A Brief Analysis Of The Efficiency And Fairness In U.s. Primary And Secondary Education From The Perspective Of Educational Finance

The research focuses on some issues about efficiency and equity in primary and secondary school finance in America. Equity is defined as equal education opportunity and equal education outcome. Efficiency is defined as allocation efficiency of education resources and technology efficiency of education.In primary and secondary school finance in America, the disparity of expenditure per pupil is regarded as inequitable education opportunity. This problem is caused by different base of local property tax, which provide revenues for primary and secondary school. The States change the tax system and provide aids for local governments to solve the problem. The change of tax system is to use tax from the states to partly replace local property tax to provide revenues. But the method cannot completely avoid the effect of local property tax. The primary aids from the states are guarantee foundation program and guarantee tax base program. In practice, the latter can better resolve the expenditure disparity. But neither of them can completely achieve the goal.Local governments providing school education can bring allocation efficiency of education resources. And the aids from the states also can improve allocation efficiency. In the comparison between foundation program and GTB program, we find that the latter can preferably facilitate the district to increase education expenditure.To maintain education quality and decrease education expenditure, or maintain education expenditure and improve education quality, can improve technology efficiency. In America, the approach to decrease education expenditure is to decrease administration cost. Professional governance and scale economy can help to achieve the goal. Accountability-driven model and competition-driven model are adopted to improve education quality and increase education outcome. Both of them have effect on school finance.Accountability-driven model requires to set academic standard and appraises system and build incentive and information system. Government would not only invest on academic standard, appraise system and information system, but also use financial incentive to improve education quality.Competition-driven model is to create market competition or competition in the system of primary and secondary school to improve education quality. The representative example of competition-driven model is voucher plan. And Charter school is the example of the latter.From the aspect of the relation between equity and efficiency in primary and secondary school finance in America, we found that education efficiency was always an important issue. With the attention on education quality, emphasis on education equity gradually shifted from equal education opportunity to equal education outcome. The method adapted to achieve equal education outcome was to provide more resources to the students in poor background. There is contradiction between equity and efficiency. But they would consist with each other in the long run. Approaches adopted to resolve issues of equity and efficiency in primary and secondary school finance in America can be used for reference to resolve similar problems in china.