The Educational Priority Areas Policy in Taiwan: A policy analysis from multiple perspectives

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Politics and Policy Discourses for Education Justice in East Asia

Proposal

The education resource and achievement gap between Taiwan’s rural and urban areas has long been a challenge in the country’s pursuit of educational equity. The Legislative Yuan points to a decline in student numbers, lack of teachers, low percent of qualified teachers, high personnel turnover, and the threat of school cut-down and mergers as major issues imperiling the education quality in rural areas (Li, 2017). With 1,205 public rural elementary and middle schools educating around 109,000 students (i.e., 4.7% of total students), Taiwan has a small but considerable population affected by these prolonged education circumstances (Ministry of Education, 2021).
The Ministry of Education (MOE) has rolled out many projects targeting remote schools’ academic achievement in response to the rural-urban divide of education environment and outcome. These remedial policies, however, have failed to effectively narrow the student achievement gap between urban and rural areas (Sheu & Yeh, 2015). In The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ’s 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), 17.8% of Taiwanese students fail to achieve basic reading skills relevant to their grade level. The performance gap between students from higher and lower socio-economic backgrounds is equivalent to three years of learning (OECE, 2019. Geographical differences further exacerbate the educational gap. According to the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) 2019’s Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the number of students in rural areas who are lagging in math and science in 4th grade is 2 to 3 times more to that in urban areas (IEA, 2020). The Legislative Yuan continues to treat the rural-urban education divide as a significant challenge to promoting education equity and enhancing social justice in Taiwan (Li, 2017).
To respond to rural areas’ distinct educational needs, the Taiwanese government sought European countries’ experience in promoting educational priority areas. Originating in 1960s England, the Educational Priority Area (EPA) policy sought to proactively improve underserved neighborhoods’ school and community environments to combat education inequity (Blackstone, 1967). Taiwan’s MOE borrowed British policy and established its version of EPA policy in 1996. The Taiwanese EPA policy is a central government’s school improvement grant for traditionally underserved schools. And the EPA policy is now one of the longest-standing and ongoing policies targeting Taiwan’s rural and minority educational development.
The passage of the EPA plan was partly a product of the waves of significant and multi-faceted change Taiwan went through from the 1970s to the 1990s (Juan, 2010). With Taiwan’s rapid urban economic development during that time, the geographical and socio-economic disparity also rose considerably. More importantly, the move toward a free economy and democracy opened policy windows (Kingdon, 2011) for various social campaigns pursuing social justice. More historically oppressed groups gained momentum to push for their agenda. More and more social groups began advocating for redistributive policies (Fowler, 2000). For example, a series of indigenous rights movements from the late 1980s to early 1990s brought people’s attention to the social, educational, and political inequity these groups have endured. The rising inequity, coupled with the shifting national mood (Kingdon, 2011), prompted the government to consider different social justice-oriented policies. And the EPA Plan is one such education policy.
Using a multiple-perspective approach, this paper explores and examines the EPA policy. The three frameworks this paper adopts include the rational, organizational, and normative perspectives. The rational perspectives stress the unitary rational actor, the linear and sequential decision-making process, and the importance of information. On the other hand, the organizational perspectives acknowledge the impact of organizational factors on a policy’s goals, process, and intended outcomes. Finally, the normative perspectives shed light on how policy shapes and is shaped by social values. Learning about the origin and development of the EPA policy through these theoretical frameworks allows us to understand the evolution of rural education in Taiwan and how the Taiwanese government’s responses to this policy issue have changed (or not) with broader social changes over time.
Analyzing the EPA policy through these three perspectives, this paper finds that each of the three perspectives enlightens us on distinct aspects of the policy’s origin and development. First, the rational perspective reveals the MOE as a unitary actor reacting to the country’s growing education inequity. The MOE designed the EPA policy to promote rural schools’ education outcomes and narrow the rural-urban educational gap. The MOE also collects various information to implement better and adjust the EPA policy throughout the years. Second, the organizational perspective of policy analysis perceives the EPA policy’s goals to be not to solve the substantive problem but to maintain the policy and its institutional design despite social changes. The organizational perspectives also reveal how the central-, municipal-, and school-level organizations contribute to the continuation of the policy by focusing on the fragmented and specialized goals particular to them. Finally, the normative perspectives bring our attention to core educational values in Taiwanese society and the values embedded in the EPA policy. Furthermore, the normative perspectives disclose how the lack of distinction between equity and equal opportunity contributes to the longevity of the EPA policy without actually narrowing the rural-urban educational gap as the policy set out to achieve.
Most evaluations and studies on the EPA policy have examined and evaluated the policy from rational perspectives (e.g., Ciou, 2020; Luo & Chen, 2016; Sheu, 2005; Yang, 2009). Applying different perspectives to the EPA policy “invites a broader and deeper examination of [the policy’s] patterns and possibilities” (Malen & Knapp, 2997, p. 420). The EPA policy will benefit from more research analyzing the case from multiple and integrated lenses. Regarding practice, the three perspectives invite the policy’s relevant public to clarify the policy’s ends, examine if current means can lead to the desired ends, and consider the influence actors at different levels have in shaping the policy. As the EPA policy is one of Taiwan’s longest-standing policies directly responding to calls for educational justice, gaining a deeper and broader grasp of the policy allows us to understand better Taiwan’s journey to equitable educational development.

Author

• Ariel Chung, University of Maryland - College Park