A Research On Present Situation And Countermeasures Of Participative Management In Rural Boarding Schools

In traditional concepts of education, school management is only the business of a few school leaders. Students, teachers, parents and community people from all walks of life are all excluded from it. This highly focused and fully enclosed management system has led to a lot of loss and waste of management resources, resulting in low efficiency of school management and becoming increasingly unsuited to the needs of school education reform and development and the school’s long-term development. Fully enclosed school management has caused especially serious problems in rural boarding schools. Participatory management, conforming to the trend of the process of the democratization of society, is a new approach to solve the problems caused by the over-regulation of the rural boarding schools, and has far-reaching significance for the promotion of school development and human development.Building "Child-Friendly Schools" is a large experimental and educational project jointly undertaken by the Ministry of Education and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), aimed to create a education quality mode which is student-centered and protects children’rights at the school level. The participation and harmony dimension of "Child-Friendly School standards’ is to ensure that teachers, students, families and communities participate in school management democractically and the school becomes a harmonious learning community. The contents of this dimension provides the basis for the realization of participative management in rural boarding schools. This paper conducts a field survey to six boarding schools in Zhongxian county, Chongqing, using a questionnaire designed in accordance with this standard plus interviews and observations. It has found that the schools have established a participatory management system, but it does not work according to the actual situation of the students’, teachers’, and parents’ participation in school management. Judging from the comparative analysis of the students’ and the adults’(teachers and parents) evaluation, the students’ evaluation is lower than the teachers’ and the parents’ in terms of both the students’ participation behavior in school management and the schools’ encouragement and guidance in the parents’ participation in school management. The comparison from the students’ attributes shows that, on the whole, the students’ evaluation drops with higher grades in terms of the status of the students and their parents’ participation in school management, but the ratings of grade3are lower than those of grades4and5, the rating of the boarders lower than non-boarders. The girls’ is lower than the boys’ in evaluation of the parents’ participation in school management. From the comparison of teachers’ properties, the evaluation of male teachers is lower than the female teachers and the teachers’ with longer teaching experience lower than those with shorter teaching experience, in terms of the teachers’ participation in decision-making, the principa’s sense of democracy and organizational management ability.Finally, the paper gives appropriate recommendations from three levels:policies in school development and evaluation, action strategies of schools and action strategies of principals, teachers, parents and students, to improve the present situation of the the rural boarding schools’ participatory management.