Implementation of the ”Two Oriented” Policy - A Case Study of Yuyao City Government

Abstract: China’s rapid urbanization process has included a large scale migration of rural labor migrants to the cities since the 1990s. The education problem of their children who migrate together with them also becomes increasingly prominent. In order to allow migrant children enjoy a fair education, China introduced the "two oriented" policy in 2001. This policy clarifies that the management responsibility of migrant children relies mainly on local government of where migrant children move to, meanwhile migrant children are supposed to be mainly arranged to study in public schools. However, existing studies show that the implementation of this policy is unsatisfactory. In other words, there is a gap between the policy and program performance during the policy implementation. The possible reasons could be several elements in the policy implementation. To obtain a systematic and comprehensive answer, this study applied Van Meter and Van Horn's model as analytical framework to explore the relationship between the policy and performance of the policy implementation. For a more specific perspective, the policy implementation of Yuyao city is applied as a case to study. On this basis, the way of achieving better performance on policy implementation of "two oriented" policy is found, such as balancing the interests of each organization or agency, setting up a more perfect supervision mechanism and establishing a more scientific and diversified performance evaluation system for policy implementation and encouraging innovation.