The Study On The Adaptability Of Education Voucher In China’s Early Childhood Education

Being an important component of China’s national education system, a goodearly childhood education not only exerts influence on children’s lifelongdevelopment, but also acts as an significant driving force of family happiness andsocial progress. Seen from the angle of public goods, early childhood educationpossesses the attributes of both pubic goods and personal goods, thus belonging toquasi-public goods. Therefore, government assumes unshakable responsibility in thesupply of early childhood education services, which, however, does not mean thatgovernment shall take care of everything. Given the fact that our public financecannot yet afford early childhood education services of the whole society,government’s purchase of early childhood education service is a feasible way toachieve the effective supply of early childhood education. It not only improves the useefficiency of educational resources, but also meet consumers’ diversified educationaldemands. The key is the type market mechanism introduced.As a kind of market or quasi-market securities, education voucher promotesbenign competition between education organizers by making use of parents’ educationoptions, so as to further improve school-running efficiency and education quality.Education voucher system aims to change the traditional allocation path ofeducational resources from directly funding producers to subsidizing consumers,which skillfully introduces market mechanism from the perspective of consumers inorder to better the competition between schools and ultimately to settle the issuesexisting in public education. A variety of education voucher modes emerged in thelong-term development of education voucher system, all of whose value judgment arebased on the views that education belongs to public goods and that governmentassumes unshakable responsibility. The education voucher proposition put forwardunder that premise contains the following value goals: firstly, public educationservices provided by government shall guarantee the fairness of educational benefits; secondly, due to finiteness of the government’s educational functions, those educationservices which can be provided effectively by market shall not be supplied bygovernment directly; thirdly, government’s welfare policy shall both ensureeducational equality and safeguard the competition and efficiency and educationmarket as well as the options of beneficiaries. Education voucher involves conceptssuch as “fairness”“competition”“diversity”“cooperation”, which is line with thecurrent dominant idea of early childhood education development in China. It is aninnovative governance mechanism of the government’s purchase of public educationservices, and it also provides brand new thinking on the market-oriented reform ofpublic education.Being an option in the government’s multiple toolkit, education voucher systemis a kind of voucher system by nature, namely, a specific application in the educationfield. The introduction and implementation of education voucher system in China’searly childhood education is conducive to the improvement of fair competitionbetween kindergartens and the rational allocation of educational resources, and it alsoembodies the government’s humanistic care towards different population. However,the issue of applicability arises in the implementation of early childhood educationvoucher system, since it cannot be carried out or popularized unless certainprerequisites are met. Firstly, the implementation of education voucher is based onsufficient financial resources; secondly, the education voucher system should becarried under the premise of general balanced supply-demand of early childhoodeducation; thirdly, the practice of education voucher system will play a bigger roleunder the condition of the marketization of early childhood education and thediversification of main investors. The past three decades since the reform and openingup witnessed the significant development of early childhood education with theestablishment of urban early childhood education market and the increasinglydiversified early childhood education investors. Thus, it is quite applicable toimplement and popularize education voucher system in early childhood education insome parts of China.Education voucher practices at home and abroad are all modified versions of education voucher theory, and accordingly, the market mechanism advocated by thetheory does not match the policy conditions of a certain country in a perfect way.Questions and experience in the implementation of education voucher both at homeand abroad act as inspirations for us. Under the guidance of the concept “biggovernment, small society”, China should implement and popularize educationvoucher system in accordance to its own conditions, carefully design the educationvoucher system document, avoid information asymmetry in a reasonable way, andresolutely eradicate “skimming”, in an effort to improve the marketization of publiceducation services from the objective aspect. To promote the healthy development ofearly childhood education is a systematic course, while education voucher system isonly one option among government’s reform patterns. Consequently, the applicationof education voucher should coordinate with other government tools so that a betterpolicy effect can be achieved.