Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin, Taipei County Magistrate Chou Shi-wei, and Taoyuan County Deputy Magistrate Huang Cheng-kung said they will invite other local government chiefs to jointly seek a constitutional interpretation by the grand justices within two weeks to rule if the MOE has trespassed the autonomy of local-level governments. They made the decision after a meeting with the directors of educational departments in their administrations. The acting mayor of Keelung City did not attend the meeting because he is currently on an overseas trip.

Hau said they will continue pushing the “one outline, one textbook edition” program for students in their areas before the grand justices hand down the verdict.

Chou said 75 percent of teachers, parents and schoolchildren in his county prefer the “one outline, one textbook edition” program to the “one outline, multiple textbook editions” policy upheld by the MOE.

This shows the program advocated by the four administrations is democratic and meet the needs of the people, he said.

All schools are now actually implementing the “one outline, one textbook edition” practice while the teachers have to select “one single textbook edition” after spending tremendous amounts of time evaluating all available editions by different publishers.

Whether the teachers can bear the burden of constantly reviewing dozens of different textbooks can be another problem, Chou added.

Wu Ching-ji, director of the Department of Education at the Taipei City Government said the “one outline, one textbook edition” program will benefit all families regardless of their incomes.

But the “one outline, multiple textbook editions” policy has many drawbacks, including benefiting mostly students from families with higher incomes.

Other officials at Wu’s department said that 75.5 percent of people in Taiwan back the “one outline, one textbook edition” program, according to an islandwide survey by the Chinese-language CommonWealth magazine.

A survey of Internet users by Yahoo! Taiwan shows the ratio is even higher at 96 percent.

They said the MOE should carry out public opinion polls to find what the people want, they said.

Cho Po-yuan, magistrate of Changhua County in central Taiwan, said the MOE should give top considerations to people’s interests and help reduce their financial burden.

Cho said he had criticized the high prices of reference books and the oligopoly of publishing companies derived from the MOE policy when he formerly served as lawmaker.

He suggested that the MOE resume an earlier operation of publishing quality but low-priced textbooks for use in schools.

An MOE official emphasized again that the ministry will invalidate all the “one outline, one textbook edition” programs to be adopted by local governments.

The Humanistic Educational Foundation and three teachers in Changhua filed a lawsuit yesterday morning against the county government for violating the central government’s “one outline, multiple textbook editions” policy.

They will continue monitoring the actions to be adopted by other local level governments, including Taipei City, Taipei County, Taoyuan County, and Chiayi County for same legal actions.

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