Teacher Attrition Beyond Exit: Semi-Attrition and Intra-County Mobility in Rural China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Authors

Thank you for the opportunity to review your submission.

This manuscript addresses an important and timely issue: teacher attrition and intra-county teacher mobility in rural China. The topic is worthwhile, and the proposed concept of “semi-attrition” is a useful way of drawing attention to internal teacher movement from remote village schools to township and county-seat schools. This is a potentially valuable contribution because such mobility may not appear in official attrition statistics but can still have significant consequences for staffing stability in remote schools.

The manuscript is generally coherent and contains useful empirical material, including interview excerpts and administrative evidence. The findings are clearly organised and the paper makes a plausible argument that internal mobility can reproduce staffing inequalities across rural county systems.

However, several areas would benefit from revision before publication. First, the manuscript should be more clearly grounded in existing literature. While relevant sources are cited, the authors could engage more deeply with prior work on teacher mobility, internal transfer, rural teacher retention, spatial inequality, life-course pressures, and county-based governance in China. This would help strengthen the scholarly foundation of the paper and clarify how “semi-attrition” differs from related concepts such as internal mobility, teacher transfer, turnover, teacher migration and rural-to-urban movement.

Second, the proposed County-Based Mobility Ecology Framework requires clearer explanation. The framework is presented as a key contribution, but it is not always clear how it is used in the analysis. The authors should clarify whether the framework emerged inductively from the data, was applied during analysis, or was developed after the findings were organised. It would also be helpful to show more explicitly how each component of the framework connects to the data and what explanatory value it adds.

Third, the methods section would benefit from some additional detail. The qualitative case study design is appropriate, but the paper should provide clearer information about participant characteristics, sampling, interview phases, coding procedures, translation, and the use of administrative records. A participant table would strengthen transparency. The authors should also clarify the timeline between data collection and ethics approval given it is an unusually long data collection period. 

The manuscript would also benefit from some tightening. There is repetition across the literature review, conceptual framework, findings and discussion, particularly around directionality, normalisation, invisibility in official statistics and cumulative impact. 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Some language editing would improve clarity and concision.

Author Response

A consolidated point-by-point response and the revised manuscript (clean + tracked) have also been uploaded.

 

We thank the reviewer for the careful and constructive assessment, and for recognising the timeliness of the topic and the value of the empirical material. We respond to each point below.

Reviewer's comment: "First, the manuscript should be more clearly grounded in existing literature. While relevant sources are cited, the authors could engage more deeply with prior work on teacher mobility, internal transfer, rural teacher retention, spatial inequality, life-course pressures, and county-based governance in China. This would help strengthen the scholarly foundation of the paper and clarify how 'semi-attrition' differs from related concepts such as internal mobility, teacher transfer, turnover, teacher migration and rural-to-urban movement."

Response: We have deepened engagement with prior work on teacher mobility, internal transfer, rural teacher retention, spatial inequality, life-course pressures, and county-based governance in China, so that each section now positions our argument against specific prior findings (e.g., Ingersoll, 2001; Borman & Dowling, 2008; Podolsky et al., 2016; Palma-Vasquez et al., 2022; Dupriez et al., 2016; Wei & Zhou, 2019; Li et al., 2020). We also added an explicit differentiation passage and a comparison table (Table 3) showing how semi-attrition differs from the five neighbouring concepts. In brief, semi-attrition is jointly defined by four features that the other terms capture only partially: it is bounded within the county system by the bianzhi staffing quota, directional along a spatial–institutional gradient, stepwise across multiple stages (village → township → county-seat), and statistically invisible because internal transfers are not recorded as attrition (Sections 2.2 and 3.4).

Reviewer's comment: "Second, the proposed County-Based Mobility Ecology Framework requires clearer explanation. The framework is presented as a key contribution, but it is not always clear how it is used in the analysis. The authors should clarify whether the framework emerged inductively from the data, was applied during analysis, or was developed after the findings were organised. It would also be helpful to show more explicitly how each component of the framework connects to the data and what explanatory value it adds."

Response: We have corrected an inconsistency the reviewer rightly identified: the original text presented three theories first yet described the mechanisms as "emerging inductively." We now state plainly that the framework was developed abductively—the three theoretical perspectives provided sensitising concepts that guided open and axial coding; the four mechanisms were identified through iterative thematic analysis of the data; and the framework was then consolidated by situating those mechanisms back within the theory. To make the component-to-data linkage explicit, we added a mapping table (Table 4) that connects each of the four mechanisms to specific codes, illustrative interview/administrative evidence, and the explanatory work it performs (Sections 3.5 and 4.4).

Reviewer's comment: "Third, the methods section would benefit from some additional detail. The qualitative case study design is appropriate, but the paper should provide clearer information about participant characteristics, sampling, interview phases, coding procedures, translation, and the use of administrative records. A participant table would strengthen transparency. The authors should also clarify the timeline between data collection and ethics approval given it is an unusually long data collection period."

Response: Sections 4.2–4.4 have been expanded to describe recruitment and access, the multi-actor purposeful and snowball sampling, the participant groups (with full characteristics in Tables 1 and 2), the two interview phases, the translation procedure, the use of county-level administrative records, and a three-stage coding scheme illustrated with a worked example. Regarding the timeline: because our institution had not yet established a formal research ethics committee during the earlier fieldwork, ethics approval was obtained on a retrospective basis from the Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee, Chongqing Normal University (Approval Reference Number CSK2026017; 10 October 2025), covering the data collected in the earlier phases. We have corrected the earlier statement that approval preceded data collection and now explain that the 2025 date reflects this retrospective review rather than a lapse in oversight. Throughout all phases (2013–2024), participation was voluntary and written informed consent was obtained before each interview (Section 4.5).

Reviewer's comment: "The manuscript would also benefit from some tightening. There is repetition across the literature review, conceptual framework, findings and discussion, particularly around directionality, normalisation, invisibility in official statistics and cumulative impact."

Response: We have reduced repetition. The four defining attributes of semi-attrition are now defined once (Section 3.4) and evidenced thereafter without restatement; the repeated claim that semi-attrition is invisible in official statistics has been cut to two purposeful occurrences; and we condensed the literature review, conceptual framework, results, and discussion to remove material duplicated across sections, reducing the main text (excluding abstract and references) to approximately 9,000 words.

Reviewer's comment (Quality of English Language): "Some language editing would improve clarity and concision."

Response: The manuscript has been carefully proofread and copy-edited for clarity and concision, and the condensation described above further improves readability.

All changes are highlighted in the revised manuscript; a clean copy is also provided.

 

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The study offers valuable empirical and theoretical insights into how mobility patterns contribute to staffing inequalities in rural education systems. To further strengthen the paper, the introduction could be strengthened by deeper engagement with the international literature on teacher mobility, transfers, and workforce redistribution, and by a clearer positioning of the concept of semi-attrition within existing scholarship. The discussion would also benefit from more explicit connections between the findings and prior research to better demonstrate the study’s theoretical contribution beyond the Chinese context. Finally, the recommendations and conclusion sections could be expanded to provide more concrete policy implications, acknowledge the study’s limitations, and highlight directions for future research.

Author Response

A consolidated point-by-point response and the revised manuscript (clean + tracked) have also been uploaded.

We thank the reviewer for the supportive assessment and for these constructive suggestions, which we have addressed in full.

Reviewer's comment: "To further strengthen the paper, the introduction could be strengthened by deeper engagement with the international literature on teacher mobility, transfers, and workforce redistribution, and by a clearer positioning of the concept of semi-attrition within existing scholarship."

Response: The Introduction now engages the international literature directly and up front—organisational accounts of turnover and the "revolving door" (Ingersoll, 2001), the working-conditions account of attrition (Borman & Dowling, 2008), and the internal-mobility and workforce-redistribution literature (Podolsky et al., 2016; Palma-Vasquez et al., 2022; OECD, 2019)—rather than deferring it to the literature review. The concept of semi-attrition is now positioned explicitly within this scholarship in the Introduction, with the full conceptual differentiation (against internal mobility, teacher transfer, turnover, teacher migration, and rural-to-urban movement) provided in Sections 2.2 and 3.4 and summarised in Table 3.

Reviewer's comment: "The discussion would also benefit from more explicit connections between the findings and prior research to better demonstrate the study's theoretical contribution beyond the Chinese context."

Response: We revised the Discussion (Section 6) so that each principal finding is read against prior international work—for example, our finding that higher-rank, recently title-qualified teachers are the most mobile is connected to Wei and Zhou (2019) and to the broader pattern in which advantaged schools accumulate experienced staff (OECD, 2019; Podolsky et al., 2016). We also added a passage stating the study's relevance beyond China: we argue that semi-attrition is not idiosyncratic to the Chinese county but the expected outcome of any system combining (i) an administrative boundary that constrains exit, (ii) a spatial gradient in resources and career opportunity, and (iii) life-course pressures that pull teachers toward central locations. We note parallels with district-based assignment systems elsewhere and specify the scope conditions under which the mechanism would and would not be expected to operate, so that readers in other contexts can assess transferability (Section 6.5).

Reviewer's comment: "Finally, the recommendations and conclusion sections could be expanded to provide more concrete policy implications, acknowledge the study's limitations, and highlight directions for future research."

Response: Section 7.1 now ties each recommendation to a specific finding and an operational mechanism rather than a general aspiration—for example, redistributing professional-title evaluation quotas toward village and township schools to neutralise the title-accumulation logic documented in Section 6.3, and requiring county data systems to record internal transfers (not only exits) so that the staffing instability evidenced in Section 6.4 becomes visible to planners. Section 7.2 has been expanded to state the study's limitations (a single-county design that is analytically rather than statistically generalisable; a modest, heterogeneous sample of N = 14, with saturation framed at the level of mechanism categories; and administrative data limited in scope and period) and to set out concrete future directions (multi-county mixed-methods designs; comparative studies exploiting variation in governance and fiscal arrangements; and designs incorporating student and parent perspectives).

All changes are highlighted in the revised manuscript; a clean copy is also provided.