A Study On The Migrant Children's Compulsory Education Problem In China

With the acceleration of urbanization and industrialization, more and more migrant workers flow into cities. In 2003, Floating population is up to 140 million, 211 million last year and will reach around 350 million in 2050.With the transition of flowing tendency of migrant workers from the"individual flow"to"whole family flow", a large number of migrant children move to the cities with their parents.Migrant children are in need of compulsory education and education requires funds input. To migrant children, it is a very tough problem when it comes to getting the funds for free, because the appropriation is based on the"hukou"which is used to prove somebody to be a permanent resident somewhere. That is to say, if they don't have the local"hukou"where they flow into, they are very difficult to get free compulsory education mostly provided by local government. What's worse, the problem has continued to deteriorate with the increase of migrant children, and it has attracted more and more attention from the media and the public. Undoubtedly, it is very urgent to solve this issue without delay.This paper argues that the key to this problem is to redefine the nature of compulsory education, including migrant children's compulsory education, and clarify the responsibility taken by all levels of governments, then rearrange funds appropriation accordingly.The most urgent problem that migrant children are facing now is how to get the money to support their compulsory education. The reason to say so is partly because local governments bear the main part of funding responsibility beyond its financial capacity; On the other hand, it is obvious that there exist deficiencies in our current appropriation system particularly compulsory education funding system. In reality, there are indeed some local governments who have solid financial capability, but the point is, they don't have equally enough incentives to solve the funding problem. So in order to effectively solve this problem, this paper focus the energy on exploring the essence of the problem and carrying out a systematic analysis of the root causes and then lay out some countermeasures accordingly. In general, the approach can be summarized as"sub-step strategy", which is divided into short-term measures and long-term strategy.In the short term, for the first problem, this paper re-defines the nature of compulsory education that includes migrant children's compulsory education, and points out that it is a national public goods, so the main investment burden should be shifted to the central government; Appropriation system deficiencies mainly lie in the fact that the money originally belonging to the migrant children can't transfer into the place where the flow into, causing the phenomenon called"financial vacuum". Though in recent years, the central government has enacted many laws and regulations to solve the problem, such as the"two-first"policy to try to find a breakthrough to the problem, the result is not very optimistic, since the central government has no stable and enough funds input, only has attempted to order the local government to arrange funds themselves, leaving the problem unsolved.This paper has made active exploration to solve this problem, pointing out that the bottleneck to this problem can be overcome through education vouchers system and improvement in transfer payment system. It states that the central government may try to set up a special fund for migrant children and calls for the clarification of responsibility taken by all levels of government, in order to guarantee the fund resources used to invest migrant children's compulsory education.This paper also attempts to solve the problem in a longer time span and try to outlook.