International And National Trends In Local Governance Of Education

Abstract

Trends can be defined as linear or directional changes, in this instance in policies and practices with respect to location of governance. What in the short run looks like a trend, however, may turn out to be merely another cycle in policy and practice. Bangladesh, for example, in 1973 eliminated local management of schools, passed legislation to restore local control in the early 1980s, reverted to central control in 1990 and most recently is moving toward local management again (Govinda, 1997). Previous reviews of decentralization provide additional examples of governance trends that turned into cycles (Chieuw & Mandolang, 1992; Malpica Faustor, 1994; Yannakopulos, 1980) Cyclical patterns can also be seen in how research reports are classified. Chart 1 displays the relative frequency reports about educational governance included in ERIC, an American bibliographic database with about 1 million entries, beginning from 1901. The chart counts all reports classified according to the keywords: Decentralization; Community Involvement; and School-Based Management. It takes on average three years for a document to appear in ERIC; almost all the entries pertain to American education. Community Involvement is a more frequent theme than is Decentralization, but was used relatively less frequently beginning in the 1980s. School-based Management was not introduced until 1980 and boomed in the early 1990s. It may be declining now relative to Decentralization.