On The Policy Of Chinese Government's Purchasing Educational Services

Purchasing educational services is one of the main means for the government to provide the public with educational services since 1980s. It was brought into China a couple of years ago. Although the government's purchasing educational services is not popular in China, it is extremely important to explore its current and future situations so as to enrich the relative theory and support China's policy on educational service purchasing.Government's purchasing educational services is that the government makes the contract with some social organizations, and pays their educational services with all or part of the public finance on the basis of the evaluation of the service quality, so as to provide the public with high-quality, efficient and alternative service. The essence of the purchasing is that the government separate producers and providers of education service, so the relationship between the government and the social organization is of commercial exchange based on the contract.The rationality of the educational service purchasing is as follows:the educational administration of the government is the model of "Government-Public-Market" Educational service can be divided into the public educational service, the would-be public educational service, and private educational service, the former two of which are the basic function of the government; whether the government buy the service depends on whether the service is public or would-be public, and which service is better. Finally, the service bought by the government should not be the government's core educational function.Based on the research of the policy of the government's purchasing educational service, the author suggests the following conditions of efficiently carrying it out:the government should have a good knowledge of the specific function of the government, the market and the school, and the government should function as "the Small Government against the Big Society"; the educational market should be in full development; the educational medium organization should be developed and the ability of the administrators should be improved. Chinese government's purchasing the educational service is possible in terms of the development of technology, economy, politics and administration. But there are some problems that have to be solved in implementing efficiently the policy:the government's function is await to be changed, the educational mediation is not mature, the law is relatively lagging, and the traditional culture needs to be modified.With the development of Chinese socialistic market, the improvement of the public power, and the future reform of the educational system, the policy on the government's purchasing educational service may be taken by China generally. However, because the basic education is the would-be public product, the government is always mainly responsible for it. In basic education, purchasing educational service should be its necessary part, through which the government meet more of the individual and multiple needs of the public. Meanwhile, the relative policy and law should be constructed, for instance, the current law regulating the social organization such as "Provisional Regulations on Registration of Private Non-enterprise Units" should be revised, the supervision of the quality, mechanism, and the financial system for the government's purchasing educational service should be built. Also, the public opinion should be guided. The implementation and the spreading of the policy should be done step by step. When doing it, we should have a good anticipation of its limitation.