어린이집 및 유치원 운영의 공공성 제고를 위한 정책 방안

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to establish the concept of publicness in the operation of child care centers and kindergartens, look into their current status of publicness, develop the questionnaire to assess it, and analyze these facilities bases on the questionnaire. The subjects of study were 72 experts in child care, preschool education, social welfare, education, and administration, 511 child care centers, and 414 kindergartens. Frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation, cross analysis, t-test, F-test, Duncan`s post hoc test, Pearson`s correlation, and regression were applied to analyze the data. The study reached the following results. First, the publicness of child care and education is to provide caring and educational services with a certain level of quality regardless of recipients` social and economic positions, so that every child can have a fair start in his or her life. Second, elements such as government relatedness, public interest, equality, openness and transparency must be obtained to realize publicness. Third, to guarantee publicness in operation, the following should be achieved: universality to provide high-quality caring and educational services suitable to children`s development, openness to guarantee disclosure of information related to facilities` operation, transparency to enable fair management of budgets, and stakeholder participation to encourage parents, teaching staffs, and local communities to take part in the operation. Fourth, 20 questions on universality, openness, transparency, and stakeholder participation were developed to assess the level of publicness in child care centers and kindergartens. Fifth, the assessment showed that child care centers` publicness was highest in transparency, followed by universality, stakeholder participation, and openness. Among child care centers, family day care homes were low in universality, and private centers were low in transparency. Kindergartens` publicness was highest in universality, followed by openness, transparency, and stakeholder participation, and public kindergartens had higher publicness than private ones in all four areas.