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education is more or less integrated into the mainstream line of public administration.
For example, it would be the case in Croatia if further decentralization steps would be initiated. However, if there is a separate line of education management, the creation of the integrated ownership role is a difficult process. For example, it would require the complete reconsideration of the functions of the Regional Departments in Serbia, or detaching all management related functions from the Regional Inspectorates in Bulgaria and Romania that—in spite of their core evaluation function—are performing a great deal of administrative management tasks. The same applies to financing: in a decen-tralized system in which ownership is devolved to local and regional self-governments, they serve as “interfaces” between the different underlying logics for financing the self-governments, which should be determined on the basis of the number of students, and financing schools, in which expenditure is determined by the number of classes (see Chapter 10).
The definition of the actual functions to be deployed to local self-governments partially flows from the required autonomy of schools. Assuming that the scope of school autonomy is somewhat similar to the “ideal type” described in the previous section, the division of labor between the owners and their institutions is based on the fact that education is a public service funded by public resources. Therefore, in a decentralized system the major core functions of the owners are: (1) the approval of all documents of the schools that determine the goals of the service, (2) the approval of the budget containing all costs of the service provision, (3) the employment of the director who is responsible for service delivery and for the use of public resources. All concrete decision-making competencies deployed to the owners are flowing either from these three functions or supplementary ones.
The other question is the division of labor between the central government (with its deconcentrated administrative branches) and the owners of the schools. In other words, what are the functions that self-governments perform within the scope of their autonomy and what are those central functions that they transmit through their own administration (if this transmission task is not deployed to deconcentrated agencies)?
In this respect the concept of the ownership role is one of the selection criteria, again.
The three most important such functions are the following:
• In a decentralized system, self-governments that are gaining control over the local networks of schools should also receive the instruments that allow for balancing the supply of educational services (school capacities) with the demand (number of children to be enrolled). Therefore, national service provision standards should allow space for local considerations. (For example, by a state budget financial allocation to the self-governments that is not earmarked.)
• To a certain extent, local self-governments mediate between the needs of the clients (parents) and the schools and convey the needs of the local community. It
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means that setting goals for education at the national level should leave enough space for local interpretation and/or setting supplementary local goals.
• Financial, legal, and professional accountability are ensured by mainstream supervisory and control organizations, as well as by national educational in-spectorates. However, in decentralized systems in which local public services are being funded by the budget of the self-government, performing regular legal control and financial audit is an obligation. In terms of professional account-ability, the task of the self-governments is regular performance evaluation of the school directors.
There are two other functions that—although not necessarily flowing from owner-ship—might be part of the self-governments’ task portfolio:
• Several decades of experience show that a narrow and isolated sectoral (health, labor, education, housing, etc.) approach has not ensured greater equity for disadvantaged groups, such as Roma and other minorities, displaced persons, etc. Those local governments will be successful that can connect all these public services with the flexibility that allows adjustments to the diverse lives of families and individuals. Therefore, local self-governments should have special mandate in this respect.
• For more than a decade, the reigning pattern of educational development has connected cooperating schools within development consortia as an instrument to promote horizontal learning. It is even more effective if the cooperating schools are institutions in the same local school networks, within which the horizontal and vertical mobility of most students occurs. Local self-governments that are coordinating local development consortia may connect development with their long-term service provision plans (see Chapter 16).
All of these functions, if deployed to local self-governments, have implications for how the major functional governance instruments—especially financing and manage-ment functions (such as planning)—are reorganized.
The evolution of the relationship between local self-governments and the schools in the course of decentralization has its typical patterns. The degrees of the intensity of ownership are the following:
• “Supporting the schools”—in completely centralized management systems local self-governments do not control any aspects of the operation of schools. How-ever, due to the sentiment of “ownership,” self-governments strive to support
“their” schools with minor assistance, such as painting the walls during the summer vacation, purchasing small equipment, or providing free housing for teachers if they settle in the village where the school is located.
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• “Financing the schools”—in most cases the task of financing the recurrent maintenance costs (all recurrent costs apart from salaries) is deployed to self-governments. Sometimes self-governments supplement it with minor capital investments. Also, sometimes self-governments contribute to the costs of certain extracurricular or other supplementary activities of the schools. However, taking part in financing still does not entail any influence on the core service provided by the schools.
• “Maintaining schools”—in rather decentralized systems the above-described own-ership is established in legal terms. However, self-governments are still intent on ensuring the work of the service provider institution without interfering with the goals and content of the actual service. The typical concern of self-government within this type of relationship is the “problem-free” operation of the school.
• “Using the schools”—here, the school owner tends to regard the school as a strate-gic instrument that has the potential to serve local social, economic, or cultural objectives. In this case, all instruments at the disposal of the self-government are used in order to influence the content of the service provided.