Wu Fei: If equality can be measured by the same opportunities and resources, fair evaluation is more blurred and long -term.Educational equity requires that different students need different resources to achieve the same goals as their peers.
Education has always been the focus of the attention of middle -class families.One of the anxiety of China's middle class comes from concerns about the education of children.According to the 2019 China New Rich Wealth and Health Index jointly released by Shanghai Higher Financial College and Jiaxin Financial Management, children education is an important financial goal of new rich people. Especially in first- and second -tier cities, children's education is listed as the primary financial goal of children.Essence
This explains the basic reasons for the rapid development of private education: parents are willing to spend money, as long as they can provide educational services that meet their needs.Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why parents in Shanghai are very concerned about the first -time implementation of private schools.
Policy makers have proposed the plan for citizens to recruit and shake the number. Obviously, they want to promote the fairness of education and give more people who could not enjoy high -quality educational resources to obtain excellent educational resources.The policy of shaking the number may reach the equality of educational resources to the public, but can this policy really achieve education fairness?What are the differences in education equality and equality in education?
1.Education Equality VS Education Fairness
Educational Equality and Educational Equity look very similar to many differences.
Equality, paying attention to everyone's resources and opportunities, not reasonable or unreasonable, essentially given everyone, not paying attention to each person's own conditions and demand differences.As far as education is concerned, it is to provide the same education opportunities and the same educational resources. Whether the educational goal is not to be considered.
Fairness, paying attention to value judgment, that is, whether the process and results are reasonable.Specifically, assuming the goal of education is to cultivate qualified citizens, and pay attention to providing differentiated and personalized resources required for different individuals to achieve the same goals, and whether they can achieve the purpose of cultivating qualified citizens.
There is a picture that is well illustrated by the difference:
On both sides of the picture, the goal of the three people is to watch baseball games.If you provide equal resources, the goal may not be achieved.However, when resources are fair and adjusted according to personal needs, everyone can successfully watch the game.
So, is we solved whether it is educational equality or education fairness?Both are important for the social impact of education, and it is difficult to achieve it, but in comparison, the fair task may be more difficult.The two principles of justice of American scholar Ross, expressed in the field of education as the principles of equality and freedom of educational equity and the principles of education equity.The former is close to the equality we mentioned, and the latter is close to the equity of education we mentioned.If equality can also be measured by the same opportunities and resources, fair evaluation can be more vague and long -term.
Educational equity requires that different students need different resources to achieve the same goals as their peers.For example: Disabled students need different physical support from peers who do not have disabled in school; ethnic minorities students who speak Chinese other than language other languages need different language support.No child is better or worse than another child, they just have different needs.Each child brings unique needs, talents and resources to the school, and prompts teachers to respond to each student in different ways.
This is very difficult. At least so far, no country and region in the world can confidently announce the fairness of education.Everyone explores, trial and error, and improvement on the road of fair education.
2.Special nature of education fairness
Why is education fair?
Education itself is a kind of social activity that can continue and develop social civilization by conveying social experience and knowledge to individuals to continue and develop social civilization.Therefore, education is not only related to individual growth, but also has a strong public welfare in science and technology, culture, medicine, and even social welfare.Due to this understanding, public education is generally considered a public item, which should be led by the government and supports education costs by public finances.
But education has its own privacy.In the 1960s, T. W. Schultz proposed human capital theory.Human capital is relative to material capital, reflected in the capital that can be used to provide future revenue.Human capital is formed by investing in manpower. The pathway includes: investing in education, investing in health care, investing in domestic laborers, and investing in immigration entry.Among them, investment in education is the most important way.
Since there are educational investment, there is an assessment of investment benefits.The educational income function proposed by Mincer in the 1970s has always been a tool for estimating personal yields that Western scholars are widely used.The personal yield of education calculated based on this model provides an empirical basis for the perspective of positive relationships between income and education.Domestic scholars have also verified the positive correlation of education and income through data from the data of education growth and income growth after the reform and opening up.
The income is positively related to education. In order to pursue higher income, it is necessary to chase better educational resources.From the perspective of economics, education is a kind of scarce resources. The differences between market economic conditions and the existence of regional differences will cause uneven allocation of scarce resources between different subjects and different regions, which will affect education fairness.
The reality is indeed the same, and market -oriented education has obvious pros and cons.On the one hand, it can alleviate the huge burden of national education, enhance the flexibility, diversity, autonomy of the education system, expand the right to select, meet the different needs of different consumers, improve the awareness and efficiency of school performance responsibility, and competition.Improve education level and cultivate a better education market.For example, private education in Shanghai has indeed played the effect of activating competition and improving school running levels.
But on the other hand, market orientation has also brought some disadvantages, leading to a certain degree of social differentiation, and it is possible that those groups that are marginalized by social and geographical reasons may be excluded from new mechanisms for competition and school selection.The loss of public education resources, the ladder of the development of regional education, and the continuous phenomenon of tuition fees are indeed not uncommon in the booming development of Shanghai's private education.
The market is profitable, but due to the public welfare and importance of education, the government cannot and cannot fully let the market allocate resources. When necessary, it is necessary to intervene in the market through tangible hand -in -law to re -allocate resources.
3.The consideration of education equity under the perspective of policy makers
Education fairness is still a topic of exploring, trial error, and improvement in the world.The different perspectives of education institutions and parents must have different understanding of education fairness.However, the referee of the market MDASH; policy maker MDash; the perspective of this problem is very important, and generally should follow two principles.
First of all, for different groups and different types of education, policy makers must have a purpose orientation for the definition of education fairness.In view of the diverse goal of education, MDASH; MDASH; is it reasonable to use one principle to train talents for the employment market, cultivate qualified citizens, and increase the education experience. Is it reasonable to allocate educational resources?For example, the distribution policy that supports occupational preparations may be very different from the distribution policy that supports other goals (such as training qualified citizens).Because the labor market is a fierce competitive area, the success of successful education for the labor market seems to be a commodity, and its value depends on its relatively status.That is, the quality of education for employment is largely depends on the opponent's opponentWhat is the education level in this field because we will compete in the same job.On the contrary, the education of qualified citizens can be regarded as a non -positioning product, which is not the damage of the success of others in this field. This is not a competitive field.
Secondly, no matter what kind of purpose, the principle of fair education is obviously not single, and the most basic requirement is to be equal with educational opportunities.
The so -called educational opportunity refers to the opportunities to enable individuals to gain knowledge and certain skills and cultivate certain abilities.The so -called opportunity is equal, not without any obstacles, but the same and appropriate obstacles facing everyone, such as the same entrance examination.No matter what the reason we care about education opportunities, and what the goal of education is, we should not have the insurmountable and unrelated obstacles.
Due to too many disputes, most countries, including my country, have adopted the problem of equality on educational opportunities in the form of national public sectors, that is, through legislation and compulsory education.The substantial equality cannot be generalized because of being too complicated and differentiated.In this sense, private education meets some of the substantial and fair needs to a certain extent, and use the intangible hands of the market to deploy resources to solve the personalized needs beyond the service capacity of the public sector.
4.How do policy makers ensure fair education?
On the basis of ensuring the clarity of educational purpose and equality of education opportunities, policy makers need to consider how to meet the diversity of education needs through better resource allocation to promote fair education.The United States is a country with a global recognized education system, high education level, and more reasonable educational resources.Let's review the practice of the United States on the issue of education fairness.
In the United States, the federal government is not directly responsible for educational at any level of nationwide.The Ministry of Education allocates federal funds to various states and various schools and institutions, and implements the Federal Civil Rights Law in the national education department through the Citizen Rights Office (OCR) to ensure that education institutions are not discriminated against by race, skin color, nationality, gender, disability, or age.EssenceAt the same time, the United States provides low -interest loans and scholarships from students who seek higher education throughout the country through a huge federal student assistance program.
State education departments usually implement all education -related policies in the state.The primary and secondary (K-1) education of the local level is provided by the school district.There are nearly 14,000 school districts in the United States to operate all public schools in their jurisdiction to ensure that all students receive public education for free in the twelfth grade.Most students in the K-12 system study in public schools, and about 10 % of students enter private schools or specially study public schools in a certain field.There are more than 34,000 private schools across the country to meet relatively personalized education needs.
The United States has invested a lot of resources to ensure public education.In 2015, the US government's educational expenditure was US $ 10,24 billion, accounting for 6.32%of GDP. The average salary of public school teachers was 50,000 US dollars than US $ 36,000.
Correspondingly, the proportion of education funds in my country in 2015 in GDP is 4.26%.It is undeniable that my country has achieved great achievements in educational equality and education improvement, but there is still room for progress compared to developed countries in the United States and Europe.
As far as my country is concerned, the first consideration of the policy maker is to ensure the equality of educational opportunities through legislation and system.Then do a good job in the openness and transparency of government data, keep supervision and feedback channels, and prevent privileges and corruption caused by information barriers.Only when the legislative guarantee is guaranteed and the information is open and transparent, and the feedback is convenient, can the Shandong candidates similar to the recent Internet candidates who have recently been discussed on the Internet have been replaced by college incidents.
On the basis of legislation and supervision, education fairness is enhanced by the overall quality of public resources.The public sector should increase the software and hardware investment of public education in education, and generally improve the teaching level and management capabilities.At the same time, special education in public education should be added.There will be some magnet schools in the United States. Through special courses, they will provide services and support for some excellent students in many aspects, such as STEM subjects, art and performance arts, world languages, and so on.This can increase the ability to choose regional education and provide better educational opportunities for minority and low -income students.On the other hand, private education should also be appropriately allowed to be characterized, differentiated, and market -oriented.Under the premise of not affecting the equality of education opportunities, the family is allowed to choose the direction of education and training independently.Supervise the direction of private education, and encourage and support within the framework.
As shown in the previous comics, public education provides the same scoot chair, so that the market will become the motivation to configure chairs as needed, supplemented by policy supervision, so that more children can cross the high wall to see the game.
(The author is a professor at Shanghai Advanced Financial College of Shanghai Jiaotong University. This article only represents the author's point of view. Editor -in -chief email: [email protected])
