Equity of Outsourced Education

This Chapter highlights how the well-intended policy to improve educational equity through outsourcing can reproduce or aggravate educational inequality. It opens with a remark from a principal, who draws our attention to how English proficiency is interrelated with the educational inequity in Hong Kong, and how he tries to level the ground using educational outsourcing. Then it provides a bird’s eye view of the context of the overall educational equity issue in Hong Kong and how the government tries to address it through educational outsourcing. This chapter also introduces Nancy Fraser’s analytical framework that points to the multi-layered and complex nature of educational equity and draws our attention to various ways inequity can occur in terms of resources, and cultural and political dimensions. Mainly drawing on survey responses involving one-fifth of Hong Kong schools and judiciously contextualized by extracts from interviews, the chapter sheds light on equity issues around outsourced English language education.