The Ministry of Education’s perfunctory response to a major scandal that erupted last week involving five board members of the private Chi Jen High School who reportedly pocketed NT$267 million (US$7.97 million) in school assets highlights its failure to formulate laws to monitor private school assets and the authorities’ lenient enforcement of the law.
Above all, it shows that few, if any, improvements have been made since 2000, when former Jinwen Group chairman Chang Wan-li (張萬利) allegedly escaped abroad after embezzling more than NT$920 million from Jinwen University of Science and Technology.
The Jinwen case sent shock waves through the nation after high-ranking government officials were implicated in the scandal, leading to the prosecution and indictment of dozens of officials and prompting the ministry to dissolve the university’s board of directors.
However, disbanding the board was nothing more than a band-aid approach, as the ministry obviously did not take any measures that would have prevented a similar incident 16 years later.
It is well known that private schools are granted smaller budgets and often sidelined in the education system, which is a situation highlighted by the ministry’s response to the Chi Jen case.
After the controversy erupted, the ministry, as the agency in charge of proposing amendments to the Private School Act (私立學校法), gave a generic response, saying that it was looking into ways to amend the act to mandate that third-party board members and supervisors be hired by private institutes to monitor their finances. It also said that as the amount of subsidy issued to each private school is different, it is working to reach a consensus with stakeholders as to which schools should have an oversight mechanism.
A review of the act’s history shows that a solution to prevent misappropriation of funds was proposed in 2006, when it was listed in a draft amendment, which was registered and approved by the Executive Yuan in 2012.
However, four years have passed since the Executive Yuan approved the proposal, and the situation facing private schools has not improved. The ministry should explain why it is dragging its feet, or the public might think it has caved in to pressure from powerful school board members who illegally profit from school operations.
Meanwhile, the ministry’s K-12 Education Administration, when asked about the scandal, said that it is the New Taipei City Government’s job to manage Chi Jen, not the ministry’s. That answer reveals underlying issues in the system to supervise private schools, as it failed to acknowledge that it is time that clearer statutes are added to the act to clarify and define the responsibilities of both the ministry and local government-level education administrations to manage school boards, including how frequently private schools’ assets should be declared and in what ways the authorities can ascertain the truthfulness of these reports.
In passing the buck immediately after a major scandal broke, the ministry failed to realize that doing so only painted it in a negative light.
Although the ranking of private schools could not compete with that of public schools, about 45 percent of students attend private high schools and 75 percent go to private universities.
Since it is usually the case that children from wealthy families, who have more abundant learning resources, are admitted to higher-ranked public institutions, fairness in education can only be ensured when education authorities stop neglecting the interests of the majority for the interests of the few.
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