Evaluating the Free Early Childhood Education Policies in Taiwan with the 3A2S Framework

Abstract

The policy of ‘free’ education for young children has come to be a concern in some parts of the Asia-Pacific region in the recent decades. When the early childhood education (ece) policies of Hong Kong, Macau, Shenzhen and some of the provinces on the Mainland China were being studied, the policies in Taiwan have also received some attention. In this paper, the ece policies of Taiwan have been reviewed with the 3A2S framework which refers to accessibility, affordability, accountability, sustainability, and social justice. In doing so, the most up-to-date data from the national and educational statistics of Taiwan were used for the analysis. This policy review does allow us to see how Taiwan has dealt with ece. While there are indications that some of the elements of the framework have had positive effect, others require additional research and reform in the future.

* I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Eva Chen for her comments on the early version of this paper.

Introduction

Some countries in the Asia-Pacific region have launched ‘free education’ policies for early childhood education (ece). It is interesting to note how different places in the region have looked at the issue of ‘free education’. In China, the State Council of Chinese government published the National Program for Medium and Long-term Educational Reform and Development (2010-2020) to increase the input in ece in 2010 1 In Hong Kong, the 15-year free education policy has triggered controversies as points out. 2 On the other hand, the Ministry of Education in Singapore has started operations of 5 public kindergartens in January 2014 3 (Li and Wang, in press). Instead of the 15-year free education, the Korean government announced a plan to offer universal free kindergarten education to all 5-year-olds in 2001. 4 Similarly, Taiwan has also been active in pursuing ece policies in the past decades. In this article, we first provide a very brief history of ece in Taiwan and then review the current policies of free education, particularly for ece. We then evaluate how the free ece policies in Taiwan have been implemented using the theoretical framework of affordability, accessibility, accountability, sustainability, and social justice (3A2S). We cite Taiwan’s national and educational statistics to examine the ece policies through the five dimensions have been achieved. The aim of this policy review is to show how policies that have been implemented have affected ece in Taiwan.

A Brief History of the Early Childhood Education in Taiwan

It is meaningful to take a brief look at the history of ece in Taiwan after World War ii. In the 1950s, the increasing number of women joining the workforce created an increased demand for daycare for children. 5 In 1956, Taiwanese government officially recognized ece centers that focused on 4 to 6 years old children as kindergartens (Lin and Ching, 2011). 6 In the 1970s, the economic prosperity enabled the government to attend more closely to ece 7 with the launch of the Child Welfare Law in 1973, the Daycare Center Establishment Measure in 1977, the Early Childhood Education Act and the Guidelines of Establishment of Nursery School in 1981, and the Statute for Encouragement of establishing private kindergartens in 1983. 8 In 1994, over 200 educational organizations initiated a call for educational reform and urged the government to form a Commission on Education Reform. 9 In 1998, An “Education Reform Action Plan” was produced with 12 key points for improvement and one of them was to make ece more accessible to families with 5-year-old children. 10 In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a number of steps were taken by the government to reform ece. 11 In the 2000s, the central government in Taiwan announced that the centralized ece voucher program targeted 5-year-old children which would address three critical issues in the field: (a) more efficient use of government resources; (b) improve the quality and standards of ece services; and (c) alleviate the financial burden on families by minimizing the cost differences between the public and private schools. 12 As this brief history points out, the government of Taiwan has initiated many policies to make sure that it would make ece more accessible and affordable to its population. This paper, in the later sections, will analyze the impact of these policies in Taiwan. Referring to Chen and Li, 13 Taipei, as the capital city of Taiwan, received much attention from the implementation of the revolutionary measures to improve ece. For this reason, our focus in this article is to see how the free ece policies in Taiwan are implemented and some of the data in Taipei will be used for discussion.

The 3A2S Framework for Evaluating ece Policies

Li, Wong and Wang proposed a theoretical framework of 3A’s to evaluate policies of early childhood education namely accessibility, affordability and accountability. 14 They argue that these three elements are the requirements to assess “a truly scientific and appropriate free ece policy.” 15 According to Li and Wang, all governments have to also consider the sustainability of their new free education policy very carefully. In Li and Wang’s study, they adopted the dimensions of affordability, accessibility, accountability, and sustainability to review four provinces from the mainland China for implementing the newly-launched free education policies in ece. 16 Li and Wang also think that educational policies should consider the principle of social justice, which they define as fairness of education funding and equal distribution among groups of people and among all entities within the group who receives appropriate relief and compensation. 17 In summarizing the ideas above, we review the free ece policies in Taiwan through the theoretical framework of 3A2S’s: 18 (1) accessibility: every preschool-age child can easily attend the nearby kindergarten; (2) affordability: every family can easily afford the fees of the chosen kindergarten, and some fee exemptions could be offered to the needy families; (3) accountability: for every kindergarten, be it public or private, the extra fiscal input provided by the policy should be accountable to the government for improving education quality; (4) sustainability: the government can sustain the education development; and (5) social justice: the government can distribute the education resources and opportunities equally among different strata and groups.

Understanding the Accessibility of ece Policies in Taiwan

Accessibility as it has here been defined implies that every preschool-age child can easily attend a nearby kindergarten. 19 When we review the free ece policy in Taiwan in terms of accessibility, we take a look at whether children in Taiwan have the opportunity to easily attend their nearby kindergartens. Taking Taipei as an example, there were 2604 kindergartens per 1000 square kilometers in 2013. 20 If we say that there are almost 260 kindergartens within every 100 square kilometers, the distribution is equitable for the provision of services to young children. In 2002, the private kindergartens accounted for 65.5% and public 34.4%, which is twice the number, but in 2008 private kindergartens took 58% of the total number of students, and the public kindergartens enrolled 42%. In 2008, the total number of four to six year-old students was 170,765 according to the statistics from Taiwan Ministry of Education (see Table 1). The private kindergartens took in twice the number of students of the public kindergartens. 21

If we look at the issue of accessibility from the point of view of the number of kindergartens made available in both public and private, we note that the total number of public kindergartens between 1998 and 2008 increased from 1,065 to 1,544, whereas the number of private kindergartens decreased from 1,809 to 1,651 during the same time period (see Table 2). The implication is that public policy has contributed to the increase in the number of public kindergartens.

table 1

Kindergartens surveys in Taiwan from 1998 to 2008

Source: Taiwan Ministry of Education (http://www.moe.gov.tw).

table 2

Percentage increase in number of public kindergartens, and decrease in number of private kindergartens from 1998 to 2008

What is notable is that the total number of kindergartens between 1998 and 2008 jumped from 2,874 to 3,195, an increase of nearly 11.2 percent. It is also worth noting that the population of kindergarten children decreased by nearly 19.0 percent during the same time period as shown in Table 3.

According to the Ministry of Education, until 2014, the total number of public and private kindergartens was 6,560, a dramatic increase from 2008 (http://eng.stat.gov.tw/). It can be surmised that with a decrease in the population of the children in kindergartens and an increase in the number of public kindergartens, that access has increased. In addition, according to the education statistical indicators in 2014, accessibility could be assessed in terms of teacher-student ratio. Data show that the ratio was 1 teacher to 9.89 students in 2013 as compared with 1 to 10.68 students in 2008 (see Table 4).

table 3

Percentage increase in the total number of kindergartens and decrease in population of kindergarteners from 1998 to 2008

table 4

Number of preschools, preschool educators and students from 2008 to 2013

Source: Taiwan Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, Executive Yuan (http://eng.stat.gov.tw).

Ho argued that the voucher policy in Taiwan was a political campaign purposefully pushed by the private kindergartens in an effort to protect their businesses. 22 He pointed out that the growth of public ece services in the 1990s was largely perceived as a threat against the livelihood of the private kindergarten owners. As a result, private kindergarten owners were careful to align their goals with those of the educational reform, acquiring support from the academic world, from families, and from both major political parties. 23 Private kindergartens are still the mainstream in Taiwan in the decade of 2000 where the total number of private kindergartens which shared nearly 60% of the total market until 2008 according to the statistics from the Ministry of Education. 24 For those families who cannot afford to pay an expensive kindergarten education, they are able to access only 4 public kindergartens out of 10 kindergartens which are affordable for them. Nevertheless, the accessibility will be improved in principle as the population of children in Taiwan is decreasing.

Understanding the Affordability of ece Policies in Taiwan

The idea behind affordability is that every family can easily afford the fees of the chosen kindergarten, and some fee exemptions could be offered to needy families. 25 According to Chen and Li, 26 the voucher program provided ntd 10,000 per year (about $333 in u.s. currency) for each family and the vouchers covered only about 5% to 15% of the total cost of sending children to pre-primary school. Almost every penny of the government’s budget for early childhood education was spent on public kindergartens prior to the implementation of the voucher policy and parents had to pay for the entire cost of private kindergartens without that subsidy. 27 In the 1990s the tuition fee for private kindergartens exceeded the tuition charged by the public universities, and it was only slightly lower than that for private universities. 28 In 2004, the Ministry of Education initiated a plan to more fully support the education of 5-year-old children from the disadvantaged families. 29 This plan, which was extended in 2007 to all families with 5-year-old children, 30 improved the accessibility and affordability of the policies. It was especially beneficial for those families with low socioeconomic status or from rural communities in Taiwan. Ying-Jeou Ma, current President of Taiwan, promised to continue the efforts to make kindergarten education free for all 5-year-old children instead of relying on vouchers to subsidize the costs of schooling during his 2008 presidential campaign. 31 Even though the promise became true, the voucher program only targeted 5-year-old children which provided no benefits for children of other ages who were also attending kindergarten. Also, the voucher program supported all families in the form of reimbursements; including those who were financially disadvantaged and still had to pay kindergarten fees themselves in advance. 32

In 2004, the Ministry of Education began promoting the creation of government-utility, privately-operated kindergartens. 33 However, this policy did receive strong pushback from both teachers and parents in the field since the government did not explicitly prohibit public kindergartens from being registered into government-utility, privately-operated kindergartens. 34 The Taipei City Parent Education Development Organization also voiced concerns that the possible increase in government-utility, privately-operated kindergartens will cause a decrease in public kindergartens; because the former would charge private school tuition, the costs of ece would therefore pose a financial burden, particularly for the low income families. 35 Another plan in 2008 was launched in 3 phases: (1) to increase the funding for the families with 5-year-old children; (2) to provide special consideration to ethnic minority students and students from remote communities, e.g., covering transportation costs and afterschool program fees in addition to school tuition; and (3) to provide free public kindergarten schooling to eligible students, while private pre-primary schooling would be partially subsidized, with the amount of subsidy based on family income as well as the total number of children (up to 3 children per family) in the family. 36

Referring to the National Statistics of Taiwan, 37 the figures of Taiwan’s household income distribution are compared with those from Asian-Pacific region such as Hong Kong (see Table 5). The Gini’s coefficient of Taiwan was 0.338 in 2012 (http://eng.stat.gov.tw/), which implies that the distribution of income is more equal than Hong Kong or the u.s. with the Gini coefficients of 0.521 and 0.477 respectively. The population, as a whole, has wealth that is not concentrated in the hand of a few. Thus, it can be argued that each household has relatively similar financial capacity for consumption, in this case, of kindergarten education.

table 5

Household income distribution among Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan and the u.s.

Source: Taiwan Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, Executive Yuan (http://eng.stat.gov.tw).

According to the Consumer Price Index (cpi) of Taiwan from 1960 to 2014 gathered from the National Statistics of Taiwan, 38 one observes the following using 2011 as the latest base (see Table 6). The economy between 1960 and 1970 experienced slow price rises. However, during the period of 1970 and 1980, there was a dramatic increase in the index. From 1980 to 2011, the price index only shows a gradual increase but manageable inflation. Another way of looking at this

table 6

Consumer price index in Taiwan from 1960 to 2013

Source: Taiwan Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, Executive Yuan (http://eng.stat.gov.tw).

is that the population as a whole was not significantly affected in their consumption by the relatively low inflation rate in the economy. The effort of the Taiwan government in launching the free education to 5-year-old children was a very good start for implementing a policy; especially when the government offers some fee exemptions to the needy families. None-theless, only the tuition fees of public kindergartens can be fully subsidized. Therefore, the poor families can easily afford the public kindergartens but not the private kindergartens. Unless all public kindergartens are available for all needy families as free education, only then one can say that the affordability has been addressed properly.

Understanding the Accountability of ece Policies in Taiwan

Accountability has been looked upon as a measure whereby every kindergarten, be it public or private, with the extra fiscal input provided by the policy should be accountable to the government for improving education quality. 39 Kindergartens in Taiwan have to go through an accreditation mechanism. For example, kindergarten accreditation indicators in Taipei include such elements as preschool administration, teaching and nursing, and the indicators of teaching facility and public safety. 40 The evaluation of ece centers, specifically the curriculum used in the classroom has been a major issue in ece improvement. According to Hsue, 41 evaluations of ece centers began in 1989. A formalized effort to evaluate the kindergartens began in 1994; from 1993 to 1997, both public and private kindergartens throughout Taiwan underwent one round of evaluations, overseen by the Ministry of Education. In 2000, the government re-emphasized the importance of kindergarten evaluation, announcing that kindergartens should be evaluated every 3 to 5 years. The evaluations focused on administration, course content, educational materials and facilities, safety measures, and degree of integration with the community. 42 The evaluation is currently reward-based, in that kindergartens with high evaluations receive a monetary reward in addition to remaining certified for the next 5 years; underperforming kindergartens, by contrast, are asked to make improvements before undergoing another evaluation 6 months after receiving the initial results. 43

As mentioned before, the Ministry of Education began promoting the creation of government-utility, privately-operated kindergartens in 2004. 44 Chen and Li explained that these kindergartens would become a joint venture between the government and the private sector, with the government providing the hardware and the private sector providing the software. 45 According to Chen and Li, 46 these types of kindergartens would fall under the jurisdiction of the local government in each city or county which would be subject to more careful regulation compared to other privately-run kindergartens. In this perspective, government-utility, privately-operated kindergartens would serve to increase ece accountability. However, according to Ho, private kindergartens offered more attractive features like favorable school schedules, more innovative and flexible curricula, and more novel teaching techniques. 47 By contrast, public kindergartens had longer vacations with fewer hours of learning which were less convenient for working parents. Private kindergartens as profit-making organizations are obligated to pay business taxes and higher utility rates. As a result, some private kindergartens compensated by enrolling more students than the educational regulations permitted. Staff at private kindergartens tended to be underpaid, with a total income of less than three‐quarters of that paid to staff in public kindergartens. 48 Some private kindergartens even now operate underground and do not register with the government so as to avoid legal regulations and enjoy a cost advantage. Therefore, these private kindergartens escaped from the quality assurance mechanism that influenced the accountability concerns of the policies. Referring to Ho, even though the Deliberative Committee on Education Reform estimated that there were around 2,500 unregistered kindergartens as compared with 2,484 registered schools, the government has no intention to close down the unregistered private kindergartens because the schools had absorbed so many children that the action may cause problems to officials and society. 49 Quality will be affected due to various curriculum and structures offered by public, private kindergartens and government-utility, privately-operated kindergartens. Therefore, accountability is still an important agenda for further advancement of ece in Taiwan.

Understanding the Sustainability of ece Policies in Taiwan

In addition to the other policy elements, sustainability by the government of educational development is critical. 50 In the past, there are two early childhood programs in Taiwan—kindergartens and preschools—each of which is regulated by a different agency. Kindergartens are regulated by the local education authorities and are educational institutions that serve children between the ages of four and six. On the other hand, preschools are regulated by a social welfare agency and were traditionally considered to be social welfare institutions that serve children aged between one month and six. Even though the two programs were regulated by different administrators in terms of fundamental functions and systems, both teaching practices and learning environments emphasize care and education in a similar manner. And recently, both kindergartens and preschools have been finally combined by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan. 51 According to Hsieh, 52 early childhood education is not included in the 9-year compulsory education in Taiwan, and parents are free to decide when to send their children to school. But the Ministry of Education is developing 12-year compulsory education as one of the objectives for 2014 claimed in their official website. It shows that the Taiwan government is determined to step forward to accomplish better education for the next generation. Sustainability here is promised with the sincerity of the government.

On the other hand, since ece is developing in Taiwan, all kinds of early childhood programs have flourished in Taiwan with the lack of a standardized curriculum and the powerful advocates of Western curricular models. 53 Hsieh reports that Montessori instruction, the Project Approach, and Waldorf education are commonly seen in Taiwan’s early childhood programs. 54 However, Hsieh claims that expectations and ways of educating young children in the traditional Chinese society also influence Taiwan’s method of early childhood education. 55 It is often reported that most Taiwanese teachers struggle with demonstrating the spirit of a child-centered curriculum (Liao 1998; Lu 1998). Teachers struggle between adopting academically-oriented and child-centered curricula in their classrooms because they are not sufficiently prepared for being child-centered teachers and a child centered curriculum differs from the traditional education they received. In addition, students’ parents may expect teachers to emphasize their children’s academic performance rather than their overall development. 56 Early childhood education is viewed as a preparation for elementary education so that children may be required to do worksheets every day. 57 The sustainability of a policy depends on whether the policy makers have a clear goal for implementation and further development. The struggle among kindergartens and preschools diversifies the quality of services available to families and children. The dilemmas between westernized and local curriculum also divides the curriculum goal of this national policy in Taiwan. This part may give challenges to the government to develop a comprehensive curriculum that balance the needs of different stakeholders so as to increase sustainability of the policies.

Understanding the Social Justice of ece Policies in Taiwan

Social justice in education implies that the government can distribute the educational resources and opportunities equally among different strata and groups. 58 The issue of kindergarten education could not avoid becoming politicized. 59 When we come to the political development of Taiwan, as political democracy came into reality in 1987 while the Kuomintang (kmt) government lifted the 38 years of martial law, electoral politics became more competitive so that getting peoples’ votes began to increase in importance. Democratization empowered the citizens and consumers of preschool education service in two ways. 60 First, government officials became more sensitive to the popular demands of parents. Second, liberalized environment enabled these demands to be organized into a powerful social force to affect policy change. According to Ho, democratization also engendered a new movement for education reform as urban middle-class parents, students, and feminists strived for better education. 61 Ho further criticized that the potential advocates or beneficiaries of public schooling were not organized so that they could not resist the successful bargaining of private kindergarten business. 62 As a result, it causes an imbalance that comes from the different interest groups who have different needs in society. This is where the difficulty lies when it comes to safeguarding social justice in society.

According to Education Statistical Indicators 2014, the expenditure of kindergartens increased from nt101,228 to 119,219. This represents an increase of 17.78% from the national plan for ece free education that began in 2008 (see Table 7). However, this is still not ideal as the expenditure to kindergartens was just a little piece of the pie (3.44% of the total expenditure to all levels in 2010) as compared with other levels in the education sector (see Table 8). It shows their concern on social justice, however, the less financial resources allocated to ece, the less the support beneficiaries can receive.

table 7

Government expenditure on kindergartens from 2002 to 2011

Source: Taiwan Department of Statistics, Ministry of Education (http://stats.moe.gov.tw/).

table 8

Composition of educational expenditure at all levels of schools

Unit: %.

Source: Taiwan Department of Statistics, Ministry of Education (http://stats.moe.gov.tw/).

Nevertheless, the free education policy in Taiwan that was successfully implemented in 2011 highlighted several considerations which were oriented towards social justice. The plan in 2011 provided additional funding for children from disadvantaged families with a supplemental plan which was also implemented in the same year (see Table 9), the Ministry of Interior provided more funding for disadvantaged families to send their children to daycare (Taiwan Ministry of Education, 2011). 63 This is in line with the philosophy of the most democratic societies where education is considered a human right and should be offered to as many children as possible. 64 In general, the free education policy showed the concern of social justice to society and the determination of the Taiwan government to provide greater input to ece to address this concern.

table 9

Tuition subsidy of public and private kindergartens to low income families in 2011

Source: Taiwan Department of Statistics, Ministry of Education (http://stats.moe.gov.tw/).

Conclusion

In general, the above discussion aims at evaluating how the free ece policies in Taiwan were implemented using the five dimensions of a 3A2S framework. Taiwan’s national and education statistics were used for this purpose. We evaluated how government policy addressed the issue of: (1) Accessibility; (2) Affordability; (3) Accountability; (4) Sustainability; and (5) Social Justice. To summarize, the accessibility of free ece policies in Taiwan is healthy for children to easily attend a nearby kindergarten, however, it will be better if all of them can access a public kindergarten nearby with tuition fees paid fully by the government. The affordability was strengthened by the implementation of tuition-free pre-school education and care for 5-year-olds and it appears that this policy will extend to other age levels. Since the 12-year compulsory education is kicking off, a comprehensive plan for quality assurance mechanism, curriculum and teachers’ development is essential for improving accountability. The ece policies entails more of the objectives for 2014 of the Taiwan government. This supports the sustainability of the policies. The benefits to the disadvantaged and low income families also indicated the concern from the Taiwan government for the issue of social justice as well.

The Taiwan government is facing many challenges to implement the free ece policies. We found the following related to ece in Taiwan based on our analysis: (1) the competitions among private and public kindergartens shifts the financial burden to the government and some to the larger society; (2) the inconsistent systems between kindergartens and daycare centers has caused barriers to advance the quality assurance mechanism; and (3) the swing towards westernized style kindergarten education which is in conflict with the traditional Taiwan values raises a question of the sustainability of the culturally-appropriate curriculum. Last but not least, even though the ece policies in Taiwan had its origins from a grassroots movement, it has created a positive tension in the political parties. This is definitely a critical element for a national policy’s healthy development. In summary, although no one policy could be perfectly applied to every eligible citizen in a society, the recent ece policies in Taiwan demonstrate a determination to address the needs of Taiwanese children.

To conclude, this policy review cannot provide a full picture of the free ece policies in Taiwan, especially the school enrollment, distribution among public and private kindergartens, school fees, and numbers of teachers are varied among different provinces in Taiwan. Furthermore, the official data of this policy review were from the government documents and websites that may not give a complete picture. Nevertheless, we intend this paper to be an important start to evaluate the free ece policies in Taiwan with the 3A2S framework which could be a useful reference for reviewing those free ece policies in other places in the Asia-Pacific region.