Since education carries high degree of fairness and is directly related to the development of a country, investment on education is both a social and a personal investment from a long-term perspective. Acknowledging the importance of increasing educat...
Since education carries high degree of fairness and is directly related to the development of a country, investment on education is both a social and a personal investment from a long-term perspective. Acknowledging the importance of increasing educational finance, it is world-wide trend to expand it. Accordingly, this paper tries to identify problems on local educational finance and propose several way to solve them by investigating current conditions of local educational finance and analyzing exemplar cases. As it turns out, national financial support on education is still insufficient in spite of yearly increase. Personnel expenses, holding more than 60% of annual expenditure of the local educational finance, is increasing continually. The suggestions to these problems are as follows:
First, institutional reform is needed in order to expand the local educational finance and to reduce budget on local education. This includes proposing ordinances assistance of education expenses, reducing charges on water supply and drainage.
Second, active cooperation among local government, businesses, and parents is necessary. This includes expanding education expenses from the local governments and forming one-business-one-school relationship.
Third, continuing efforts is needed to find exemplary cases on efficiency of local educational finance and to diffuse them. This can be done by forming a task force, diffusing them to other institutions, and benchmarking them.
We cannot expect successful educational improvement if there is no national consensus on the above-mentioned solutions. The central government should be a main actor in this process but with active participation from local government, educational associations, and local citizens. If there exists genuine cooperation system among these groups, efficiency of local educational finance will be possible.