Editorial: Educational Decentralization Around the Pacific Rim

Transcription

1 Editorial: Educational Decentralization Around the Pacific Rim Guest Editor for this Special Edition E. Mark Hanson University of California at Riverside, Riverside, California Around the world the emergence of modern economies, increasingly educated societies, the triumph of capitalism, the collapse of centralized planning, the demise of colonialism, and the demands for increased democratization have resulted in enormous pressures on nations to decentralize their public institutions, especially in education. For example, virtually every country in North, Central, and South America has some type of educational decentralization reform underway currently. Why Is This Collection Of Studies Particularly Significant? These research papers should make a valuable contribution to the research literature because they explore the motives, strategies, strengths, and weaknesses of a collection of unique educational decentralization reforms in Eastern and Western nations. 1 In this special issue of the JEA, Ernesto and Paulina Schiefelbein analyze Chile's educational voucher system which has been in operation since This reform successfully made the transition from an autocratic military government to a democratic government and remains the only such nation-wide decentralization strategy in the world. Mexico's decentralization strategy is particularly interesting because, as Carlos Ornelas informs us, that country publically recognized serious deficiencies in its educational system and then used the blitzkrieg approach to carry forward the reform. In just a 1 In October of 1999, the authors of these studies gathered in Hong Kong to present and discuss their preliminary findings at an international conference funded by the University of California's Pacific Rim Program and hosted by the Comparative Education Research Centre of the University of Hong Kong. Prior to final revisions, drafts of the papers appeared as an interactive electronic conference hosted by the World Bank on its web site

2 matter of days, the central government simultaneously transferred resources and responsibility to the 31 states for more than 14 million students and 100 thousand schools -- all without any requests from the states or special preparation for their management infrastructures. Within the context of unique decentralization reforms, Tang Kwok-Chun and Mark Bray conducted a comparative analysis of the former colonies of Hong Kong and Macau as they make the transition to their new status with China. Using a theoretical framework of centralization and decentralization in the context of a reform process, the two authors explain why Hong Kong enters its new one nation but two systems relationship with China with an organized and effective decentralized educational system and Macau enters with an uncoordinated collection of schools facing major challenges and limitations. Japan utilized both centralization and decentralization strategics to advance its national objectives. Hiromitsu Muta points out that in the late 19 th century Japan centralized its institutions, including education, in order to catch up with the Western industrialized nations. However, in the late 20 th century, in order to maintain its competitive edge as a world leader in the economic globalization process, the national leadership instituted a series of reforms to deregulate and decentralize the educational system. The objective is to provide sufficient flexibility and local control at the school level that creativity, individual initiative, and the spirit of entrepreneurship will become part of the teaching/learning process for each new generation of students. John Hawkins diagnoses the role decentralization plays in China's struggle to align the educational system with the newly emerging marketization of the economy while at the same time requiring regional and local governments to assume a greater share of educational expenditures. However, as often happens in an autocratic State, fear of losing control of any institution, -2-

3 particularly education, trumps the benefits of local leadership and innovativeness, and significant recentralization has begun. Finally, all of the studies reported emphasize the necessity of political will to execute a major educational decentralization reform. However, looking at site-based decentralization initiatives in the United States, Flora Ida Ortiz and Rodney Ogawa argue that the real key to successful decentralized management is social capital. That is, social capital is the product of strong horizontal and vertical interpersonal relationships that contribute to shared and enforced norms, a sense of obligation to the school, a willingness to collaborate toward a common objective, and expectations that the end result will be for mutual benefit. Social capital encourages productive behaviors in schools during good times and sustains them in bad times. The various differences between national efforts toward decentralization surfaces an important debate that arose between some academics and World Bank executives at the March 2000 meeting of the Comparative and International Education Society held in San Antonio, Texas. The academics argued that just as all nations are different, all decentralization strategies are different. Each strategy is embedded in the political, economic and historical contexts that give it birth. Hence, little good can come from trying to generalize experiences from one country to another or seeking out so-called best practices. World Bank officials, on the other hand, argued that while context is important this does not mean that the experiences of one nation can not inform the educational leaders and planners of another. The position taken in this special issue of the JEA is that knowledge is cumulative, and while lessons derived from international experiences can be constructive, they should be viewed through the filters of national context. What are the Various Types of Decentralization? -3-

4 The country studies reveal that there are various types of decentralization. Devolution, for example, transfers decision-making authority to a lower institutional unit that can then act independently or without first asking permission from the central ministry or government. In Chile, control over much of the educational process was transferred (devolved) to the municipalities. A subset of devolution is privatization, and that occurs when responsibility and resources are transferred from public to private sector institutions. In Chile, through the use of vouchers, parents can choose to send their children to public or private schools thus creating public or private schooling opportunities through devolution. Delegation transfers decision-making authority from higher to lower hierarchical units, but this authority can be withdrawn at the discretion of the delegating unit. China reflects this pattern as it first decentralized and then began a partial recentralization when the government sensed it might be losing too much control. The third type of decentralization encountered in the collection of studies is deconcentration, or the transfer of work but not significant decision-making authority. In Mexico, for example, while the national leaders proclaimed a major decentralization reform, it basically transferred educational management tasks to the 31 state governments and increased (centralized) control over educational policy at the national level. What are the Motives Behind the Decentralization Reforms? Country studies of educational decentralization, including the ones reported on here, demonstrate that while improving the quality of education is always a goal, it is rarely (if ever) the principal goal. These types of reform tend to be born in political arenas and driven by many motives (mostly informal and frequently hidden), such as: reducing national budgets by transferring educational costs to subnational units (Argentina, China, Venezuela), breaking the power of -4-

5 teachers' unions (Chile, Mexico), strengthening policy control at the national level under the guise of decentralization (China, Mexico), establishing democratic roots after long periods of autocratic government or political turbulence (Colombia, Spain, El Salvador, Argentina, Nicaragua), targeting national economic development as a derivative of the reform (China, Venezuela, Japan), and reducing conflict at the national level by authorizing local school councils to hire and fire administrators and teachers (Nicaragua). Once politicians make the decision to decentralize education, the task of carrying out this mission is transferred to leaders of the educational institution, and hence a complicating dilemma is introduced. Under the public banner of decentralization to improve the quality of education, the educational leaders must mount a strategy of changing the way the educational system operates when the underlying motive is really political in nature. This change process is further complicated because the tenure of ministers of education tends to be quite brief. In a study reporting on the tenure of ministers of education in 22 nations around the world, including several countries in the collection reported here, Javier Corrales (1999, p. 10) found that they lasted less than 2.5 years in office. New ministers have a learning curve and about the time they learn the job, they are history. What are Pivotal Issues in Designing Decentralization Strategies? The studies presented in this special issue of the JEA make it clear that decentralization is not inherently good or bad, but simply a means to an end -- an end that is rooted in context. In the studies of Japan and Hong Kong, for example, strong centralization was the key to first organizing and then positioning the countries to decentralize as new goals emerged. This concluding section will identify a few of the critical questions that all the countries decentralizing their educational systems had to address. To what institutional level should educational authority be transferred? According to -5-

6 country-specific circumstances, authority is being transferred to various levels: regional (Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Venezuela, China), municipal (Chile, Colombia), and local school (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Japan, Hong Kong, USA). How quickly should authority and resources be transferred? Mexico, Chile, and Argentina decentralized nation-wide in just a few weeks. In contrast, Spain took almost 25 years (Hanson, 2000). Among other things, the issue revolves around whether or not the regional and/or municipal administrative infrastructures and the educational inventory (school buildings, vehicles, trained teachers) are to be brought up to minimum standards before or after the transfers take place (or not at all). When transfers from the center to the periphery take place without the schools being brought up to minimum standards, the process often turns out to be closer to educational dumping than decentralization. How should a decentralized educational system be financed? At one extreme, the central government continues to finance almost the entire educational system (Mexico, Venezuela, Japan, El Salvador, Nicaragua), but the trend appears to be toward developing cofinancing strategies by which expenditures of decentralized systems are shared by formula between national, regional, and municipal governments (China, Spain, Colombia, Chile). An interesting variation exists where the central government, under specific conditions, subsidizes private education with public funds (Chile, Hong Kong, Spain). How can fragmentation be prevented in the decentralization process? Countries tend to be very selective regarding the specific decisions they transfer to lower levels. Frequently, policy decisions are made and enforced at the national level, but management decisions are transferred, particularly over personnel and budget expenditures. Control over the curriculum seems to be the last to go because a nation defines itself by how it is represented in classrooms. -6-

7 Japan and Spain are quite opposite in this respect. Japan has decentralized only a thin slice of academic programming to lower levels in an effort to introduce additional creative expression in the learning process. Spain, on the other hand, has turned over approximately 35 to 45 percent of the entire educational program (including the curriculum) to the 17 regional governments to do with what they wish. What About Outcomes? In discussing outcomes of educational decentralization, the hopeful expectation is to find clear and conclusive information about the impact of decentralization on classroom performance as demonstrated by test scores. However, various researchers have pointed out that direct cause (decentralization) and effect (test scores) relationships are of questionable validity because of the host of intervening variables, such as: teacher training, parent support, availability of resources, student and teacher motivation, and peer group pressure. D. J. Brown (1994, p. 1410) writes that while parents, students, and educators appear to be more satisfied under decentralization, it is still unclear whether, and under what circumstances, it makes any real difference in levels of student attainment of academic or social objectives. In the search for classroom outcomes, a point made by several of the country studies reported in this issue should be recalled. Improvement in teaching/learning processes, while always desirable, tends not to be the primary objective of most decentralization initiatives. If outcomes are to be truly understood, we must also look at effectiveness in terms of the primary political objectives that drove the reform in the first place, such as: breaking up a teachers' union, transferring costs from the national to regional budgets, bringing stability to turbulent regional demands for autonomy, and so forth. In the final analysis, Fenton Sharpe (1996, p. 7) writes, This transfer of power provides -7-

8 the opportunity, but not the guarantee, for the quality of school decision making and action to benefit. The more this opportunity involves transferring positive opportunities to the regions or municipalities, rather than problems and burdens, the greater the changes for success (Hanson, 1997). That is, if educational decentralization produces a win-win (center - periphery) situation rather than win-lose, the changes that take place inside and outside the classroom should be constructive whatever the initial motivation. References Brown, D. J. (1994), Decentralization in educational government and management, The International Encyclopedia of Education, Pergamon Press, London. Burki, S. J. (1999), Beyond the Center: Decentralizing the State, The World Bank, Washington D.C.. Corrales, J. (1999), The Politics of Education Reform: Bolstering the Supply and Demand; Overcoming Institutional Blocks, The World Bank, Washington, D.C.. Hanson, E. M. (1989), Decentralisation and regionalization in educational administration: Comparisons of Venezuela, Colombia and Spain, Comparative Education, Vol 25 No. 1, pp Hanson, E. M. (2000), Democratization and Educational Decentralization in Spain: A Twenty Year Struggle for Reform, The World Bank, Washington, D.C.. Hanson, E. M. (1997), Strategies of educational decentralization: Key questions and core issues, Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 36, No. 2, pp Sharpe, F. (1996), Towards a research paradigm on devolution, Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 34 No. 1, pp

9 About the Guest Editor: E. Mark Hanson is a Professor of Education and Management at the University of California, Riverside. He has studied decentralization reforms in several Latin American nations as well as in the Middle East. Professor Hanson has been an international consultant on educational reform for the World Bank, UNESCO, UNDP, USAID, and the Harvard Institute for International Development. (mark.hanson@ucr.edu) -9-