Publication: A Comparative Analysis of School-Based Management in Central America
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2005-06
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2012-08-13
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El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua introduced education decentralization reforms, including school-based management (SBM) in some schools. As applied in Central America, (SBM) is a decentralization mechanism that shifts certain decision-making powers to the school level, emphasizing the role of community, and parental management in school affairs. The SBM programs aim to increase enrollments, efficiency, and parental and local community participation. Greater participations are also seen as a means to achieve other goals. In three cases-EDUCO (El Salvador), PRONADE (Guatemala), and PROHECO (Honduras)-the main objective is increasing enrollment in isolated rural areas affected by conflict, poverty, or natural disasters. The School Autonomy Program in Nicaragua aims to increase operational efficiency, by giving voice to parents and civil society on educational issues. The note discusses two key questions that arise: What effect have the reforms had on community empowerment, and educational outcomes? What can be learned by comparing the circumstances, reform designs, and contexts in the four countries?
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“Di Gropello, Emanuela. 2005. A Comparative Analysis of School-Based Management in Central America. en breve; No. 72. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/10328 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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Publication A Comparative Analysis of School-based Management in Central America(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2006)This paper provides a comparative analysis of school-based management reforms in four Central American countries (EDUCO in El Salvador, PRONADE in Guatemala, PROHECO in Honduras, and Centros Autonomos in Nicaragua). It starts by providing a characterization of the models and then reviews how they have expanded community participation and empowerment and school decision-making autonomy. It then continues by analyzing the impact of community and school empowerment on the teaching-learning process, including measures of teacher effort; and assesses the impact of the models on several educational outcomes, relating this impact with the teaching-learning environment and community empowerment. Finally, the paper attempts to explain the impact of the reforms by discussing how variations in reform design, country contexts and actors' assets can explain differences and similarities in result. The key conclusion of the paper is that school-based management models have led generally to greater community empowerment and teacher effort, resulting in: (a) a better use of the existing limited capacity of teachers and schools1; (b) higher coverage in rural areas; (c) somewhat better student flows; and (d) learning outcomes at least as high as in traditional schools (while community-managed schools are generally established in the poorest and most isolated rural areas2). Nonetheless, the models rank poorly in terms of teacher education and experience, adoption of active/innovative teaching methodologies and substantive and supportive teacher involvement in the schools. 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The empirical results also show that schools with experienced principals and teachers are eager to introduce school-based management.Publication Decentralized Decision-making in Schools : The Theory and Evidence on School-based Management(World Bank, 2009)The school-based management (SBM) has become a very popular movement over the last decade. The World Bank's work on school-based management emerged from a need to better define the concept, review the evidence, support impact assessments in various countries, and provide feedback to project teams. The authors took detailed stock of the existing literature on school-based management and then identified several cases that the Bank was supporting in various countries. The authors present as well general guidance on how to evaluate school-based management programs. The Bank continues to support and oversee a number of impact evaluations of school-based management programs in an array of countries. Despite the clear commitment of governments and international agencies to the education sector, efficient, and equitable access remains elusive for many populations - especially for girls, indigenous peoples, and other poor and marginalized groups. Many international initiatives focus on these access issues with great commitment, but even where the vast majority of children do have access to education facilities, the quality of that education often is very poor. This fact increasingly is apparent in the scores from international learning assessments on which most students from developing countries do not excel. Evidence has shown that merely increasing resource allocation without also introducing institutional reforms in the education sector will not increase equity or improve the quality of education. One way to decentralize decision-making power in education is known popularly as SBM. There are other names for this concept, but they all refer to the decentralization of authority from the central government to the school level. SBM emphasizes the individual school (represented by any combination of principals, teachers, parents, students, and other members of the school community) as the main decision-making authority, and holds that this shift in the formulating of decisions will lead to improvement in the delivery of education.
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