A Study On The Preschool Education Responsibility Of American Governments At All Levels And The Enlightenments To China

In recent years, the development of Chinese pre-school education is faced with more and more severe situation. The pre-school education resources are insufficient and unfair in most of China. The entrance and the high price of pre-school is becoming a problem. Facing with this live hood issue, our governments start to pay much more attention to the development of Chinese pre-school education. With the emergence of the《State Councils on the Current Development of Preschool Education》and the “Three-year Action Plan on Preschool Education”, there is obvious improvement in financial investment about the pre-school education. The provincial gap also presents a narrowing trend. However, the status of pre-school responsibility among all levels of our governments is ambiguous which largely restricts the development of pre-school education. In the United States, the development of pre-school education is far superior to our country. Children aged 5 have been included in the scope of the compulsory education system. Pre-school responsibilities among the various levels of governments are defined, which promotes the development of pre-school education. Therefore, it is helpful for us to study all levels of the US government pre-primary responsibility about pre-school education, in order to improve situation of pre-school education and enrich the theoretical research achievements in the field of pre-school education in our country, which has a certain theoretical and practical significance!In this paper, it shows that the governments especially the local governments have to take the investment responsibility and the regulatory responsibility to intervene the Pre-school education, as it is the quasi-public goods, according to the Pre-school education externality theory, Equity theory, Market information asymmetry theory and the Theory of fiscal decentralization. Combined with the status quo of preschool education in the United States, it draws three conclusions in this paper. Firstly, the American government bears more and more responsibilities and pays more and more attention to the development of preschool education. Initially the government regarded the support of preschool education as a means of welfare, in the end as an investment with high return. Secondly, the federal and local governments have different responsibility for the preschool education. The federal government is in charge of making macro-policies, laws and regulations to protect the healthy development of preschool education and guiding the state and local governments to become the investment subject to provide sustained and stable financial investment for the development of preschool education. The government should protect the interests of the disadvantaged groups and promote the fairness of the preschool education to help improve the education quality. The local governments are in charge of investment, management and operation of the preschool education project. From the analysis the Pre-k project we can get the features of the state government’s responsibility: The financing way is flexible but lack of stability; The total investment keeps steady growth, but states per-student investment keeps falling and investment gap is widening; They focus on gradually expand the education chance of young children and prior to the vulnerable groups. Thirdly, according to the problems the US government faced in the preschool education development and the trend of the development of preschool education, it concludes that,we need to further strengthen the federal government in narrow the investment gap and quality gap and the role of planning on preschool education development; to increase investment in the state preschool education and gradually stabilize preschool education investment source; to make the investment focus on both quality and chance instead of pure education chance.Finally, through the data analysis we can draw a conclusion that pre-school education in china is still faced with the issues of lack of financial investment and the irrational structure of financial investment. Based on the present situation of our country and learning from the experience of the United States pre-school development, the paper draws the following recommendations for policy development of pre-school education:(1) Increase the governmental financial input to the preschool education.(2) Strengthen the central government in coordinated development, plan as a whole role in the development of pre-school education.(3) Further strengthen the responsibility of the provincial government investment in pre-school education and give the provincial finance funding priorities to the vulnerable groups and the less developed regions, highlighting the weak capacity of financial resources.(4) The focus of the development of pre-school education from the simple "emphasis on the education fair chance" to the "quality and opportunity fairness".(5) The provincial government establishes basic database about the pre-school development, and supervise quality of pre-school education.