Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 19th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview PA Reform Author(s) Jolanta Urbanovic Mykolas Romeris University Vilnius Lithuania Title Decentralization of education management: Theoretical and practical issues File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract In many countries around the world many strategies are developed to improve educational services funding and their delivering, increasingly emphasizing the improvement of the quality of education. One of such strategy is the decentralization of the decision-making in education, the expansion school autonomy aiming to increase the parental and community involvement in schools. Although the principle that schools should be autonomous in at least some areas of their management is accepted nearly everywhere in Europe, however, it is worth to notice that school autonomy reform doesn’t belong to the European tradition. This type of school management was implemented in only a few pioneering countries from the 1980s onwards and in a limited way. The school autonomy movement did not really become widespread until the 1990s. The process of school autonomy reform has reflected the then concepts of public administration: the eighth decade for political tendencies in “democratic participation”, the ninth decade for the new public management program, most recently it is aimed at improving the quality of public services. The school autonomy reforms are supported by recently growing the conception of New Governance Approach, fostering citizens’ co-participation, supporting civic values. The purpose of this article is to present an analysis of the education decentralization reforms in European countries. In order to achieve this goal it will be analyzed strategies of decentralization and these ones of school based mangement reforms in various European countries, identifying factors that had influenced the development of school based management transformation reforms as also advantages and threats of that process.
