Decentralization is a key feature of institutional reform throughout the world. The main argument underpinning decentralization policies is that they empower people to be part of the local decision-making process –they improve government performance by alleviating information asymmetries and costs by bringing decision-making closer to the people concerned. However, decentralization can also worsen the provision of public goods in the presence of externalities, lack of technical capabilities by local governments, or capture of lower-level administration by local elites. In the context of the education sector, decentralization typically includes one or more of the following features: decentralized revenue generation, curriculum design, school administration, and teacher hiring and management. Decision making authority for these types of functions is devolved to regional/municipal governments or to schools themselves.
The policy of allowing schools autonomy in decisions in these areas is referred to as school-based management (SBM), school based governance, or school self management. Responsibility and decision-making over different types of school operations are transferred to individuals at the school level, who in turn must conform within a set of centrally or state-level determined policies. The popularity of SBM is evidenced by the large number of development agencies promoting it as a key component of the decentralization reforms and the growing number of countries that have adopted aspects of this approach.
SBM reforms began in the 1970s in Australia. Since then, a wide range of countries have experimented with or introduced SBM in all regions of the world, including Hong Kong (China), Indonesia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Kenya, Kyrgyz Republic, Nepal, Paraguay and Mexico.6 Nevertheless, the impact of SBM on education quality, including student outcomes, remains a contentious issue, with some researchers arguing that SBM leads to enhanced educational outcomes. While others contending that SBM leads to the deterioration of educational quality especially among the weakest schools.
The range of SBM approaches and the contexts in which they are implemented makes the debate about SBM quality an intricate one. The evaluation of SBM is complicated by the diversity of approaches to and elements of decentralization that collectively constitute SBM and by the institutional and socio-cultural contexts in which they are implemented. Nonetheless, some studies in recent years have found that SBM reforms are associated with improved education outcomes and processes. However, rigorous evidence base for the effectiveness of SBM in boosting student performance is thin. A recent review of the empirical literature on SBM since 1995 indicates that only 14 studies utilized rigorous methods to assess the impact of SBM, and only six reported positive impacts on students test scores (Barrera-Osorio et al., 2009) . Eleven studies are country-specific from Latin America, one from Kenya, and two exploit data from multiple countries. No empirical evidence is available from East Asia except for the policy study conducted in the Philippines and released on March 2010.
The result of the study in the Philippines revealed that school-averaged student performance on national tests improved between 2002-03 and 2004-05 and that the level of improvement was higher for schools involved in SBM for two years compared with schools that had not yet received the intervention or received the intervention later. School-averaged student performance improved in math, science, and English and on the composite score. Improvement for schools that received SBM early was significantly higher in science and English and on composite test scores. As a result, the Philippines has embarked on a nation-wide effort to introduce and implement SBM.
However, the paper explained that while the result of the study provides an early indication of the usefulness of SBM in a few districts in the country and its promise for other parts of the country, it also highlights an opportunity for introducing a SBM program rollout design that would permit a more rigorous analysis of the contribution of SBM to student outcomes in the Philippines. It emphasized the limitations of the study and provides some recommendations for a program of SBM evaluation in the Philippines. It furthers that although the study found significant differences between SBM and non-SBM schools on school level outcomes, the possibility of unmeasured differences influencing outcomes exists.
In order to fully assess the impact of SBM, the assumptions regarding how the reforms play out over time and eventually affect student achievement will need to be articulated and examined explicitly. The possibility of a “hawthorne” effect cannot be eliminated, and, potentially, an evaluation with a longer time-frame would permit the identification of longer-term effects. Behrman and King (2008) highlight the risks of a poorly timed evaluation, ranging from finding partial or no impacts, when they in fact would take a longer time to materialize, to the risk of scaling up a poor program, by waiting too long to evaluate. Articulating clear assumptions regarding the reforms would assist with implementing evaluations in a timely fashion.
Available reports on TEEP indicate that several aspects of SBM may have been conducive to improved student performance: improved school management through intensive principal and head-teacher training, identification of school-level needs and allocation of resources to those specific needs, greater community attention to schools and students concerns. However, it further noted that, the study does not examine the distribution of effects across different types of schools, both in terms of specified outcomes – student achievement – as well as unintended effects, such as toll on the principal’s and teachers’ time in community engagement.Unintended effects, or processes that eventually undermine desired effects, may exist as well.
The Implementation Completion Report for the TEEP project indicates that, indeed, community engagement demanded that principals and teachers spend considerable time on community relations in addition to their administrative and pedagogical responsibilities, a commitment that several were beginning to find burdensome.
Thus, answers to questions regarding the conditions under which the different SBM models work and which implementation processes are effective are critically important from a policy and program design and implementation perspective. A new evaluation would present an opportunity to study such issues through focusing on such issues as well.
Despite these limitations, the study intends to contribute to the growing body of studies that examine school based management as a tool for improving student outcomes. This study provides an initial case study on the Philippines, an area where SBM has not yet been evaluated. Thus, this analysis suggests there are possible benefits from SBM that may be applicable in the country as a whole.
The SBM program in the Philippines is an ongoing exercise, and the analysis in our paper suggests that it was successful with respect to its objectives of improving student achievement, although the effects were small. However, as the Department of Education in the Philippines moves forward with SBM and goes to scale across the country, it is important to collect data simultaneously in a systematic manner to enable scientific evaluations. The current data has several limitations which make it difficult to espouse conclusive statements about the success of the program and how it might generalize beyond the 23 districts to the country as a whole. A new evaluation approach could enable the Department of Education to study both the implementation processes (what really makes SBM work) and assess impact in a more rigorous fashion.
(Based on the World Bank Policy Paper entitled The Effects of School-Based Management in the Philippines, An Initial Assessment Using Administrative Data, March 2010 )
The policy of allowing schools autonomy in decisions in these areas is referred to as school-based management (SBM), school based governance, or school self management. Responsibility and decision-making over different types of school operations are transferred to individuals at the school level, who in turn must conform within a set of centrally or state-level determined policies. The popularity of SBM is evidenced by the large number of development agencies promoting it as a key component of the decentralization reforms and the growing number of countries that have adopted aspects of this approach.
SBM reforms began in the 1970s in Australia. Since then, a wide range of countries have experimented with or introduced SBM in all regions of the world, including Hong Kong (China), Indonesia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Kenya, Kyrgyz Republic, Nepal, Paraguay and Mexico.6 Nevertheless, the impact of SBM on education quality, including student outcomes, remains a contentious issue, with some researchers arguing that SBM leads to enhanced educational outcomes. While others contending that SBM leads to the deterioration of educational quality especially among the weakest schools.
The range of SBM approaches and the contexts in which they are implemented makes the debate about SBM quality an intricate one. The evaluation of SBM is complicated by the diversity of approaches to and elements of decentralization that collectively constitute SBM and by the institutional and socio-cultural contexts in which they are implemented. Nonetheless, some studies in recent years have found that SBM reforms are associated with improved education outcomes and processes. However, rigorous evidence base for the effectiveness of SBM in boosting student performance is thin. A recent review of the empirical literature on SBM since 1995 indicates that only 14 studies utilized rigorous methods to assess the impact of SBM, and only six reported positive impacts on students test scores (Barrera-Osorio et al., 2009) . Eleven studies are country-specific from Latin America, one from Kenya, and two exploit data from multiple countries. No empirical evidence is available from East Asia except for the policy study conducted in the Philippines and released on March 2010.
The result of the study in the Philippines revealed that school-averaged student performance on national tests improved between 2002-03 and 2004-05 and that the level of improvement was higher for schools involved in SBM for two years compared with schools that had not yet received the intervention or received the intervention later. School-averaged student performance improved in math, science, and English and on the composite score. Improvement for schools that received SBM early was significantly higher in science and English and on composite test scores. As a result, the Philippines has embarked on a nation-wide effort to introduce and implement SBM.
However, the paper explained that while the result of the study provides an early indication of the usefulness of SBM in a few districts in the country and its promise for other parts of the country, it also highlights an opportunity for introducing a SBM program rollout design that would permit a more rigorous analysis of the contribution of SBM to student outcomes in the Philippines. It emphasized the limitations of the study and provides some recommendations for a program of SBM evaluation in the Philippines. It furthers that although the study found significant differences between SBM and non-SBM schools on school level outcomes, the possibility of unmeasured differences influencing outcomes exists.
In order to fully assess the impact of SBM, the assumptions regarding how the reforms play out over time and eventually affect student achievement will need to be articulated and examined explicitly. The possibility of a “hawthorne” effect cannot be eliminated, and, potentially, an evaluation with a longer time-frame would permit the identification of longer-term effects. Behrman and King (2008) highlight the risks of a poorly timed evaluation, ranging from finding partial or no impacts, when they in fact would take a longer time to materialize, to the risk of scaling up a poor program, by waiting too long to evaluate. Articulating clear assumptions regarding the reforms would assist with implementing evaluations in a timely fashion.
Available reports on TEEP indicate that several aspects of SBM may have been conducive to improved student performance: improved school management through intensive principal and head-teacher training, identification of school-level needs and allocation of resources to those specific needs, greater community attention to schools and students concerns. However, it further noted that, the study does not examine the distribution of effects across different types of schools, both in terms of specified outcomes – student achievement – as well as unintended effects, such as toll on the principal’s and teachers’ time in community engagement.Unintended effects, or processes that eventually undermine desired effects, may exist as well.
The Implementation Completion Report for the TEEP project indicates that, indeed, community engagement demanded that principals and teachers spend considerable time on community relations in addition to their administrative and pedagogical responsibilities, a commitment that several were beginning to find burdensome.
Thus, answers to questions regarding the conditions under which the different SBM models work and which implementation processes are effective are critically important from a policy and program design and implementation perspective. A new evaluation would present an opportunity to study such issues through focusing on such issues as well.
Despite these limitations, the study intends to contribute to the growing body of studies that examine school based management as a tool for improving student outcomes. This study provides an initial case study on the Philippines, an area where SBM has not yet been evaluated. Thus, this analysis suggests there are possible benefits from SBM that may be applicable in the country as a whole.
The SBM program in the Philippines is an ongoing exercise, and the analysis in our paper suggests that it was successful with respect to its objectives of improving student achievement, although the effects were small. However, as the Department of Education in the Philippines moves forward with SBM and goes to scale across the country, it is important to collect data simultaneously in a systematic manner to enable scientific evaluations. The current data has several limitations which make it difficult to espouse conclusive statements about the success of the program and how it might generalize beyond the 23 districts to the country as a whole. A new evaluation approach could enable the Department of Education to study both the implementation processes (what really makes SBM work) and assess impact in a more rigorous fashion.
(Based on the World Bank Policy Paper entitled The Effects of School-Based Management in the Philippines, An Initial Assessment Using Administrative Data, March 2010 )
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