2016 Volume 99 Pages 5-25
Maintaining high school education when the number of students is decreasing is challenging in many respects. When education was expanding, the primary concern was to cope with the growing quantitative demand. However, when education is being downsized, providing adequate education involves dealing with problems that are both quantitative and qualitative. The challenge is to downsize education while guaranteeing equal opportunities for everyone. To examine this issue, we focus on education providers in Japan and Taiwan.
These societies have several common features regarding upper secondary education. First, both experienced rapid expansion, and now, arguably, almost every child goes to high school. Second, private schools provide a considerable amount of opportunities because of the historical background of both countries. The limited public provision in the face of rising demand created a gap, which private schools bridged. Consequently, in both societies, private high schools are slightly semi-public in nature, unlike those in the West. In Japan, public and private schools determined the allocation of entrants before examinations in Public-Private Cooperation Councils. Thus, private schools maintained a certain quota for many years, and kept the ratio of private high students stable over fifty years. In Taiwan, low academic achievers from poor households go to private vocational high schools, which are at the bottom of the hierarchy.
Now, these societies are facing a drop in the number of students which affects the structure of high school provision. In Japan, the function of the Public-Private Cooperation Council might be changing due to this decline. The size of the market has shrunk too much and with the allocation system, private schools, in particular, have not been able to finance the administration of their schools. Since each private school operates independently with separate educational institutions, it is not easy to integrate and abolish schools in a planned manner as public schools have done. Moreover, in some prefectures, the public place a “special consideration” on private high schools. It is true that this is, in a sense, “protection of the private sector” for it deprives students of the opportunity to go to public high schools. In addition, this problem leaves the role of private high schools indistinct, and private high schools have to find a niche to survive in the shrinking market without any guiding principles.
In Taiwan, the Twelve-Year Basic Education Policy was launched in 2014. This policy practically extended citizen education from nine years to twelve years. It has also sought to promote educational goals such as raising educational quality and realizing equal opportunities. As we have seen, to ensure various educational opportunities means keeping private vocational high schools. However, support for narrowing the gap between public and private schools is given to individual students in the form of enrollment choices. Marketization will work if the size of the market is large enough. However, the Twelve-Year Basic Education Policy also seeks the localization of education by encouraging students to attend their nearest schools. The size of the market is already too small for the marketization mechanism to work in rural areas, where depopulation is a serious problem.
