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Also, the scope of this approach is different. Schools are not only subjects of manage-ment and financing; their work greatly depends on all other resources they consume (such as in-service training programs and all sorts of professional support services). Therefore, from an institutional point of view, the extent to which they control the supply of these essential recourses is also part of the decentralization saga. An additional aspect of school autonomy is quality evaluation. The work of the schools is evaluated by professional bodies (inspectorates) in a great majority of European countries. The extent of the pro-fessional autonomy of schools determines the type of external evaluation: whether it is oriented to external control of the work of the school staff on the basis of rigid national standards or designed to support the self-evaluation of rather autonomous schools that set goals for themselves within frameworks set at the national level?
The distinction between the two approaches is partially influenced by the lenses through which educational, economic, or public administration experts view the world.
(Moreover, due to the very weak public policy approach to education in Central and South Eastern Europe, communication among the experts of different professions is rather sporadic.) However, the relevance of this distinction flows from something more than the different perspective of various professionals. It is the emerging whole-school approach to education that makes this distinction even more explicit.
The whole-school approach is the result of the gradual shift of emphasis from teacher-centered educational services to those focusing on the teaching of students.
Especially, since the contemporary goals of education are not determined in a manner that easily allows for their assignment to individual teachers, the need to reconsider how teachers cooperate and how their work is managed is attracting some attention. We will return to the details of the whole-school approach in Part 2 of this volume. What is important to indicate here is that this approach has major implications for governance and management of education: their primary target is not teaching and the individual teacher anymore—it is the school as an organization. In Part 3 we will see that all major governance instruments are also reorganized accordingly.
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teaching and learning, etc., are allocated to the schools. Together, these components create a space within which schools are operated and managed, and within which the staff of the schools can consider how they provide educational services. In decentralized education systems most policies are implemented through these instruments. The most important ones are the following:
• Management of education,
• Allocation of financial resources,
• Curriculum and standards (“content regulation”),
• Quality evaluation,
• Initial teacher training,
• Professional services (among others: in-service training),
• Textbook publishing and the supply of teaching materials, and
• Information systems, research, and development.
Later, it will become clear that one of the most important impacts of service delivery decentralization is the rapid growth of the kind and amount of various services that schools, teachers, and students consume. The provision of knowledge, information, new types of content carriers (e.g., digital learning object) and new types of school-based ac-tivities that require external support lead to the evolution of a more and more diversified external support system. The process is very similar to the evolution of modern armies, in which the number of soldiers who actually fight (“frontline professionals”) is decreas-ing, while the number of those who support the fighters is increasing and their activities are becoming more diversified. Likewise, the evolution of modern education systems is similar, with the additional feature of decentralization that speeds up this process.
Figure 3.1
The Systemic Environment of Educational Service Delivery
Governance/
management
Quality evaluation
Professional services
Textbooks and teaching material Curriculum and
standards
Initial teacher training Allocation of
financial resources
Information systems, research and development
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As a result of the ongoing functional differentiation, all of these governance instru-ments are becoming separate subsystems. (In certain cases they even integrate subsystems within the subsystem, such as in the case of the separate pillars of quality evaluation:
external assessment of the performance of students and schools, external school evalua-tion, and the information system of education.) These subsystems have distinct functions, they are organized into relatively or completely separated institutions, they are funded from separate budget lines through distinct allocation mechanisms, they are operating with more and more sophisticated methodologies, they are forming specialized profes-sions for which specialists are trained in separate university programs, and they have their separate international cooperation networks. What is important here is that the diversification and expansion of these functional instruments increase the number and type of decisions at all levels of governance and management of education.
Decentralization of these functional governance instruments rarely happens side by side in a balanced way. In fact, managing major systemic reforms in all of the relevant segments of the systemic environment of schools is far beyond the capacity of any gov-ernment. Therefore, decentralization is not a project; it is rather a “stop-and-go” type of systemic change process, within which the directions and priorities are reconsidered from time to time. The initial (or the next) steps of the process are determined by the driving forces behind decentralization. The most obvious distinction in this respect is that between the education-reform-driven and the public-administration-reform-driven decentralization agendas. A good example of the first case is Serbia in which the first steps of decentralization at the very beginning of the 2000s were genuinely educational: the implementation of a curriculum reform and the introduction of school improvement in the center of the changes. Examples for the second case are Croatia, which transferred the ownership of schools to local self-governments in 2001, and Bulgaria, which initi-ated fiscal decentralization in 2007 and 2008. An example that allows a comparison is that of Hungary, which has the longest history of education sector decentralization in Central Europe. The process started in Hungary in the mid-1980s by strengthening the autonomy of schools. It was followed up with rapid decentralization of management and financing in 1990, then with curriculum decentralization in 1995.
Though the different strands of decentralization were never implemented in parallel, the mismatch between the pace of changes in the different segments of the management systems have always created “systemic tensions.” For example, by taking over the property of school buildings in 2001, Croatian self-governments became responsible for all sorts of capital investments. However, they often ask the question: why should they invest in a service that they cannot influence in any way? Another example is the introduction of formula-based financial allocation through the municipalities in Bulgaria that created tensions in relation to the appointment of directors by the regional inspectorates (in fact, the deconcentrated agencies of the Ministry of Education). Therefore, the authority of
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especially in relation to the municipality self-governments. These examples demonstrate that focusing on the priority areas of change is a legitimate approach; however, any major changes in the system of any of the functional governance instruments eventually will require adjustments in others.
C H A P T E R 4