Research On Non-profit Organizations Participating In Educational Improvement

Since the 1980 s,non-profit organizations outside the government and enterprises have flourished with the global neoliberal reform of the public sector and the rise of governance.Education has also continued to explore in streamlining administration and decentralization in China,and education governance has become a hot topic.In this context,educational non-profit organizations have become one of the subjects involved in educational improvement.Why do non-profit organizations and regional schools choose to cooperate with each other? How to advance cooperative educational improvement? What factors will affect the cooperation between them?The thesis focuses on the core content of " educational improvement" and adopts the qualitative research approach based on the issues above.It selects A Foundation and its two areas of cooperation,District Y of Province S and District Z of Province H,as typical cases.It aims to analyze the motivation,process and driving mechanism of cooperation between A Foundation and the two regional schools.It is found that non-profit organizations and regional schools have their own motivations in terms of cooperation.The mission of A Foundation in education poverty alleviation and development of quality education drives its participation in educational improvement,but it also needs to comprehensively evaluate the risks and benefits in cooperation because of constraining by reality.The regional schools in the study,represented by District Y and District Z,are respectively driven by the needs of regional strategy about culture and education and professional development of the school-based curriculum,whose cooperation with the A Foundation separately established upon the lead of the local government and the teaching and research office.From the perspective of the cooperation process,A Foundation relies on a systematic service layout to cooperate with regional schools,which includes four aspects that creating teaching space,providing curriculum options,carrying out training for educators,and serving local self-organized workshops.Some improvements have been achieved in this way,like improving the overall quality of the students,promoting the professional development of the teachers,creating breakthroughs between home and school to the co-education,and revitalizing the regional education ecology.In general,the cooperation between A Foundation and regional schools is driven by four mechanisms: administrative power under the policy environment and administrative measures,market power including business logic and "symbolic operation",professional power with discourse of competency-based education and professional public welfare,and public welfare power that emphasizes common values and integrates the resources of all parties.These four powers have promoted cooperation together to a certain extent,but they also have their own drawbacks.At the end of the thesis,it further summarizes and analyzes based on the above findings and forms a reflection on educational governance,that educational governance is emerging,but it still needs to be developed.Besides,some suggestions are put forward for non-profit organizations,the national government,local governments,schools and the society,which is about the vision of networked educational governance and to provide references for different subjects in the practice.