Managerialism, Educational Equity, and Professional Development of Teachers: A Case of Grouplized Schools

School grouplization in China aims to promote educational equity and optimize the distribution of high-quality educational resources. It refers to schools, including both elite and weak schools that are organized into a group adopting modern enterprise management systems. The concept of school grouplization underlines standardization, institutionalization, and specialization. For teachers, the expectation is that elite schools help weak schools through increase of teacher mobility and exchange, diversifying forms for professional development, and eventually, scaling up the impact of the whole group. In practice, this model of school management encounters challenges and contradictive expectations. This paper focuses on such challenges among teachers in their professional development. Thirteen teachers from a school group in Shanghai participated in this study. The findings revealed that teachers’ challenges in professional development revolve around three aspects, (1) the rich resources, effective management, and good reputation of the education group promote teacher professional development. But overlapping activities consume a lot of teachers’ energy, so that teachers have little time for reflection. (2) Resources from the education group do not meet teachers’ needs and the evaluation standards for teachers are inconsistent, resulting in the hidden injustice among teachers and different types of schools within the larger group, and (3) Influenced by parent schools, education groups attach different importance to subjects, which results in limited development of teachers in some subjects, especially non-key subjects.