Who Is Best Qualified to Decide?
The problem of legitimacy crisis as a common point of departure for decentralization efforts was mentioned in the previous chapter. However, when it comes to the actual justification of decentralization—and as a result, to the actual type of decentraliza-tion—the diversity of underlying concepts and assumptions is striking. One aspect that has the potential of offering a classification for justifications for decentralization is the answer to the question: who is best qualified to make decisions, if not central government bureaucracies? In other words, what ensures the legitimacy of decision-making? There are two possible sources of legitimacy: democratic decision-making and the professional quality of decisions. There are certain rationales for decentralization that
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emphasize democratic legitimacy, while other justifications are based on professionalism that ensures efficiency and quality.
The requirement of democratic legitimacy calls for open decision-making procedures even at the expense of professionalism. From the point of view of decentralization the question is: who do the schools belong to? Are educational services the exclusive con-cern of national interests, or they should serve the interest of local communities and/
or the clients of the service, too? The answer rarely locks out the interests of the second group. Ensuring local control over public services of local interests is one of the stron-gest arguments in favor of decentralization. Decentralization aiming at strengthening democratic legitimacy of decision-making, often called political decentralization, that is, “assigning power to make decisions on education to citizens or their representatives at lower levels of government” (Fiske 1996). In practice, it means placing schools into the chain of local accountability relations (see Chapter 9). Decentralization is often based on direct political agendas. For example, in the mid-1980s in Hungary the main concern behind strengthening the autonomy of schools was kicking out the political influence of the ruling Communist Party from education. Also, one of the key goals of the education reform wave at the very beginning of the new century in Serbia was the democratization of education.
However, there is something that Jon Lauglo calls “populist localism.” According to this concept, schools are not the extensions of the state bureaucracy and not the property of professionals. Therefore, they should be governed directly and locally “by the people” (Lauglo 1996). It reminds us of two major implications. First of all, none of the rationales for decentralization may claim exclusivity in determining the direc-tion of changes; they should be considered as the underlying basis for marking out the emphases of the design of the process. The other implication is a signal that we should try to avoid confusing value-based ideals with the concrete context of exercis-ing authorities. For example, the “local community”—as it is referred to several times by education development programs—is an Anglo-Saxon Protestant social construct that, as such, does not necessarily exist in Central or South Eastern European countries.
(For example, the equivalent term in Hungarian translates as “local society” that better reflects the highly-stratified character of the population of a village or an urban neighbor-hood.) Lauglo also speaks about “sponsored populist localism,” when “non-government organizations coming in from outside the community, support informal educational initiatives in order to mobilize the poor” (Lauglo 1996). Again, our judgment on this must very much depend on the context. For example, if formal education systems are failing to reach out to Roma settlements and Roma are excluded from self-governance of the municipality, such initiatives should not be labeled as populist.
Rationales for decentralization that emphasize ensuring professional legitimacy are very diverse in terms of the kind of efficiency of decision-making they focus on. One of them is based on the assumption that market efficiency—being the perfect and ideal form
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of accountability relations—should be applied in the realm of public services, too. We will return to the pros and cons of the arguments about market efficiency later in this book. Only one thing should be advanced here: the counter-arguments simply declaring that “education is different” are unconvincing. Education is different indeed, but not because of its esoteric humanistic nature, but because of the discretionary character of educational (or health) services (see Chapter 9).
A rather traditional way of emphasizing professional legitimacy is the one based on administrative efficiency. The main concerns of the rationales under this heading are the old-fashioned requirements of public administration, all those aspects in which nineteenth-century bureaucracies were very successful, but are rarely achieved by government agencies at the beginning of the new millennium in the South Eastern Europe. The old concerns about reliability, calculability, accuracy, procedural unity, or the rather new ones about responsiveness or a client-centered civil service may call for administrative decentralization. In fact, in order to ensure that standards and other forms of regulations are complied with, management should be moved closer to the supervised area of state concern.
Another type of rationales emphasizing professional legitimacy is the one focusing on technical efficiency of decision-making. According to this alignment, what really matters is the effectiveness of exercising authority that is measured partly by the extent to which the desired performance is achieved, and partly by the use of contemporary management techniques. It is often called managerialism but is viewed by many who regard education as a humanitarian mission simply importing management methods from business. (Speaking about performance management in education still sounds somewhat perverse in many countries.) To a certain extent this view is unfair; there is a great deal of work invested in the adaptation of management techniques to the specific realm of public services in general, among others to the governance and management of education. Moreover, sometimes it is the public sector that invents management solu-tions that are taken over by business organizasolu-tions. Nevertheless, when, for example, industrial quality assurance experts are forced to work together with educationalists, a real cultural clash may result from which both sides may benefit a lot.
Promoting pedagogical efficiency (quality) is probably the most influential ratio-nale for decentralization in education. Almost all aspects of education are extremely knowledge-intensive, high added-value activities performed by highly-trained special-ists. Regardless of the perceived status of the teaching profession, the consensus about its high professional requirements is undiminished and the expectations of teachers are high. Therefore, the fact that educationalists are making certain decisions on their own, is something that is rarely challenged, in general. Pedagogical efficiency is a complex phenomenon; therefore, references to it are, rather, based on the matter of the impact of decision-making on the quality of educational services—whatever quality really
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However, there is something that we may call “populist professionalism” (what Jon Lauglo calls participatory democracy). It refers to the attitude regarding the decision-making in education as the natural monopoly of teachers, who should have a decisive role in exercising authority and who should govern the schools in a participatory way.
Indeed, there are several education systems in which school-based decision-making is, to a large extent, deployed to the teaching corps and not to those who have any management authority. Also, teachers are often present in the local self-government councils in charge of education, or ministries of education are almost completely captured by teachers.
Professional populism is deeply rooted in syndicalism; most of the time, this type of argumentation serves to protect the interests of teachers. (For example, the president of the largest teachers’ union in Bulgaria asked the minister of education and his advisors at a conference: “Did anybody behind the president’s table ever teach in a school?”)
The type of legitimacy that is emphasized is not simply a kind of argumentation.
During the transition period of the 1990s, most Central and Eastern European coun-tries went through a deep systemic change process that included a speedy or gradual decentralization of their education management systems. There are countries (such as Hungary) that moved towards democratic-political management systems that emphasize the political legitimacy of decision-making, while others (such as the Czech Repub-lic) built administrative-professional management systems, in which the main focus is on expertise in decision-making (Radó 2001a). Therefore, the distinction between the two types of legitimacy is a handy tool to grasp certain systemic characteristics of management systems, too. It definitely does not mean that the power of intellectual approaches determine the systemic feature of education management systems. In fact, the evolution of institutional changes and the underlying justifications are both deeply rooted in the traditions of the countries, the political context of institutional change, and the characteristics of the inherited public administration systems. It is important to note that by referring to the two education management types (or to the two types of rationales) we do not mean to suggest that they are mutually exclusive. Our concern should be the opposite: in democratic-political management systems special attention should be paid to the professional quality of decision-making and vice versa.
Returning to the rationales of decentralization in education, the different justifi-cations are very much based on social value orientations. However, some caution is recommended in connecting values, political alignments, and actual policies. Even in mature democracies where the ideological values of political parties are reliable selectors among policy options, shortcuts among values and policies would be problematic. It is even more than problematic in South Eastern Europe—it is impossible. Nevertheless, there are certain typical value orientations that have—rather indirect—implications for the rationale for decentralization (see Box 2.1). The reader should be reminded again, that in spite of the influence of these social value-based approaches on the type of ar-gumentation, they do not directly determine the construct of the different rationales for decentralization.
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Box 2.1
Value Orientation Approaches to Education
“The same for all.”—An egalitarian leftist approach with strong centralization align-ment, often based on the reminiscences of the communist past.
“Quality for those who deserve it.”—An elitist, often conservative approach based on the ideologies and interests of the ruling elites, that typically promotes liberalization but not necessarily decentralization.
“Quality for those who can afford it.”—A free-market approach promoting decen-tralization and privatization that emphasizes the power of the clients of educational services.
“Quality for all.”—A democratic liberal approach promoting decentralization and liberalization, emphasizing choice and equity in education at the same time.
—Radó 2001a