The Outline of the National Medium and Long-term Education Reform and Development Plan (20 10-2020) (hereinafter referred to as the Outline) has been implemented for five years. The Ministry of Education commissioned a third party to evaluate the implementation of the Outline, and issued the Special Assessment Report on Compulsory Education on 20 165438 (hereinafter referred to as the report).
According to the goal proposed in the outline, the consolidation rate of nine-year compulsory education in China will reach 93%. The report shows that the consolidation rate is 92.6%, which is 5. 1 percentage point higher than that in 20 10. However, since the State Council issued the Opinions on Deepening the Balanced Development of Compulsory Education in 20 12, only 1 124 units have passed the evaluation, accounting for 38.6%, which is different from the Opinions.
Wang Dinghua said that the process of urbanization has accelerated the urban-rural mobility of students in compulsory education, and measures such as the reform of household registration system and the adjustment of family planning policy have also brought challenges to compulsory education. "Promoting fairness and improving quality" are the two major themes of future reform and development.
The difficulty of enrolling children of migrant workers has not decreased, but has increased.
According to Wang Dinghua, due to the rapid development of urbanization, the proportion of students studying in cities and towns has reached 73%, which is 18 percentage points higher than the urbanization rate of 55% of the permanent population, and the urban-rural mobility of students in compulsory education has accelerated.
As a result, a large number of floating children and left-behind children have emerged. Du Kewei, deputy director of the First Department of Basic Education of the Ministry of Education, once said that by 20 13 years, there will be12.77 million children in compulsory education in China, accounting for 9.3% of the total number of compulsory education students. At the symposium on education and care for left-behind children in rural areas, the relevant person in charge of the Ministry of Education once said that the number of left-behind children in rural areas in compulsory education in China is 20.754 million.
To this end, the Ministry of Education has put forward the policy of "giving priority to the management of the local government and giving priority to full-time public primary and secondary schools" and a plan of "promoting the local government to invest in the purchase of private places" to ensure the children who move with them to school. According to the report, 78.5% of the children of floating population attend public primary schools and 82.3% attend public junior high schools. The number of private school places purchased by the government for the children of floating population is 654.38+0.246 million, accounting for 654.38+00% of the children of floating population.
But the actual situation is not as optimistic as statistics. Yang Dongping, dean of the College Entrance Examination Institute, once said at the annual meeting of educational public welfare organizations that the quality of compulsory education for children of floating population is "unevenly distributed, and there are still more than 2 million children of floating population studying in lower quality schools".
What is even more worrying is that "strictly controlling the population of megacities" has been written into relevant documents, and "controlling people through education" has become the population control policy of megacities. The education policy of migrant children has been seriously reversed, and many cities have raised the threshold for non-registered children to go to school. The obstacles faced by children who go to public schools with them are more difficult to overcome.
Take Beijing as an example. When non-Beijing school-age children apply for compulsory education in Beijing, they need parents to provide "proof of employment in Beijing, proof of actual residence in Beijing, household registration book of the whole family, temporary residence permit in Beijing, and proof of no guardianship conditions issued by the domicile" (commonly known as "five certificates"). In addition, some districts and counties have also put forward stricter audit requirements.
In addition, the migrant children's school, which was spontaneously established by the Beijing people to provide educational opportunities for migrant children, has also been demolished and closed in recent years. Some migrant workers are forced to take their children back to their hometown to study and become "left-behind women" and "left-behind husbands"; However, according to a five-year follow-up survey by Dr. Song Yingquan from China Institute of Education and Fiscal Science in Peking University, more than 70% of migrant children still stay in Beijing after dropping out of school, and the proportion is still on the rise.
The Double Challenges of "Weak Rural Areas" and "Crowded Towns"
Song Naiqing, the general manager of the special evaluation of compulsory education of the Ministry of Education and a professor at Southwest University, said that rapid urbanization has caused two major problems, including: the shortage of educational resources in towns, especially in counties and towns in the central and western regions, and the problem of large class size; However, in rural areas, there is the problem of idle educational resources. Wang Dinghua summarized this phenomenon as "weak rural areas" and "crowded cities and towns", and proposed to promote the integration of urban and rural development by coordinating the development of compulsory education in urban and rural areas, "strengthening rural education and making urban education bigger".
According to Yang Dongping, the problem of large class size has reached a worrying level in some areas. For example, in Xinyang and Zhoukou areas of Henan Province, the maximum class size of some primary schools and junior high schools is as high as 150. "All the space is occupied, and even some students can only stand in class." Yang Dongping said, "Such a large class has no quality of education, and the most prominent problem is safety."
Liu Limin, Vice Minister of Education, also pointed out at the press conference that at present, the class size in the western region "some classes have more than 55 students or even more than 65 students." Therefore, our first step is to take a step ahead this year and set the scale of 65 people. In the next two years, we will reduce the class size to less than 55. "
Yang Dongping, on the other hand, is worried that the government's blind emphasis on expanding urban education, further tilting educational resources to cities, and building more schools in cities to alleviate the large class size may lead to a new round of larger-scale and wider-ranging merger of schools, further promoting rural schools to enter cities, and eventually making rural education disappear.
"Is the modernization of rural education to eliminate rural education?" Yang Dongping asked. He believes that in order to meet the challenge of urbanization to education, rural areas and cities need to "deal with it at the same time", and the problem of large class size in cities can be solved by building rural schools and letting rural students enter schools nearby. "Promoting the coordinated development of urban and rural education is the fundamental way," Yang Dongping said.
Since then, the Ministry of Education has launched a "thin reform plan" to improve the basic conditions for running schools with weak compulsory education in poverty-stricken areas, and put forward the goal of "ensuring the basics and making up the shortcomings", striving to improve the basic conditions for running schools in poverty-stricken areas within three to five years. Yang Dongping believes that this task of "solving problems from the bottom" is quite arduous.
According to Liu Limin, at present, in 1 100 poverty-stricken counties in China, schools with weak compulsory education account for 40% of the total, and their students account for 33% of the national total.
Yang Dongping believes that solving the education problems of migrant children and left-behind children requires institutional innovation. Attention should be paid to improving the construction of rural boarding schools and rural small-scale schools. "Because of the small scale and remote location, we can't try our best to cancel it."
The "Central Collapse" of Education Funds Investment
The evaluation report shows that the investment in compulsory education is generally insufficient, and compared with the investment in different regions, it shows a "central collapse". The data shows that the proportion of national financial expenditure on education in GDP is 4. 15%, which is not only far from the world average-according to OECD statistics, the average level of 28 countries in OECD in 2005 has reached 5%; Compared with China itself, fiscal education expenditure only accounts for 4. 15% of GDP, which is also lower than 4.28% in 20 12 and 4.3% in 20 13.
In addition, Song Naiqing also found that in the past five years, the investment in education funds in the central region has "collapsed", and the education funds in the central region are not only lower than those in the eastern region, but even lower than those in the western region. Taking primary schools as an example, the average budget of primary school students in the central region for 20 13 years is 2460 yuan lower than that in the eastern region, and even lower than that in the western region 1408 yuan.
Scholars such as Lei from the School of Education of Central China Normal University once wrote that the low-focus compulsory education financial system and the central transfer payment are the important reasons for the "central collapse".
Lei believes that the central government's education transfer payment system gives priority to the western region, while the eastern region has sufficient local financial resources. In contrast, the central region's own financial level is limited, and the transfer payment income is less, which leads to the weak financial resources in the central region. "It is difficult to invest in compulsory education."
In this regard, Song Naiqing suggested that in the future, we should increase investment in compulsory education in the central region and gradually try to implement differentiated investment policies in different provinces in the central and western regions; Wang Dinghua also proposed to implement the provincial-level overall planning policy for compulsory education funds and gradually improve the financial payment system below the provincial level.
In addition, Wang Dinghua reiterated the direction of "coordinating the development of compulsory education in urban and rural areas" when introducing the next step. A few days ago, the executive meeting of the State Council decided to establish a unified funding guarantee mechanism for compulsory education in urban and rural areas: the state uniformly determines the benchmark quota of public funds per student, and gives subsidies to all compulsory education schools in urban and rural areas (including private schools) according to standards not lower than the quota. Only in this way can urban and rural students get unified basic welfare.
However, in the view of scholars such as Song Yingquan, whether the financial responsibility of compulsory education should be local or central, how to avoid depriving residents of their welfare because of the seesaw interests of the central government? This is still a problem that needs further consideration. ;