analysis of fellows’ classroom teaching. The chapter identifies and describes the constraints that prevent many fellows from putting these conceptions of high-quality education into practice. Teach For China’s strategy and practice for impacting curriculum and pedagogy is compared with Teach For America’s role in curriculum change in the U.S. Teach For China’s promotion of student-centered education is aligned with China’s curriculum reform and responds to the needs of the new knowledge economy; Teach For America’s reinforcement of standardized test scores for evaluating students and teachers is aligned with policy trends in the U.S. in recent decades, and responds to the needs of neoliberal education reform for standardization.