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P A R T O N E : D E C E N T R A L I Z A T I O N I N E D U C A T I O N
governance procedures. However, in certain cases, promoting “democratic solu-tions,” such as the appointment of directors by school boards, is simply based on the kind of mistrust that was briefly discussed in the previous chapter.
• Managing ethnic diversity. A unique feature of the postwar situation in the countries of the former Yugoslavia is the great emphasis on reducing ethnic tensions and supporting reconciliation. Cooling ethnic conflicts is an aspect that influences major decisions on governance and management of education, too. The most obvious example is the Ohrid Framework Agreement signed in 2001 by the representatives of ethnic Albanians in Macedonia and the central government. The agreement prescribes the decentralization of education to the level of municipalities. This was the basis of decentralization measures imple-mented from 2005. This aspect is revealed in relation to the “municipalization”
of management of education in Bosnia and Herzegovina, too. In general, even if the ethnic dimension is not referred to overtly in other countries in the region, due to strong ethnic and religious identities than dwarf civic identity, this lurk-ing consideration often influences approaches to decentralization.
• Problems in the flow of information The information basis of governance in the centralized systems of South Eastern Europe is typically poor. The type of infor-mation that is used rarely goes beyond raw statistical data on participation (not available at a lower aggregation level than the schools), anecdotal information, that is, the necessarily limited personal experience of policymakers and the information provided by the huge administrative reporting burden of actors at lower levels that are rarely processed fully. Therefore, when struggling with the contemporary challenges to education, a frequent complaint is the lack of infor-mation: lack of data on dropouts, special needs children educated in integrated settings, the participation of Roma, or any other matters of policy relevance.
One way of dealing with this problem is moving decision-making closer to those who have easier access to the necessary information and channel it into the decision-making. However, there is a paradox that renders the identification of this solution more difficult: we should know a lot in order to recognize how much we do not know. Many of the employees of the central administration of education share the “optimism of the poorly informed.” Therefore, anything more than the types of available information are often relegated to the realm of
“research” and investment into information systems is not necessarily a main concern of policymakers. Another similar obstacle is the problem of informa-tion monopolies; sharing informainforma-tion is like sharing power. Since the access to information of public interest is not properly ensured and, due to the lack of online information management systems, access even to existing information is rather difficult.
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Financing of Education
• Scarcity of public resources. By international comparison, most South Eastern European countries spend less on education than other European countries.
The reason for this is partly the very small contribution of municipalities and parents to the cost of education. Since space for increasing central budget spending is limited, the governments are seeking additional resources that can be channeled into the financing of education. Putting more of the cost of education on parents also has its political price. Therefore—choosing the path of least resistance—this is one of the strongest practical arguments in favor of deploying the responsibility for education to municipalities.
Figure 2.6
Expenditure on Education as a Percentage of GDP (2004)
• Low efficiency of funding. Financing educational services on an “historical basis”
(that is, on the basis of the previous year’s budget) is flexible, and in the course of annual budget bargaining, it can adjust to major changes in terms of the service tasks that the schools perform. However, under the pressure of efficiency, problems mainly caused by the declining number of students, the apparent lack of efficiency of this allocation mechanism becomes more visible. Therefore,
1
0 2 3 4 5 6 7
Bulgaria (2003)Serbia (2005)Croatia (2004) Slovakia
Czech Rep.
Estonia
NetherlandsGermany Hungary
OECD AverageUnited Kingdom
Poland Belgium Finland Slovenia
4.4 4.5 4.5
4.8 4.9 4.9 5.1 5.2
5.6 5.8 5.9 6.0 6.1 6.1 6.3
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most countries moved or are planning to move to a formula-based normative allocation system typically calculated on the basis of the number of students enrolled (per-capita financing). However, while it ensures the basic conditions of efficiency, it is rigid and does not easily adjust to diversities of the specific costs of the service. As a result, moving to normative financing almost automatically generates the need to build those mechanisms at the local level that create the balance between efficiency and flexibility (see Chapter 10). These mechanisms are even more important if choice and program diversity are introduced in education; if it happens, correcting the per-capita-based central financing by program and service specifications based on local financing regimes becomes a major requirement for the efficiency of financing.
• Low effectiveness of the use of development funds. It is not only the regular financial allocation system that is the subject of efficiency-related concerns. Due to the limited absorption capacity of the municipalities and schools, the actual use of development resources also raises several questions. If development of educa-tion is not based on situaeduca-tion analysis and planning in the municipalities and schools, development is either based on the “one-size-fits-all” type of spending or on showering money on schools without any hope that these resources will really generate change. One of the examples for this concern is the allocation of small EU structural funds to finance grants to schools for extracurricular ac-tivities in Bulgaria that do not necessarily impose any impact on the quality of mainstream teaching and that are most probably unsustainable. As seen in the previous section about the educational rationale for decentralization, building the conditions for the effective use of domestic or international development funds also calls for greater local and institutional autonomy.
C H A P T E R 3
Decentralization:
Definitions, Taxonomies, and Functions
Since the purpose of this reading is rather practical, a comparative overview on the vast literature of decentralization or an in-depth academic discussion of its underlying theo-retical foundations will not be attempted. However, precisely because of the diversity of approaches and the uses of specialized terms, some clarification of the meaning of decentralization is inevitable. Apart from bringing certain intellectual order to the use of terminology (at least for the purposes of this volume), this chapter aims at offering an analytical framework that allows for “unpacking” and structuring the extremely diverse and complicated matters strategies for decentralization should concern. Also, this exercise will allow for streamlining the discussion in the following chapters by determining those aspects of decentralization that are most relevant to South Eastern Europe.