School Budget and Resource Allocation of Bilingual Education in China: Lessons from Different Bilingual Programs in Yunnan Province

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday II)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: The challenges of approaching a sustainable minority education

Proposal

In the context of national integration and globalization, the focus of bilingual education policy in China had been expanded dynamically from “Plurality within Unity” to equal opportunities in the national and global labor markets. It seems that there is always a tense between the government’s multilingual policies mainly based on the ethnic groups’ needs of cultural heritage preservation and the tendency to put more emphasis on Chinese and English rather than minority language based on the individual needs for further competencies for more kinds of social and economic success. As a result, bilingual education in China has been described as on the horns of a dilemma (Rehamo & Harrell, 2018).
Plenty of researches had explored the ideological evolution of China’s multilingualism policies from historical perspectives. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese government has described China as a unified multiethnic nation and sought to consistently guarantee the equal social and political rights of all ethnic groups in the country (Banks, 2014; Rehamo & Harrel, 2018). At the same time, efforts at promoting bilingual education confront what He Baogang (2014) has called ‘Chinese linguistic imperialism’ which leaded to an increasingly wide gap between the national policy ideals and the actual needs at the individual level. Some studies had revealed that bilingual students were under-severed due to the lack of qualified bilingual teachers, inadequate and inappropriate curricular materials, and so forth (Ma, 2014; Postiglione, etc., 2014; Tsung, 2014). While other studies had investigated different narratives of minority students from various family backgrounds and school experiences. In the face of rapid social change and the spread of standard national language and international language, some bilingual students became even more academically disadvantaged by the huge burden of trilingual study (Zhao, 2014).
Between governmental bilingual education policy and individual students’ education experience, school plays a key role which connect and interact with both the upper and the lower level in the school system. Although many important decisions are usually made at the national and provincial level, a few studies had testified the significance of school leadership and that the resource allocation decisions at the school level could have direct impact on students’ educational experiences and outcomes. A case study on a new dual language campus in a midsized city of America had demonstrated that successful implementation of bilingual education may require substantial reallocation of resources without necessarily creating additional expenditure in the budget (Knight Izequierdo & DeMatthews, 2016). Owing to the pressure of test-based accountability imposed by No Child Left Behind, school principals in ten New York City schools chose to eliminate bilingual education programs in case they were more likely to be labeled low performing and risk sanctions (Menken & Solorza, 2014). Under the constrains of regulations and resources, schools may try to find and keep a balance between nation’s demands and individuals’ needs through formal or informal ways of implementation.
Empirical study of the schools’ behaviors at the implementation stage from the school budget and resource allocation perspectives could help uncover the black box during the bilingual education process. The logic and influential factors behind the choices and the educational results related to the choices could facilitate our understanding in the questions as follows:
What’s the reality of the financial, human and other resources’ distribution for bilingual education programs at the school level?
What really matter in the resource allocation decision for bilingual education at school level?
Have schools made use of existing resources efficiently to fully support bilingual teachers and students? And what kinds of additional resources are needed for bilingual programs?
How to amend resource allocation structures through school budget tools to improve academic achievement of bilingual education?
Yunnan province is in China’s southwest and has the most ethnic minorities in China, which make up about one-third of the province's population. These ethnic minorities live together over vast areas in the region while some live in individual concentrated communities in small areas. Moreover, many ethnic minorities settled in rural and remote mountain areas and suffered a lot from their disadvantaged socioeconomic status. Bilingual education for such a highly multilingual and ethnically diverse population is of great importance and it is practical and viable to do research at the individual school level due to the demographic heterogeneity.
By describing and analyzing the budget and other financial and human resource statistics of different bilingual education programs, this research intends to present comparisons of the current resources available among different kinds of bilingual education programs (for instance, one-way vs. two-way and/or two-way vs. Chinese-English bilingual education). Besides, in contrast with the similarities and differences of the resource allocation in different bilingual education patterns, this research will try to explore the driven forces and influential factors behind the budgetary decision-making process combined with some further in-depth interviews with the stakeholders of bilingual education, such as principals, teachers, students and their parents. Consequently, this research would discover how the resource allocation impact the bilingual education outcomes and if there are any flexible and creative ways to reallocate resources more practically and effectively based on various bilingual student needs through school budget tools.
Still, this research has its own limitations. First and foremost, it could hardly deduce the causality between resource allocation and student achievement for there are a variety of other factors which have impacts on students’ academic outcomes, such as the pedagogue adopted by bilingual teachers, the interaction between teachers and students, peer effect and parental education. Nevertheless, the correlation between resource allocation and bilingual education programs is worthy making a thorough inquiry for some clear pictures of the implementation process within individual schools and different bilingual programs need to be presented and the obstacles and barriers hindering the improvement for the bilingual education also need to be explored. The combinations of all influential factors mentioned above into the further empirical studies from school level to grade or class level, even discipline level could be further research directions in the future.

Key Words: School Budget; Resource Allocation; Bilingual Education;

Author

• Xue Zhang, Yunnan Normal University