Macau Basic Education Funding Policy Research

Private educational system plays a major role in the diversified Macao basic educational system. The problems encountered in the educational development are not the diversified education itself, but the long-existing "laissez-faire" educational policy, which is mostly reflected in the policy concerning basic-education expenditure. This study mainly uses information and data analysis, together with literature review and educational regulations, to work out the relation between the development of the policy about the expenditure on Macao basic education and the educational administration as well as educational policy, and find out the key problems for making policy.In the transitional period before handover, Macao was facing continuously favorable economic conditions. However, the ratio of educational expenditure to the total budget expenditure was low for a long period. Meanwhile, the share of educational expenditure in Gross National Product (GNP) was lower than the average of the developing countries. It clearly shows the amount of the expenditure on basic education is insufficient. This is not only because most of the expenditure was allocated to the public Portuguese education, which shared only 6.5% of total Macao students, but also the private Chinese and English schools (93.5% of total students) suffered unfair subordinate purpose implemented by the Government. The Government intended to strengthen and build up the strong position of Portuguese language after handover, by implementing the policy concerning educational expenditure. This leads to an indivisible relation between universal education and promote Portuguese language in all private schools, causing high ratio of basic-educational expenditure in both the Portuguese and Sino-Portuguese educational systems. The fact that the sum allocated to the private English and Chinese educational systems reflected the Government's overlooking of the equality and rationale of the allocation of the educational expenditure.After handover, the educational budget increased annually, though under the not-so-optimistic economic environment. Moreover, the educational expenditure was listed as one of the priorities. Although this conformed to the commitment listed in the Chief Executives' campaign platform, the budget on basic education showed negative growths in two consecutive years. The average student cost differs 4 to 6 folds between the public and private educational systems. This shows no improvement in the allocation of the basic-educational expenditure. Finally, after integrating the educational theory, scholars' opinions and experiences from neighboring countries, together with the present situation in Macao, I will make some suggestions on the reform and policymaking concerning the basic-educational expenditure.