农村小规模学校公用经费支出的现状、困境与对策——基于山东省8个县（市）的调查

通过对山东省5个地级市8县（市）18所农村小规模学校的走访和调查,发现农村小规模学校公用经费的支出存在一定的问题。具体表现为：公用经费支出水平整体偏低;层级式管理模式降低了公用经费支出效率;公用经费支出范围不明确不清晰;公用经费支出管理粗放,缺乏监管。为破解农村小规模学校公用经费支出的困境,要建立以需求为出发点的动态公用经费拨付机制,提高公用经费保障水平;“简政放权”与“放管结合”并举,赋予农村小规模学校一定的公用经费支出管理权;规范公用经费支出项目,给予重点支出项目一定的政策性倾斜;加强公用经费支出管理,建立健全高效的监管机制。     

论农村小规模学校的分类发展政策

在比较农村小规模学校优势与劣势的基础上,文章认为我国农村小规模学校应采取“科学定位、分类发展”的政策。其基本涵义是：以公正的程序对农村小规模学校进行准确定位,对不同类型的小规模学校采取分类发展政策。（1）对于需要关闭的小规模学校,应在学生分流、校车服务、校产处置等方面实施配套政策;（2）对于过渡期保留的小规模学校,应在...     

悖论边缘的界定：农村小规模学校发展路径探析

关注农村小规模学校、切实提高农村小规模学校办学质量,是整体提高农村教育水平、初步实现教育均衡发展的重要举措。在倡导“撤点并校”与叫停“撤点并校”二元对立中寻求彼此边界的相关性并予以界定,这或许能为发展农村小规模学校提供一条新路径。文章通过对农村小规模学校发展的现实困境与理论难题进行梳理,并用具体案例辅助之,以期明晰农村小规模学校发展面临的几对悖论,从而尝试着走一条实事求是、“彼”“此”兼而有之的新型的农村小规模学校发展之路。     

乡村小规模学校语文教学现状及对策——以天水市麦积区花牛镇乡村小规模学校为例

提高乡村小规模学校教学质量是乡村振兴战略的必然要求。本研究认为,在乡村小规模学校语文课堂教学中,构建“三段式”教学模式,以开展课内拓展阅读和课堂小练笔活动为抓手,培养学生语文素养,是提高乡村小规模学校教学质量的一条新思路。     

小规模学校运用“互联网+教育”存在的问题及对策探讨

“互联网+教育”应用于小规模学校可以突破时间和空间的限制,帮助教师建立先进的教学理念,优化其课堂教学手段,不断提高课堂教学效率。文章分析小规模学校运用“互联网+教育”的现状、存在的问题,探究提高小规模学校运用“互联网+教育”效率的策略,以最大限度发挥“互联网+教育”在小规模学校的教学价值。     

现代性语境下的学校隐喻

现代性以“理性的扩张”为主要特性，以“纪律组织”为主要手段，以“机械的物化的世界”为主要表征。在现代性语境之下，学校这一规训机构，因其在封闭、规训和监控之下机械运转的，理性化、标准化、符号化生存的特征而被赋予“工厂”和“监狱”的隐喻。而警惕工具理性对现代学校教育的异化，尊重鲜活的、个性的、独立的生命个体，实现教育过程中的对话与交往、独立与自由，倡导正常价值理性的追寻．则是抑制教育异化的可能策略。     

教育：一个众说纷纭的热点话题——两会代表谈教育

“城市学校像欧洲，农村学校像非洲”，甚至在同一地区，重点学校设备先进、老师待遇优厚，而普通学校连运转都难以维持。一些人大代表提出，当前教育不公现象愈演愈烈，“政绩观误区”是不容忽视的原因。     

贵州农村小规模学校师资建设调查分析--以黔东南州四个县为例

开展2013年贵州省教育改革发展研究招标课题“贵州省农村小规模学校教学质量保障机制研究”调查研究过程中发现,农村小规模学校发展存在诸多的问题,主要是教职工满编与不够用的矛盾,教师知识文化与教育素质缺失,农村学校教师有机会培训与不能去培训矛盾以及师资影响学校各学科开设齐全等问题.以黔东南的某四个县为例深入分析这些问题并提出思考建议.     

支出功能分类:一种教育财政研究新工具

2014年以来,基于北京大学中国教育财政科学研究所创建的工具,部分地区开展了教育支出功能分类的改革试点。本文呈现了三个方面的工作:(1)对比美国和我国试点科目设置情况,提出以精细度、准确性、获取成本三者的平衡作为未来科目调整的基本原则;(2)以农村小规模学校拨款机制设计为例,探索功能分类对于教育政策制定的价值;(3)以教育生产研究为例,探索功能分类对于学术研究的价值。校本课程支出、支出性服务支出与学校学业表现有着正向的统计关系,而统一教学、学校管理、教育技术等支出的效果需要审视。功能分类的引入,将为教育投入产出的相关研究提供范式转变的可能。     

农村小学小规模学校个性化教学模式实践研究

随着我国城镇化进程加快,农村学校学生人数逐年下降,出现了许多小规模学校。很多人认为这些小规模学校没有存在的必要,然而正是这些小规模学校打通了农村教育攻坚的“最后一公里”,对保障农村适龄儿童就近入学、促进教育公平具有深远意义。农村小规模学校应当如何发展成了实现教育均衡的重点和难点问题。本文分析农村小学小规模学校个性化教学的意义,阐述具体的实施策略,旨在为小规模学校的发展指明方向。     

Mission matters: The cost of small high schools revisited

With the financial support of several large foundations and the federal government, creating small schools has become a prominent high school reform strategy in many large American cities. While some research supports this strategy, little research assesses the relative costs of these smaller schools. We use data on over 200 New York City high schools, from 1996 through 2003, to estimate school cost functions relating per pupil expenditures to school size, controlling for school output and quality, student characteristics, and school organization.We find that the structure of costs differs across schools depending upon mission—comprehensive or themed. At their current levels of outputs, themed schools minimize per pupil costs at smaller enrollments than comprehensive schools, but these optimally sized themed schools also cost more per pupil than optimally sized comprehensive schools. We also find that both themed and comprehensive high schools at actual sizes are smaller than their optimal sizes.     

Upper Secondary Schools and Sparsity: The Case of Northern Sweden

Governmental reforms since the early 1990s have acted as a push factor for starting new schools in Sweden and have created options for pupils to choose a school irrespective of municipal borders. This study highlights the upper secondary school system in small municipalities in northern Sweden since the late 1990s. The analysis shows that the reforms led to more schools, and thereby also to more competition in recruiting pupils both within and across municipal borders. When the cohorts started declining, the vulnerability of the school structure became obvious. The competition generated higher costs per capita and fewer available programs in small municipalities. Furthermore, it was noted that fewer pupils attending schools in small municipalities completed their education compared to those in larger municipalities.     

Understandings and misconceptions of biology concepts held by students attending small high schools and students attending large high schools

Do students from small high schools show fewer understandings and more misconceptions of biology concepts than students attending large high schools? Fifty students attending large high schools (enrollments exceeding 900 students) and fifty students attending small high schools (enrollments less than 150 students) were randomly selected and than evaluated on their understandings and misunderstandings of four biology concepts: diffusion, homeostasis, food production in plants, and classification of animals and plants. Students attending small high schools showed less instances of understanding and more instances of misunderstanding the concepts of diffusion and homeostasis. These differences could be related to a higher percentage of students in large schools capable of formal operations; sound understanding of diffusion and homeostasis required students to use formal operations. No difference was observed between the large and small school samples for the concepts of food production in plants and classification of plants and animals. Students in the small school sample lived in agricultural communities and their daily experiences allowed them to develop some understanding of food production in plants and prevented instances of misunderstandings from being developed. Classification of animals and plants required concrete operations to understand; therefore, students in small schools were capable of developing sound understanding as well as students from large schools.     

Examining the generalizability of administrative personnel allocation decisions

This study examined the effect of district and school size on principal teacher allocation decisions. The study tested the invariance of a personnel allocation decision making model for elementary school principals from three categories of school and district size. The sample consisted of elementary school principals from small, medium, and large schools and districts. The results confirmed the fit of the model across schools of all sizes and across small and medium size districts. For large school districts the proposed decision-making model did not fit the data. This result implies that district size has an effect on the personnel allocation decisions made by elementary school principals.     

Twice considered: Charter schools and student achievement in Utah

A relatively small state, Utah presents an interesting case to study charter schools given its friendly policy environment and its significant growth in charter school enrollment. Based on longitudinal student-level data from 2004 to 2009, this paper utilizes two approaches to evaluate the Utah charter school effectiveness: (a) hierarchical linear growth models with matched sample, and (b) general methods of moments with student-fixed effects regressions. Both methods yield consistent results that charter schools on average perform slightly worse as compared to traditional public schools, a result that is primarily affected by the low effectiveness and high student mobility of newly opened charter schools. Interestingly, when charter schools gain more experience they become as effective as traditional public schools, and in some cases more effective than traditional public schools. This research has implications for local and state charter school policies, particularly policies that avoid “start-up” costs associated with new charter schools.     

School efficiency in low and middle income countries: An analysis based on PISA for development learning survey

This study provides new evidence on school efficiency for low and middle income countries. We use data from PISA for Development (2017) for seven countries to obtain estimates on school efficiency using data envelopment analysis, both for cognitive and non-cognitive outputs, and their determinants. We find that there is a scope to increase efficiency by 20–22% via boosting both types of educational outputs and by reducing within-country disparity on schools’ efficiency scores by weakening the impact of students’ disadvantages. Our results suggest that schools cognitive inequality can be reduced alongside inefficiency. Cross-country results suggest similar drivers of efficiency across countries, at least for students’ school determinants, though we find more nuanced results on teachers and policies determinants for efficiency.     

Measuring Spanish orthographic development in private,public and subsidised schools in Chile

The current study has a twofold purpose: first, to determine the reliability of a tool for assessing orthographic development in Spanish; second, to assess differences in students’ performance on the measure across multiple types of primary schools in a large city in Chile. A Spanish developmental spelling inventory that contained words of increasing orthographic difficulty was administered twice to students in first through fifth grades in three types of schools: public, private and partially subsidised. These school types in large part represent varying levels of student socio-economic status because of costs associated with attending them. Results demonstrate that (a) the Spanish spelling inventory is able to reliably measure the development of orthographic knowledge in Spanish, and (b) there is a relationship between school type and student achievement. The authors describe individual cases to highlight the qualitative nature of differential performance for students in greater- or lesser-resourced schools.     

The structure of educational costs: Multiproduct cost functions for primary and secondary schools in latin America

This paper extends the existing literature on educational cost functions in the following ways: it employs flexible cost functions to comply with prior theoretical expectations about price homogeneity without the imposition of overly restrictive assumptions regarding the technological structure; it examines possible complementarities in the provision of different levels of schooling by treating schools as multiproduct firms: and it uses disaggregated school-level data for two developing countries. The major findings are: (a) the data for the Paraguayan and Bolivan samples indicate that the average primary school does exhibit scale economies with respect to percentage changes in quality-adjusted enrollment, with the level of secondary student outputs held fixed. The same finding holds for the average Bolivian secondary school, with the provision of primary levels held fixed. The results are not substantially affected when students' transport costs are taken into account; (b) at least for this sample, there do not appear to be any significant complementarities that imply lower costs for schools which offer both primary and secondary services vs those which offer only one or the other; (c) there is some scope to substitute between labor and non-labor inputs, even in the short run, particularly for the Bolivian sample. Thus, in the event of a major escalation in teacher salaries, schools may be able to absorb some of the increase by substituting teachers for materials (such as hooks and supplies) to maintain the same level of output in terms of quantity and quality: and (d) there is some evidence for Paraguay that the size of the physical plant for schools is excessive. This overinvestment would imply that long-run cost minimization should not simply be assumed in cost function studies.     

美国农村小规模学校政策变化分析

一个多世纪以来,美国农村小规模学校的政策发生了较大变化。其动因在于政府逐渐意识到小规模学校存在的价值,认识到小规模学校在学生成绩、经济效益等方面比大规模学校表现更好。当前我国正实施义务教育学校布局调整,美国小规模学校的政策演变对我国具有借鉴意义。     

Assessing the Impact of Formula Funding on Schools

Abstract

Local management of schools was implemented in England and Wales from 1990/91. A crucial aspect of this implementation was the introduction of a new method of funding schools by formula. The impact of formula funding was investigated by means of statistical analysis of hypothesised determinants of the resulting budget changes experienced by all schools in one large local education authority over the financial years 1989/90 to 1991/92. While the largest determinant of budget changes was the change in pupil numbers, schools with high unit costs due to having excess capacity or being relatively small tended to lose budget. Above average staff costs contributed to budget losses in the primary sector but not in the secondary. Thus the formula promoted cost efficiency by reducing the number of schools which had large positive discrepancies between their unit costs and the average for their sector. Schools with higher proportions of socially disadvantaged pupils did not lose budget while schools with poor examination results did. The formula is shown to be a sensitive instrument by which LEAs can transmit policies such as those with respect to special needs and support for small schools.