HKIER

Abstract

Following the rapid expansion of the education system in many of the developed countries after the Second World War, educational policy planners in these countries have now turned their attentions from increasing the quantity of schooling to improving the quality of education. Since then, a number of policy initiatives were introduced to put schools on track towards quality improvement. Similar situations have confronted the educational policy makers in Hong Kong since the 1980s and a number of reform initiatives in the area of school management, curriculum, pedagogical language, teacher education, etc., were introduced with the aims to improve education quality. Although the implications of these reforms are far-reaching, one of the major problems with the reform agenda is that there was no clear and widely shared understanding of quality. These same problems face policy makers and educational researchers around the world. Quality, as opposed to quantity, has been found to be a difficult concept to define clearly because different persons have different opinions of what the term means. Also, there has not been an agreed-upon formula which can enable a school to attain education quality. This paper is an attempt to develop models of education quality for policy makers and researchers to consider and suggest some management frameworks for practitioners and educators to reflect on when they try to achieve their conception of education quality.

摘要

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