Can Teacher Mobility Promote the Development of Chinese Students' Social and Emotional Skills? —— An Empirical Study Based on the SESS 2019 Data

Abstract

The Chinese government regards teacher mobility as a policy tool to allocate teacher resources in counties and has carried out the teacher mobility policy for nearly 30 years, but the relationship between teacher mobility and student development in China is unclear, hindering the in-depth implementation of related policies. Based on the SESS 2019 survey China Suzhou data, this study analyzed the effects of teacher mobility on students' social and emotional skills development using OLS regression methods, interaction terms, and conditional quantile regression with 10-year-old and 15-year-old students as the research subjects. The study found that teacher mobility had a significant positive effect on students' social and emotional skills. These effects did not differ significantly between male and female student groups, but the effects differed significantly between students from different family socioeconomic statuses, with students from higher family socioeconomic statuses benefiting more. The quantile regression results found that teacher mobility had a significant effect on students in the low and high quartiles of social and emotional development (Q10%, Q25%, and Q90%), and a non-significant effect on students in the middle quartile (Q50% and Q75%). Therefore, in China, governmental departments should take effective measures to continuously and deeply promote the teacher mobility policy in order to promote the development of students' social and emotional skills, but they also need to be wary of generating new problems of educational inequality.