From Public Schools to “Food Market Schools”: The Tale of Privatizing Shanghai Pubic Schools
Abstract
Being a TA has given me the opportunity to discuss school choice, especially the privatization movement of public education via charter schools with my students, who tended to side with the advocates for school choice. While some of them had reservations about vouchers, they did not seem to mind charter schools’ impact on public education. In this paper, I present the tale of how charter schools’ counterparts in Shanghai—so called “non-government/state schools”—have caused detrimental effects on many Shanghai public schools. Unlike U.S. charter schools, the non-government schools in Shanghai started in the 1990s for abolishing the notion of “key schools” (which means first-rate schools in Chinese), improving equal access to quality education and promoting the “nearby enrollment” policy. Ironically, the government’s good intentions soon became a catalyst for privatizing public schools in Shanghai, causing regular public schools to lose local students to non-government ones and gradually degraded to so-called “Food market schools”—schools only the children of migrant workers who work at the food markets will attend. I hope this tale will help further the understanding of the charter school debate here.
Keywords
charter schools; privatization of public education; non-government/state schools; international context
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Jin, Yiming Ms., "From Public Schools to “Food Market Schools”: The Tale of Privatizing Shanghai Pubic Schools" (2018). Georgia Educational Research Association Conference. 19.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/gera/2018/2018/19
From Public Schools to “Food Market Schools”: The Tale of Privatizing Shanghai Pubic Schools
Being a TA has given me the opportunity to discuss school choice, especially the privatization movement of public education via charter schools with my students, who tended to side with the advocates for school choice. While some of them had reservations about vouchers, they did not seem to mind charter schools’ impact on public education. In this paper, I present the tale of how charter schools’ counterparts in Shanghai—so called “non-government/state schools”—have caused detrimental effects on many Shanghai public schools. Unlike U.S. charter schools, the non-government schools in Shanghai started in the 1990s for abolishing the notion of “key schools” (which means first-rate schools in Chinese), improving equal access to quality education and promoting the “nearby enrollment” policy. Ironically, the government’s good intentions soon became a catalyst for privatizing public schools in Shanghai, causing regular public schools to lose local students to non-government ones and gradually degraded to so-called “Food market schools”—schools only the children of migrant workers who work at the food markets will attend. I hope this tale will help further the understanding of the charter school debate here.
