Abstract
Direct subsidy scheme (DSS) schools are a product of Hong Kong’s market-oriented educational reform, mirroring global reform that champions parental choice and school marketization. Such schools have greater autonomy in matters of curricula, staffing, and student admission. Although advocates of the DSS credit it with increasing educational diversity and competition, little empirical is available to back up such claim. In this study, we use data from the Program for International Student Assessment to compare student achievements in DSS schools with those in traditional public schools. We find that while DSS students’ test scores in math, reading, and science have improved significantly over time, though the variation is much greater. Changes in mean performance have been anchored by a substantial change in student composition. DSS schools have a higher proportion of students with high socioeconomic status than with medium and low socioeconomic status. DSS schools also amplify the effects that family background have on student achievement. These findings raise concerns that the DSS approach favors a small minority of students.
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Notes
A form of pension fund. Teachers and their employers, schools, are both required to contribute.
Each DSS school is eligible for a full subsidy from the government in the form of a block grant calculated on the basis of the DSS unit subsidy rate—i.e., the average unit cost of an aided school place—and the number of enrolled students at the DSS school, if the fee level of the DSS school is no more than \(2{\frac {1}{3}}\) times the DSS unit subsidy rate. Indeed, the annual school fees for primary school students range from $10,500 to $78,000, and for secondary school students in junior and senior forms range from $700 to over $65,000 and from $1600 to over $98,000, respectively. As a reference, the median household monthly income is about $23,000 (Census and Statistics Department 2014).
It is true that some DSS schools charge very high tuition fees, but there are also low-fee DSS schools. Yung (2006) analyzed the fees charged by DSS schools and found that about one-third were high-fee schools, which created the image of luxury schools. However, no analysis has been conducted in recent years, and thus, the present scale of this phenomenon is not known.
Another thing that precludes us from using earlier cycles is that those test scores were not equated in a way that enables cross-cycle comparison. See OECD (2009) for details.
Note that the schools sampled in each wave were different, even if they were given the same school identification number. Thus, a school-level longitudinal analysis is not possible. We only compare different types of schools in this analysis.
The only exception is science subject in international schools.
We fit multiple models by adding interaction terms one at a time. We eventually exclude those terms that are not significant.
We also tried to control for school specificity by using a school fixed effect, but the number of schools was too low for the model to converge.
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Zhou, Y., Wong, YL. & Li, W. Educational choice and marketization in Hong Kong: the case of direct subsidy scheme schools. Asia Pacific Educ. Rev. 16, 627–636 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-015-9402-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-015-9402-9