Literature Review and Issue Statement
General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized at the National Education Conference, “We must reverse the unscientific evaluation orientation in education, resolutely overcome the stubborn problems of focusing solely on scores, admissions, diplomas, papers, and titles,” clearly proposing to address the “Five Only” issues in education. In 2020, the Central Comprehensive Deepening Reform Commission approved the “Overall Plan for Deepening Education Evaluation Reform in the New Era,” making general arrangements for establishing a scientific education evaluation system and mechanism that meets the requirements of the times. The academic community has long paid attention to the “Five Only” issues, with related research mainly focusing on the manifestations of the “Five Only” issues, the causes of their formation, and strategies for their resolution.
Some researchers believe that the issues related to talent evaluation, school evaluation, quality evaluation, and scientific research evaluation involved in the “Five Only” have long existed in China’s education evaluation. In the basic education stage, “exam-oriented education” has been criticized for a long time, yet comprehensive quality evaluation of students has always been difficult to truly become a “hard core.” The reform of the college entrance examination, which was once expected to allow for “independent enrollment,” has ceased since 2020 due to technical issues. As early as 20 years ago, scholars pointed out that “a small number of universities and research institutions in China have already shown a one-sided emphasis on the role of SCI and its derived impact factors in scientific research evaluation.” “The simple and absolute use of SCI as the dominant evaluation standard for scientific research achievements has many limitations.” To this day, the “Five Only” has evolved from a “problem” to a “difficult problem.” The attribution of the “Five Only” issues can be generally divided into three categories. The first viewpoint believes that the dominant institutional effect is the fundamental cause, such as after the promulgation of personnel reform policies, schools introduced the enterprise performance pay model into the teacher remuneration system and implemented policies related to high-level talents, producing guiding effects; the government guides school evaluations, various selections (such as key laboratories, bases, etc.), and various assessments with a clear indicator system, combined with an audit culture, forming normative compliance. The second viewpoint believes that the imperfect evaluation concepts and unscientific evaluation methods are the technical reasons for the formation of the “Five Only” issues. The “indicator-quantification” scientific positivism model is compatible with the characteristics of standardization and scale in industrial social production, but it may not be suitable for school organizations and teachers’ labor; currently, there has not been a simple measurement method to clearly indicate the level and status. The third viewpoint believes that the lagging talent management leading to chain reactions is the operational reason for the formation of the “Five Only” issues, with loose management after high-end talent selection, the functional generalization and overflow of talent titles, leading schools to have a tendency toward “hatification” in talent policies.
Researchers generally believe that solving the “Five Only” issues requires improving the professionalism of education evaluation, scientifically establishing evaluation indicators, and reforming evaluation methods. First, implement multi-dimensional evaluation. The antonym of “only” is “many,” which should change “Five” to “N” and “Only” to “Dimensions.” Under the premise of reasonable sampling standards, the more samples, the more accurate the modeling. Second, implement a peer evaluation system for representative works and landmark achievements. Focus on the quality, contribution, and impact of landmark achievements, considering the activity and influence of the discipline, important academic organizations or journal positions, originality of research and development achievements, conversion benefits of achievements, and satisfaction with scientific and technological services as important evaluation indicators. Again, implement performance evaluation of comprehensive quality. Use comprehensive quality evaluation reflecting students’ overall development in moral, intellectual, physical, aesthetic, and labor aspects as an important reference for students’ graduation and further education. In addition, cancel examination outlines, starting from curriculum standards, to achieve integration of “teaching” and “examination.” Change the management method of “academic performance politicization” that replaces “management” with “examination” and the indicatorization of further education, strengthening the awareness of educational ecological construction in regional educational development. Use evaluation results scientifically, activating the multiple functions of education evaluation such as diagnosis, consultation, supervision, and guidance. Based on the purpose of evaluation, use assessment results within a limited scope, avoiding the low-level use of simplifying evaluation results to ranking, screening, and elimination mechanisms.
Existing research provides different perspectives for understanding the “Five Only” issues, but the analysis of the core obstacles among them is still insufficient. The “Five Only” issues relate to the university’s own stance and positioning, the realization of functions of primary and secondary schools, the academic and educational ecology, the misalignment of evaluation objects, and a series of deeper social roots, requiring in-depth discussion. In the new era, the policy context for solving the “Five Only” issues is to “deepen the reform of the education system and improve the implementation mechanism of moral education.” The “Five Only” directly points to the evaluation of scientific research and talent training and the rational use of evaluation results. The deeper problem is the transformation of the education system and the scientific research system, while the more fundamental issue is the change in governance concepts and educational philosophies. Only by grasping the essence of the “Five Only” issues and finding the entry point for solving the problems can we clarify the solution ideas and seek effective solutions to the “Five Only” issues within the context of “system reform,” allowing educational practices to return to the fundamental task of moral education.
The Essence of the “Five Only” Issues
(1) The “Five Only” as Evaluation Issues: Standards, Information, and Judgment
Evaluation refers to the judgment of the value, advantages, and disadvantages of a certain thing. The basic process of evaluation includes: establishing standards used to judge quality, collecting relevant empirical information, and using these standards to test empirical data to judge the quality or status of the evaluated object. The reason why the “Five Only” issues have become a chronic ailment is that education evaluation has encountered problems to varying degrees in the following three aspects.
First, the absence of education evaluation standards.The lack of judgment is due to the absence of standards and basis for judgment—criteria for making judgments on measurement results. Establishing standards is a highly demanding professional act. In reality, quite a number of teachers do not possess the ability to implement education evaluation as required by the “standards,” making measurement results the primary basis for evaluation—”scores” as the standard for student development quality, “admissions” as the standard for school teaching quality, “papers” as the standard for teacher professional quality, “diplomas” as the standard for talent training quality, and “titles” as the standard for expert level quality. For example, the root cause of the “only admissions” issue is the lack of basic understanding of education and schools: what exactly are the standards and basis for judging a “good school.” Strictly speaking, judging a school should be a judgment of its functions, that is, what functions the school carries and whether those functions have been effectively realized. Admissions and social mobility are merely one function of schools; the functions of schools such as “public life, training, power acquisition, spiritual life, and cultural progress” should all become the main dimensions of school evaluation. Further, when many functions enter the judgment perspective, it is also necessary to weigh which functions are more important.
Second, the education evaluation process emphasizes “measurement” but lacks sufficient “judgment.”Gronland (N. E.) describes evaluation as: evaluation = measurement (quantitative description) + value judgment; evaluation = non-measurement (qualitative description) + value judgment. Evaluation must use empirical research methods to obtain information, as well as philosophical research methods to establish standards. A complete evaluation must include judgment, which is based on standards to interpret objective data, thereby providing conclusions about the status of the evaluated object. Measurement is the primary way to obtain quantifiable empirical data, but empirical data includes not only quantitative results but also objective qualitative data obtained through observation, interviews, etc. At the same time, measurement itself does not provide value judgments on the measured objects or results; it focuses on providing objective data itself. The issues of “only scores” and “only admissions” lie in the exclusive use of empirical methods, relying solely on measurement data and treating data as the only object and basis for judgment. This not only fails to consider the value of non-quantifiable qualitative data in providing a complete analysis and judgment basis but, more seriously, leads to an incomplete evaluation process, lacking the two links of standard establishment and standard-based judgment. Judgments made solely based on the sequence of measurement results significantly reduce the professionalism and authority of education evaluation. Furthermore, theoretically, the most important aspects of education still face methodological challenges in measurement. Thus, in practice, educational measurement often only measures those parts of education that can be measured, and by reinforcing the objectivity, rigor, and other scientific characteristics of measurement data, it suppresses other judgment bases—the incompetence of methods presents itself as the arrogance of methods.
Third, there is also the phenomenon of reference frame misplacement in education evaluation.Reference frame misplacement mainly manifests as the mixed use of standard reference and norm reference. For example, the evaluation of students’ learning outcomes can generally be represented by two methods: one is the proportion of what they have learned relative to what they should have learned, i.e., standard reference measurement; the other is the proportion of what they have learned compared to their peers, i.e., norm reference measurement. The functions and applicable scopes of these two different measurements differ: standard reference measures whether students have reached the criterion or specified level of achievement, commonly used to diagnose students’ learning difficulties, estimate students’ learning abilities in certain areas, measure how much students have learned, etc.; norm reference measures a student’s performance relative to other students who have completed the same test, used to rank students and select those who meet the criteria. The evaluation in the educational process should mainly be formative evaluation, aimed not at “proving” but at “improving”—formative evaluation belongs to standard reference measurement. For the basic education stage, there is only one true terminal evaluation, which is the college entrance examination. This belongs to norm reference measurement, aimed at selection. The problem with “only scores” lies in treating the vast majority of what should belong to standard reference measurement as norm reference measurement, incorrectly normalizing what should serve as feedback on students’ learning status.
(2) The “Five Only” as Management Issues: Power, Resources, and Performance
The key to the “Five Only” issues does not lie in a series of quantitative indicators, but in the understanding and use of these quantitative indicators in the management process. The basic functions of evaluation include: formative functions for improvement, summative functions for selection, identification, and teaching verification, psychological or socio-political functions for motivation and awareness enhancement, and administrative management functions for executing authority. Modern education evaluation is permeated with a strong tendency toward management.
“Administrative” management is the originator of the “only” presentation of evaluation results.Evaluation itself is a link in management, and evaluation results play an important role in decision-making processes—assigning higher weights to certain measurement indicators will directly lead to a series of chain reactions in subsequent actions. The baton effect of evaluation is rooted in the baton nature of management: when principals reward teachers with high admission rates, and when educational administrative departments tilt educational resources toward schools with high admission rates, teachers and principals naturally understand that “admission rates” are the top priority in their work. The scores, admissions, etc., referred to in the “Five Only” are clearly understood to have absolute dominance as evaluation indicators for students and schools, possessing high weight and stakes. In the field of higher education natural science research, the prevalence of the “three major cores” (Science, Nature, Cell) is partly due to management departments achieving the transfer of professional judgment to administrative evaluation through calculable performance indicators, allowing administration to make judgments without relying on expertise and thus gaining control over professional fields.
“Performance-based” management leads to a direct correlation between resource allocation and evaluation results.Various affirmations of scores and admissions through policies and resources profoundly influence educational practice activities: good admissions gain good reputation, resources, student sources, faculty, social funding, and policies, forming a closed loop of school development where resource allocation and evaluation results establish a simple and “efficient” connection. Resource dependency theory holds that the key to organizational survival and prosperity is the ability to acquire and maintain resources. As organizations are always rooted in environments composed of other organizations, to obtain the necessary resources, organizations must engage in transactions with other factors in the environment to introduce, absorb, and transform various resources, striving for as much autonomy and freedom as possible from external constraints. The current development of schools also follows this resource-oriented logic, meaning that schools must obtain more quality resources that influence their development through competition or other means to thrive. Public schools mainly derive their resources from the government, and the government’s stance, principles, and logic in resource allocation directly determine the space for school development. However, public schools, as public service departments, are a special type of non-profit organization, and their developmental resource dependency target is the government rather than other organizations. The resource allocation logic in public education should not follow a “performance” logic but should adhere to a “standard” logic.
“Proactive” management will give rise to more potential evaluation “only” degrees.Management departments often actively “take action” to implement many goal-oriented and indicator-heavy guiding evaluations to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of educational resource use. Although these evaluations are not directly organized by administrative management departments, many evaluation indicators may originate from expert groups, the direct consequence of evaluations is that these indicators immediately become the focus of investment, struggle, and accumulation for the evaluated. If taken to an extreme, these indicators will become the specific content of new “only” indicators; the more comprehensive the content items checked by administrative management departments, the more potential “only” may arise.
(3) The “Five Only” as Social and Cultural Issues: Trust, Auditing, and Utilitarianism
The “Five Only” issues expose a crisis of trust in the education system and expert system.From a theoretical and logical analysis, university independent enrollment is the basic direction for reforming admission methods, but from the beginning of the independent enrollment pilot, the public has been alert to the potential for improper transactions and possible injustices. People prefer to trust the college entrance examination and scores, believing that objective scores are the broad road to fairness. As a result, the once-hopeful “independent enrollment” has ceased since 2020 due to “technical issues.” In higher education, the expert system is the basic form of system trust, and the integration of science, academic qualifications, and peer review is the foundation of the expert system, with peer review and bibliometric methods running parallel as two evaluation systems within the expert system. However, when personal relationships, connections, and interests impact its credibility and effectiveness, and when the representative work system becomes nominal, it seems that only bibliometric methods are more reliable, as they provide more comparable data. Thus, the number of achievements, citation counts, and journal impact factors have become the main bibliometric indicators. Breaking the “Five Only” is an important part of rebuilding trust in education. This is not only about trust in fairness but also about trust in professional authority.
The “Five Only” issues are products of the current “audit society” and “audit culture.”With the development of governance concepts and the new public management movement, public management methods have shifted from control to supervision, with “audit” becoming “a principle of social organization composition” and “a widely used social control technique,” with “comprehensive auditing” becoming a basic measure for effective supervision. Auditing is generally based on a quantifiable and measurable indicator system, aiming to obtain computable comparisons or proofs based on precise data. In an audit culture, the complex labor of teachers and learning outcomes of students are simplified into measurable indicators, resulting in precisely calculable indicators becoming the goal itself. However, since the most fundamental aspects of education are often difficult to quantify and measure, setting measurable targets inevitably leads our educational practice further away from true education and innovation. The social management function of auditing mainly lies in professional autonomy. In this process, what actually happens is the transfer of professional evaluation authority to managers, and various platforms for professional communication and operation are replaced with tools for professional management. The “Five Only” to some extent aligns with the basic operational requirements of auditing, becoming an important manifestation of the extension of audit culture into the field of education.
The “Five Only” issues are also important manifestations of social utilitarian culture.Strictly speaking, things in relationships always exist as dual purposes and tools; the pursuit of tool value has its natural rationality. However, it is worth reflecting that rational values are obscured and overstepped. Utilitarian culture is the overstepping of modern society’s instrumental rationality over value rationality. People pay more attention to the applicability and effectiveness of tools, while the purposes pointed to by tools become secondary; this is a rationality aimed at tools rather than purposes. For example, what is the relationship between “scores” and learning, what is the purpose of “admissions,” and why write “papers”? Deep inquiries into these questions highlight the replacement of purposes by means: the employment orientation of educational purposes, the practice orientation of educational methods, the practicality of educational content, and the identification of educational evaluation. Individuals tend to think from their own interests, while society and the government tend to think from structures and relationships. If parents’ “only scores” can still be understood, then schools’ “only admissions” are incomprehensible. The manifestation of social utilitarian culture in the “Five Only” is the direct pursuit of indicators and the quest for immediate results.
(4) The “Five Only” as Issues of Social Development Stages: Industrial/Information, Poor/Rich
The “Five Only” issues are manifestations of insufficient modern development during the transition from industrial society to information society.The model of rating students, teachers, schools, talents, and even the entire education system based on relatively objective and measurable evaluation standards originates from the operational and developmental modes of industrial society. Industrial civilization is based on large-scale machine production, adhering to a “mechanized” worldview and “reductionist” thinking mode, where “design” and “control” are the basic logic of industrial civilization’s operation, and acting according to “instructions” is the most basic and effective way of “control.” Educational practice is deeply marked by the basic characteristics of industrial civilization, and the “Five Only” is a basic manifestation of industrial society’s characteristics such as efficiency, standardization, methodization, scale, and de-subjectification. The information society emphasizes uncertainty, autonomy, self-organization, diversity, individualization, and generative thinking and logic. However, during the period of social transition, due to the inherent path dependence of educational development, the thinking and logic of industrial society will continue to influence educational activities. The prominence of the “Five Only” issues at this stage is related to the acceleration of social transformation. The thinking methods and operational characteristics of the information society are increasingly present in educational practices, but the transformation of educational practice forms still requires social choices and effective institutional designs. The fundamental focus of breaking free from the “Five Only” issues lies in knowledge production and innovation, with a commitment to knowledge itself and interest becoming the core of educational practice, and innovative ability being the primary capability in information society educational practice.
The “Five Only” issues reflect educational anxiety during the transition from a “poor society” to a “rich society.”After decades of reform and development, China is gradually entering a wealthy society characterized by consumption, where the standard of “development” will shift from “economic growth” to “freedom pursuit,” viewing development as a process of expanding people’s genuine freedoms, with capability as a basic condition. Having gone through a poor society and entering a wealthy society, parents have a very positive attitude toward educational investment. First, for urban residents, they hope their descendants can have a better future and life based on the foundation they have laid. Therefore, they have the ability and willingness to invest more time, energy, and money in their children, placing them in a high-intensity learning state. Second, parents’ deeper anxiety lies in their understanding that the existing education system and standards are unsuitable for the impending social changes, thus wanting to provide education for their children based on the values and standards of a wealthy society and information society, but at the same time having to adapt to existing educational standards and requirements. Therefore, in the transition to a wealthy society, people are more eager to pursue good schools, as sending children to good schools is the safest way to respond to a changing society. Thus, universities become the starting point of the chain—good universities determine what constitutes good primary and secondary schools. From this perspective, granting universities autonomy is necessary to ensure they can quickly adjust themselves to respond to social changes, potentially leading to changes in concepts and practices in the field of basic education.
(5) The “Five Only” as Methodological Issues: Scientism and the Relationship between Name and Reality
The “Five Only” issues are manifestations of the positivist scientific view characterized by objectivism, obsession with completely clear knowledge, and reductionism in the field of education.People believe in scores, partly because the structure of “numbers” allows for intuitive judgments and choices. Human judgment comes from comparison. To facilitate comparison, results are always expressed in “numbers,” even comprehensive quality assessments are no exception. If the elements are too complex, then indices or coefficients are used, such as admission rates, employment rates, and development indices. On the other hand, in educational research, science is often understood as empirical, and empirical is understood as data-oriented, with measurement being the basic way to obtain objective data, thus scores become synonymous with scientificity. Trust in data and belief in scores reflect the methodological worldview of scientism. The objectivity, simplicity, and convenience of data make hidden structures visible to the public, rendering vague areas relatively transparent. This is a victory of simplicity over complexity, precision over vagueness, certainty over uncertainty, relativity over absoluteness, and control over generation; it is the basic manifestation of the prevalence of scientism. However, evaluation requires not only empirical methods but also philosophical methods. “Although bibliometric methods treat all citations equally, not all citations hold equal importance. Many citations are conventional methods, statistical designs, technical modifications, or standard data; some citations serve as reminders to prevent errors. The most significant citations acknowledge relevant work or suggest possible expansions and applications. Therefore, the fact that a paper is cited multiple times is not sufficient evidence of its scientific quality.”
The “Five Only” issues reflect the difficulty of “Name” and “Reality” in educational evaluation.The “Five Only” issues are important aspects of talent work, involving how to select and evaluate talent. Historically, the emphasis in China on the “talent” standard has always been on “moral integrity and talent.” The talent selection mechanism has undergone various forms, including the recommendation system, the nine-rank system, the imperial examination system, the higher education enrollment system, and the civil service examination system. Each selection mechanism has its strengths and weaknesses, but regardless of the methods and mechanisms, the key lies in whether the evaluation made is true to its name. “Names arise from truth; without truth, they are not considered names. Names are what sages use to represent reality. The essence of a name is truth.” What is the “truth” of evaluation, what is the purpose of evaluation, how can we better grasp a person’s learning and development status, how can we accurately judge a person’s ability and level, and how can we accurately assess a school’s functional performance? What do scores, diplomas, papers, titles, and admissions actually evaluate? The incompetence of methods cannot fulfill the demand for “reality,” but it manifests as the arrogance of methods. The “Five Only” issues essentially obscure the relationship between “Name” and “Reality.” Evaluation is a challenge; only when evaluation itself is scientific, accurate, true to its name, and based on standards can it provide the basis and foundation for judgment. Therefore, “evaluation” needs to strengthen the development of educational evaluation itself and deepen the scientific development of evaluating people and complex matters.
Solutions to the “Five Only” Issues
(1) Always Carry Out Educational Practices Centered on the Fundamental Task of Moral Education
The report of the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China pointed out, “Taking moral education as the fundamental task of education, cultivating socialist builders and successors with all-round development in morality, intelligence, physical fitness, aesthetics, and labor.” However, the “Five Only” phenomenon indicates significant issues in implementing the fundamental task of education—deviations in educational practices from the fundamental task and the essence of education: “scores” and “admissions,” “diplomas,” “titles,” and “papers” do not necessarily signify true “talent,” nor do they necessarily represent true “people.” To unravel the “Five Only” issues, we must return to the source, deeply understand the contemporary connotation of moral education, focus on the fundamental task of education, return to the educational starting point, and defend the intrinsic logic of education. Chinese traditional culture forms a “virtue worldview,” emphasizing the intrinsic value of education for humanity, where “without virtue, one cannot go far in action,” fully integrating the individual’s understanding of “virtue” and the perfection of “virtue” for the individual. This “coexistence of human and virtue” educational view has been passed down for thousands of years in China. Today, moral education has more contemporary and creative connotations, and as the fundamental task of education in the new era, moral education is a concrete implementation of national strategies such as “governing the country with virtue,” “putting people first,” and “providing education that satisfies the people.” “Moral education” is not only about mastering “moral knowledge” but also about cultivating the autonomy and quality of moral judgment; “building people” is not about producing batches of “refined egoists” but about cultivating “free, autonomous, and well-rounded individuals.” Taking moral education as the fundamental task of education highlights the demand for education to return to nurturing people, to humanity, and to authenticity, reflecting a deep-seated transformation in educational concepts and thinking methods.
Integrate moral education into the entire educational process. First, prioritize moral education in school education. Cai Yuanpei believed that “moral education is the foundation of a complete personality; without virtue, even if one has developed physically and intellectually, it will only assist in doing evil, which is of no benefit.” Therefore, in all education, “moral education must be fundamental.” Second, in educational practices, grasp the contemporary connotation of moral education. In today’s context, “socialist builders and successors with all-round development in morality, intelligence, physical fitness, aesthetics, and labor” are fundamentally shaped by “virtue,” and the core socialist values should be important content taught and understood in school education, which is more important than any external representation such as “scores” and “papers.” Third, integrate the process of moral education into all aspects of educational policy formulation, school management, and classroom teaching. Only by establishing supportive institutional guarantees for moral education and utilizing various implicit and explicit educational resources from schools, families, and society during the “teaching” and “learning” processes can we realize the implementation of moral education in education.
(2) Transform Administrative Management Thinking and Logic
The goal of educational management is to promote the development of education and support the conduct of educational activities. Management is service. “For enterprises, management always serves operations; for government departments or public affairs departments, management always serves objectives.” Based on this, educational management should serve the goals of educational undertakings and educational activities. Managers of specialized affairs should ideally be knowledgeable in the field, as only knowledgeable individuals can truly understand and grasp the essence of specific activities and specialized objectives. When the concept of school education is materialized into a fixed set of standardized indicators and measurements, and operates within the management logic of “standardization—norming—review and assessment—hierarchization—rewards and punishments,” school educational practice becomes an endless game of “molding” competition, causing the “objectives of educational activities” and the “future of educational undertakings” to be forgotten. Since educational objectives must be determined within the functional logic of educational ideals and practices, administrative management of education should adhere to both management logic and educational logic. However, currently, some educational administrative managers only understand management but not education. “Leaders in the management field declare that their auditing procedures are ‘scientific,’ and their education prevents them from asking or answering some truly fundamental educational questions.” The current situation of educational management, which lacks educational ideals and beliefs, and focuses only on management objectives, must change.
Educational management also needs to distinguish the nature and content of management objects, changing the resource-oriented approach to education and school development as a public undertaking. First, decouple the evaluation of schools in the basic education stage from the acquisition of school resources. As public affairs departments, schools are a special type of organization, and their resource allocation logic should be based on standards rather than performance—schools should not acquire resources through competition or exchange, but rather through distribution based on various standards such as school construction standards and faculty allocation standards. Second, improve the level of educational administrative management and enhance the quality of resource use. Educational administrative management departments should not simply use resource increases or decreases as the main means of managing public affairs departments and related affairs, but should strengthen process management and quality management, enhancing the performance of management in serving objectives.
Management should emphasize “structure” rather than “elements.” Due to the strong directive effect of management on practice, it is necessary to be cautious about treating inspection and evaluation as a display of power. The items evaluated and inspected are important for school development, and after a long period of continuity, they may even become potential dimensions of “only.” Su Shi once said, “If filial piety is used to select people, then the brave will cut off their flesh, and the timid will stay by the graves. If integrity is used to select people, then shabby carts, weak horses, poor clothes, and meager food will all be used to satisfy the superior’s wishes” (from the Song History, Election Records). Managers cannot avoid making evaluations, but they must use evaluations and their results cautiously. First, administrative management should balance the relationship between measurement and judgment, with management primarily focusing on measurement work while judgment is left to professionals. Management institutions should no longer rely solely on those seemingly precise numbers when determining funding and projects. Second, when implementing inspections and evaluations, administrative departments should focus on maintaining and regulating basic principles and order rather than concentrating on specific, tedious elements and details. The latter not only requires evaluators to understand the internal operation of the education system but also requires evaluators to grasp the basic structure of the system and external environmental conditions as a whole, which often exceeds the capabilities of managers. Finally, unless necessary, do not implement evaluation items, and minimize talent evaluations, award assessments, and institutional evaluations.
(3) Rebuild Social Trust in Professional Authority
Overall, there is currently a lack of strong trust in social life. Anti-corruption efforts have rebuilt people’s trust in government, but the social trust in fields like education still needs to be rebuilt. Specifically, it is necessary to reform the managerial effects of administrative management departments and reshape professional authority.
The managerial effects manifest in the following two aspects. On one hand, they emphasize scientificization through quantitative standards or mathematical models, and then operationalize them through technical applications, seeking normative organization management to maximize management efficiency. On the other hand, they advocate generality in management, emphasizing the commonality between public and private sectors, and shaping government management through enterprise management. The audit society and its logic are typical operational styles of managerialism. Auditing achieves the transfer of professional and academic power to administrative power through quantifiable performance data or indices that can be measured and compared. However, for a healthy social life, justice and truth are extremely important public values—”justice is the primary value of social systems, just as truth is the primary value of thought systems.” Trust in government and trust in truth are the most fundamental forms of trust in society. Therefore, when government administrative management intervenes in the field of education, it should focus more on procedural legality rather than intervening in professional areas, by respecting and defending the trust and respect due to professional judgment and professionals, guiding society to rebuild trust in the “expert system.” “Peer review is not only a regular component of scientific function but also a fundamental principle of scientific institutions.” Rebuilding social trust in the expert system is primarily about respecting peer review and achieving a balance between scientific autonomy and government management.
Teachers are professionals, and enhancing teachers’ evaluation capabilities is an important task in rebuilding social trust in the expert system. The “only scores” issue is, to some extent, a result or manifestation of teachers’ low evaluation capabilities—teachers’ professional evaluation capabilities are insufficient, preventing them from accurately analyzing and making value judgments on data, thus leading to inaccurate evaluations of students. Teachers often have to rely on measurement results, i.e., scores, to judge learning outcomes. Analyzing from the nature and content of work, teachers likely spend about a quarter to a third of their professional working time on evaluation-related tasks, yet they do not receive the necessary training in teacher education. Universities do not provide sufficient course training to cultivate prospective teachers’ education evaluation capabilities. In the 1990s, the United States proposed qualification certification for teachers and course requirements related to “evaluation” in teacher education programs. The results found that “most states do not have course requirements for evaluation in qualification certification and teacher education programs; many course contents do not match the evaluation requirements that teachers should know and be able to do.” A school culture has even emerged in basic education institutions that separates testers from educators, as if the two will never meet. Although teacher professional standards stipulate that teachers must possess evaluation capabilities, the lack of relevant course design and scheduling during teacher training means that enhancing teachers’ evaluation capabilities is urgent.
(4) Grant More Autonomy to Universities
The direct function of university enrollment work is to select talent, and its indirect function is to guide the value orientation and practical forms of basic education. Therefore, the reform of university enrollment methods should drive the transformation of talent concepts in basic education. “Reform the enrollment mechanism. Explore a multi-dimensional enrollment mechanism based on unified college entrance examination and high school academic level examination scores, with comprehensive quality evaluation as a reference.” When the stance, inclination, and standards of university enrollment change, it will directly lead to a transformation in talent concepts at the basic education stage, diversifying social success concepts. Academic quality, potential, specialization, and innovation will become the basic qualities pursued by students, with individualization replacing standardization as the basic form of practice in basic education.
The “only papers,” “only degrees,” and “only titles” are manifestations of the alienation of academic talent evaluation and assessment of university teachers, which is driven not only by data management reasons but also by the psychological and professional reasons of university knowledge producers, who actively or passively participate in the quantification of research outcomes. This alienation manifests in two aspects: first, the alienation of government management over universities, which involves the autonomy of university operations; second, the alienation of university intellectuals, which involves the character issues of researchers. Therefore, it is necessary to solidify the foundation of university development through autonomous operation. The logic of university autonomy begins with truth and scholarship, with the inherent regulatory nature of truth and scholarship as the ultimate standards and bases for university operations. “Universities as research institutions are more important than their role as schools for training professionals. Because universities have scholars who advance into the world of knowledge, they possess a highly sensitive intellectual antenna for detecting social changes and proposing measures to address them. Universities can accelerate the operational speed of automatic balancing machines.” However, the indicators of “only papers,” based on the number of publications, journal levels, impact factors, citation counts, and awards, reflect the formalization of truth standards and the externalization of academic activities, while the “only titles” that label certain achievers damage the academic ecology of researchers.
University autonomy depends on the belief, sentiment, and pursuit of truth and scholarship held by the thousands of university teachers constituting the university. However, when this group of “smart people” discovers that catering to quantifiable research quality management is a shortcut to gaining fame, they quickly immerse themselves in this game, making “only papers” a collusion between a fame-seeking arena and managerialism, thus completely eroding the internal possibilities for university development. Based on the inherent regulatory nature of “truth,” university researchers must first restore the unity of “is” and “in.” “Restoring the unity between a person’s beliefs about the world they inhabit and their beliefs about the values and purposes guiding their actions is the deepest issue in modern life.” The proactive side of university autonomy is the government; as the relationship between the government and universities becomes increasingly close, the government must take a long-term view of university development, respect the university’s demands for truth, and its academic mission, reduce process and detail management over universities, and avoid over-exhausting social trust in expert systems. University autonomy is a fundamental pathway to building a trust system for experts.
(5) Promote the Professionalization of Educational Evaluation
The development of the education evaluation discipline should focus on strengthening research on basic principles and scientific methods of evaluation. Since the 21st century, significant progress has been made in the development of the education evaluation discipline in China, establishing a theoretical and methodological system for education evaluation in China. However, overall, the education evaluation discipline remains the weakest field among educational disciplines, with its achievements not commensurate with its importance; the “Five Only” issues are merely a concentrated reflection of evaluation issues. Guba and Lincoln divided the development of evaluation into four stages: measurement-based, descriptive, judgmental, and responsive, and proposed moving toward responsive evaluation based on reflections and critiques of traditional evaluation types. Currently, personnel engaged in educational evaluation mainly come from psychology and statistical measurement backgrounds, and most of the time, they lack a deep understanding of the internal value basis and external value effects of education in their measurement analyses and descriptions; relevant diagnostic analyses are mostly descriptive. In this sense, the current educational evaluation in China is essentially still at the measurement level.
For the education evaluation discipline, it is necessary to strengthen research on establishing standards, obtaining data, and making judgments. “Standards” come from the inherent regulatory nature of “education” itself, as well as from the “value expectations” of education. This first requires the development of educational evaluation philosophy, the establishment of premises for educational evaluation, and the scientific development of people’s evaluation concepts. “Based on pure rational understanding of education, it is not a work understanding linked to relevant interest subjects, nor is it a reality-oriented understanding based on management positions, but rather a pure rational judgment of actual educational activities based on the essence of education, relying on the intuition and analysis of theorists, thus primarily possessing theoretical and ideological value.” In terms of data acquisition, some new evaluation methods and technologies have recently been developed to compensate for the drawbacks of measurement quantification, such as story evaluation and information technology-based evaluation; however, these formal changes still need to return to the fundamental issues in measurement methods, namely the validity of measurement. Therefore, the development of the education evaluation discipline needs to continuously return to theoretical origins, holding reflections and doubts about the assessment indicator system, and always seek better analytical frameworks and measurement representations to achieve genuine evaluation.
Train specialized educational evaluators to reasonably and efficiently perform the functions of educational evaluation. The development of the education evaluation discipline inherently includes the training of specialized educational evaluators, and enhancing teachers’ educational evaluation literacy is an important task in the development of the education evaluation discipline. In addition, it is necessary to cultivate professional educational evaluators and teams targeting the national education system, specific educational projects or policies, as well as schools, teachers, and students, to comprehensively perform the basic functions of evaluation, certification, accountability, diagnosis, improvement, and organization. Current policies related to the evaluation field, such as the separation of management and evaluation and third-party evaluations, provide a good foundation for the development of educational evaluation. Educational administrative departments must implement effective qualification certification and supervision of institutions entering the educational evaluation field to enhance the scientific nature of evaluations, perform evaluation functions, and promote educational development.
Source| “Educational Research” 2021, Issue 1
Author| Yi Lingyun (Director and Researcher, Institute of Teacher Development, Chinese Academy of Education Sciences)
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