On Mutual Trusteeship of Public and Private Schools (20 18)

A few days ago, I saw the news that a private education group entrusted a public primary school, and I remembered some other cases in which public and private schools entrusted management. I have exchanged views with several comrades who are more concerned about the development of private education on the topic of entrusted management of public and private schools, and I feel that there are many different understandings. I want to talk about my personal views and discuss them with you.

At the beginning of its establishment, some private schools are difficult to form a lean and efficient management team in a short time, lacking experience in education, teaching and management, and the quality of running schools is difficult to guarantee. Entrusting high-level public schools for management and introducing advanced school-running concepts and mature management models can quickly improve the level of running schools and form social influence. Entrusting the management team of high-quality private schools to manage, introducing the management system and operation mechanism of private schools and activating the vitality of running schools are also effective measures to transform weak public schools.

As a supporting document of the new Law on the Promotion of Private Education, Article 9 of the State Council No.81Opinions on Encouraging Social Forces to Establish Education to Promote the Healthy Development of Private Education explores multi-agent cooperation in running schools and proposes to actively encourage public schools and private schools to purchase management services, teaching resources and scientific research results from each other. After that, most of the implementation opinions issued by provincial governments reiterated this formulation.

It is simple to actively encourage public schools and private schools to purchase management services from each other, but in practice, there are many practical problems to be studied whether public schools entrust private schools to manage or private schools entrust public schools to manage. Especially the following aspects.

That is, who has the right to decide to entrust a school to manage other schools and who has the right to decide that a school should be managed by other schools. This problem mainly focuses on the fact that public schools are managed by private schools and entrusted to manage private schools. The problem of private schools is simpler.

Whoever has the right to entrust a private school to manage a public school and who has the right to agree to entrust a private school to manage a public school should be the organizer or manager of a public school, that is, the government or the education administrative department. Theoretically speaking, under the current system, public schools themselves should have no right to entrust other schools to manage themselves, nor do they have the right to accept other schools to entrust management teams to manage private schools without approval.

As for whether private schools entrust the government (or education department) to manage public schools or entrust public schools to manage themselves, personally, it is enough for the school decision-making body (Council or board of directors) to make a decision.

The fundamental purpose of realizing entrusted management should be to introduce the management team of high-quality schools, learn from its advanced management mode and operation mechanism, and improve the management level and running quality of managed schools.

Entrust management should have a clear goal, which can be set from many dimensions such as system construction, teacher training, teaching quality, student management, logistics management, social reputation and so on. There should be both qualitative aspects and quantitative questions, and they should be relatively clear and easy to assess.

In the final analysis, entrusted management is a kind of service purchase, and spending money to buy services. How much money to spend, or how much management fee to pay, should be to calculate the management cost, plus an appropriate premium profit, the two sides bargain to a certain amount.

The author believes that the government entrusts private schools to public schools with weak management, and the entrusted management expenses should come from financial allocations. Of course, public schools themselves have no legal way to raise funds themselves. The management fees obtained from the management of private schools by public schools belong to the income of state-owned resources and should be included in the budget management, and shall not be arbitrarily disposed of without authorization.

During the implementation of entrusted management, the entrusting party must follow up the assessment, strengthen the process assessment and evaluation according to the agreement reached in advance, and reward and punish and pay management fees according to the agreed objectives.

The whole entrustment management should formulate a legal, compliant, specific and reasonable entrustment agreement that clearly expresses the wishes of both parties; In the process of implementation, both parties strictly fulfill the rights and obligations stipulated in the agreement and realize the goal of entrusted management.

On the practical level, the entrustment management agreement between public and private institutions is often signed between two institutions, which is not appropriate in reason. Of course, this kind of behavior is generally authorized by the organizers or managers of public schools, or at least acquiesced; But I think authorization according to law is not enough.

Due to various reasons, the entrusted management between public schools and private schools sometimes breaks through the boundary of entrusted management and evolves into the establishment of private schools by public schools, or public schools operate according to the mechanism of private schools.

Upon approval, public schools can entrust private schools with management. They can appoint teams to manage private schools according to the entrustment agreement, and even send a small number of teachers to coach and help private schools improve their management level and school-running level. But in the final analysis, the output is management services, which is to manage schools rather than running schools.

The problem in this respect is that some entrusted public schools have not defined the boundaries between school organizers and managers, and even turned entrusted private schools into private branches of public schools. The teachers and facilities of the two schools are randomly distributed with the original private schools. This practice completely takes over the evaluation of personnel, finance and property management of private schools, damages the autonomy of private schools, damages the rights and interests of teachers and students in public schools, violates the relevant financial discipline, and does not conform to the spirit of the Law on the Promotion of Private Education and other laws and regulations.

Private schools are entrusted by the government to manage public schools, which should be a typical service purchased by the government. The management service fee should come from financial allocation and cannot change the nature of public schools.

In reality, many places give private schools some other policies to solve the management cost problem, either for financial considerations or for other pursuits. For example, under the premise of maintaining the original enrollment area and enrollment scale, schools are allowed to recruit some high-priced private school students, and the fees offset the management service fees, and even make up for the lack of funds for running public schools, turning public schools into one school, two systems, and changing the nature of public schools in disguise. Personally, this practice violates the spirit of the Private Education Promotion Law and its implementing regulations and other relevant laws and regulations, and also deviates from the correct track of entrusted management.

Of course, truth is truth, and reality is reality. Many unreasonable things also exist in a large number in reality and will exist for a long time in a certain period of time. I won't discuss the specific case.