WB Policy Research Working Paper, Suggests More Rigorous Analysis of SBM Contribution to Student Outcomes

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 )

Trends and Issues in Using IT in Education

By Gilbert M. Forbes
DepEd QUEZON, IV-A CALABARZON   

We are very much aware of the present status of learning of our students.  Beneath the introduction of modern concepts of teaching and learning versus the traditional one, still low performance is a primary challenge.  At the outset, we are doubtful if curriculum reform and other educational reforms in the area of teaching, educational management and supervision will create a difference.  But there is still another element aside from these reforms that can make a difference when it comes to student performance.  This is no other than the introduction and use of information technology in our classrooms.

    The use of IT is actually not new already because it has already gained its ground in our secondary schools, even in grade schools in highly developed and economically affluent school districts.  Hence, computer laboratories have become ordinary among our secondary schools and has even become a priority among some of our school administrators and benefactors both private individual and politicians alike.  As such, most of these schools are now offering not only basic computer literacy but also even advance computer studies e.g. word processing and desktop publishing, power point and spread- sheet presentations etc.  With the introduction of Tech Voch concepts in selected secondary schools, benefit from IT education further benefitted students.  These give high school students the edge when they go to college to pursue advance IT studies both degree and non-degree.  It has even popularized computer related courses to the detriment of other vocational and technical disciplines that are also equally important and in- demand in the labor market contributing further to mismatch in actual labor demand.  Fly by night computer institutions have flourished in the past two decades.

    Observers are saying that, in this mode, the use of computer in learning is not practically maximized.  This is in terms of return on investment it requires, hardware, personnel, energy and facility.  Academic programs using computers is concentrated in a single area, computer education benefitting only the TLE class.  Therefore, no significant contribution on the advancement of learning in other important areas like English, Science and Mathematics can be seen in this arrangement since computers are not utilized for this purpose.  At times it is even funny to know that the school has a functional computer laboratory but has no library or a science laboratory where students can do their experiments and manipulate important science equipment.  This was recently corrected by a series of DepEd instructions with regards to the utilization of IT but still, much have to be seen in a larger scale.  Other more productive endeavors such as wood- working and agriculture are also neglected in favor of computer instruction, until recently, DepEd has issued an order strengthening Edukasyong Pantahanan at Pangkabuhayan in our schools.

    But still, we could not discount the unlimited possibilities, computers can offer towards the advancement of learning.  It can integrate multiple media into single educational applications, it is interactive and include the capacity to control, manipulate and contribute to the information environment; they are flexible, offering freedom from rigid scheduling and from barriers of time and location; through connectivity, they provide access to every other person on the planet who has an internet account, to hundreds of thousands of information archives, and to millions of Web pages (Blurton 2001).

    In simple terms computers through an LCD projectors and sound blasters could be used in the classroom in presenting various multi-media lessons using CD-R-DVD Rom, various software applications such as word processing, power point and others thus making the lesson more interesting and full of suspense to the students.  It can even free the teachers from the traditional mode of writing, because instead of paper and pen, the computer can be used for such purpose and can be retrieved and revised anytime.  If there’s an Internet provider in the area, both teacher and students will further benefit for there are now eavailable downloadble learning materials e.g., instructional videos from youtube and other sites, lesson plans and learning guides, on-line exercises, etc.

    Various studies therefore favor the use of IT in education.   According to these, evidence has consistently shown that IT mediated instruction using conventional teaching methods is as effective as traditional face-to-face instruction, and in the case of computer-based instruction, may in certain instances improve student learning and attitudes to learning (Kulik 1994, as cited in Glennan and Melmed, chap. 2, 1995). Uses of ICTs in the classroom, especially for the host of applications and methods support ‘constructivist’ learning, in which students are encouraged to work in rich environments of information and experience to build their own understanding of them (Apple Computer, Inc., 1995; Bertelsmann Foundation, 1998). ICTs can make it possible for teachers to provide students with self-paced, self-directed problem-based on constructivist learning experiences, as well as to test student learning in new, interactive, and attractive ways that may better assess the depth of their understanding of content and processes.

    For this matter, school authorities, stakeholders, benefactors most especially politicians who illogically ride on this craze should consider these realities and try to refocus their priorities on a wider and not on a limited perspective which tend to serve only their interest and not the general interest of the many.  A World Bank Report warns about the lack of planning and the necessary resources for this matter.

    Before embarking on computer literacy programs for the students, the human resource of the school must be the first priority so that they will learn to use these technologies for the advancement of learning.  Advance instructional processes to enhance advance and quality learning must be the priority and not the open-ended computer literacy programs which becomes part of the THE old curriculum only.  After all not all students when they go to college or technical schools will pursue computer related disciplines.  The presence of the computers must not be confined to computer laboratories but should be dispersed to classroom levels.  After all computers today are not as sensitive as other may think it to be.  It no longer need a common area, which is expensive to maintain.  Since 1995, we have seen a lot of poorly ventilated establishments using computers. Instead of hiring computer instructors, why not train the existing teachers and let them maintain it together with their students.  In this manner, precious funds can be saved and allotted to other equally important needs and concerns such as the establishment of functional library and a science laboratory.

    As our civilization today continues, the evolution of new knowledge and technologies are immense.  As such, our thoughts and actions must not be distorted nor limit our horizon of thinking due to the gargantuan effect this craze brought.  So may our antiquity but instead the first to break the barriers of traditionalism for the advancement of learning.

(Mr. Gilbert M. Forbes had his Bachelors Degree and MA in Educational Management (CAR) from the Philippine Normal University.  A campus paper adviser and trainer for 13 years.  Currently, he is a school principal in one of the central schools in the Division of Quezon.)