Towards an education decentralization strategy for Turkey : guideposts from international experience

41062 Towards an Education Decentralization Strategy for Turkey: Guideposts from international experience Policy Note for the Turkey Education Sector Study Alec Ian Gershberg, HDNED The World Bank March 2005 Serap Bindebir provided excellent and timely research assistance.  Introduction: Turkey's Decentralization Challenges Turkey's recent expansion of school enrolments has been as impressive as it has been historic. Like many countries that have achieved such increased coverage, the Government of Turkey (GOT) is now rightly turning its attention to improving educational quality, equity and student achievement.1 And, like many countries seeking to improve educational quality, the government is seriously exploring potential strategies to decentralize the way schooling is governed and managed. Turkey's education system is highly centralized--in many respects among the most centralized of middle income countries (MICs). It is far more centralized than most other countries in the ECA region and more centralized than all members of the European Union it hopes to join. It is significantly more centralized even than France, which is among the most famously centralized countries in Europe and whose education system provided a model upon which the Turkish system is based.2 It is not unreasonable to argue that a well-designed reform process in Turkey that includes components of decentralization could improve educational service provision and, over time, achievement. There are, however, legitimate reasons--political, societal and historical--why Turkey's education system has remained so centralized: in particular, issues of nation building, social unity, political philosophy, and potential religious conflict. These are poignant issues that, while we cannot explore in detail in this paper, form crucial aspects of the policymaking context that one must consider in any exploration of decentralization strategies for Turkey. Never easy, decentralization in Turkey will no doubt prove particularly challenging to conceptualize and even more so to implement. This study first develops a framework for thinking about educational decentralization, and next describes the most common kinds of policy reforms associated with decentralization. It focuses, in particular, on the decentralization of basic education functions and responsibilities from central government ministries to sub-national governments, to communities, and to the schools themselves. Drawing upon the now significant international experience with education decentralization, the study presents guiding principles and lessons learned with an emphasis on how these could prove applicable in the Turkish context. We develop a typology of education decentralization and a conceptual framework for considering education decentralization in Turkey. Throughout, we highlight some specific country case examples that provide insight into 1For instance, the Turkey Public Expenditure and Institutional Review (PEIR) concludes that the equity and efficiency of public expenditures on education and training are significantly lagging. 2In fact, we use many comparisons to France in the report since we consider it a useful case study for Turkey. Simsek and Yilderim (2004: 155) note that "the French education model has been the most influential model in turkey since the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923. the Turkish system currently is `ore French than the French system'because the French model has experienced significant changes during the past twenty years." 1  the choices Turkey faces.3 Finally, we assess where Turkey stands in the context of this typology and conceptual framework, and explore potential paths for education reform. The main objective of this study is to inform policymakers and other stakeholders of the issues, justifications, advantages, and risks of decentralizing or deconcentrating education management, service delivery, and financing from the Ministry of National Education (MONE) to local municipal governments, to local offices of the Ministry located in the Provincial Governors' offices, or directly to schools themselves. Decentralization of education: rationale, theoretical and practical framework The rationales for education decentralization involve improving efficiency, effectiveness and democracy.4 Improved equity, too, is a rationale for decentralization, although it is also often acknowledged that because decentralization can make localities more reliant upon their economic and social endowments, some aspects of equity may suffer in the absence of adequate compensatory mechanisms. Thus the rationales are often categorized as follows: i. Efficiency and effectiveness: Potential Factors for Improved Effectiveness from Decentralization & Participation5 1. More accurate fit of services to recipient demand. 2. Reducing bureaucracy and red tape; 3. Reducing leakage of resources; 4. Adaptation of standardized government programs to local conditions. 5. Reduced costs of communication with poor and rural populations on issues involving other government programs. 6. Increased sectoral resources through local resource mobilization, based on either self-help, user charges, or matching grant basis. 7. Gains in technical knowledge, both from and to local populations. 8. Better accountability and performance, derived particularly from better fit of services, increased resources and stakeholders acting as watchdog entity. 9. Lower costs through cooperation 10. It is often recognized, however, that strong central evaluation is a key for realizing these potential gains. ii.Democracy: decentralization has the potential to increase the number and voice of stakeholders and incorporate democratic decision-making; iii.Equity: the potential exists to worsen equity, especially inter-regional equity, if decentralization includes sub-national revenue generation and/or school fees; but 3Annex 2 provides more detailed case study information on France, Poland, Hungary, and Romania, and we also draw from many other cases. 4Here we discuss the rationale, as opposed to the political reason, for decentralization. Politically, decentralization may be pursued as a strategy to shift expenditure obligations to lower levels of government, to resolve ethnic conflicts by giving different language groups or tribes greater autonomy, etc. 5Potential Factors for Effectiveness Adapted from Esman & Uphoff (1984). 2  equity can also improve if the poor receive better service delivery. Compensatory mechanisms designed and overseen by the Central Government are key. There is no silver bullet: what is equitable may not be efficient, what is efficient may not be democratic, what is democratic may not be equitable. In practice, reform strategies must attempt to optimize the sometimes inevitable trade-offs between efficiency, equity, and democracy while seeking to improve on all three. The actual design and implementation of decentralization reforms are inherently political processes; thus, the decisions about making these trade-offs rightly occur in the political arena. Certainly, improved accountability is often a goal of decentralization reforms, and expected improvements in performance are usually predicated at least in part on improved accountability. The World Bank's knowledge about accountability is well crystallized in the World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for Poor People (WDR2004). The WDR 2004 gives a framework of accountability and represents a three cornered relationship, where providers are accountable to policy makers and both providers and policy makers are accountable to the poor people. While beyond the scope of this present study, Annex 3 provides an in-depth listing of the myriad potential "accountability mechanisms" in education. The WDR 2004 suggests that by empowering the poor in terms of service providers and policy makers being accountable to the people, service outcomes can be radically improved for the poor people. It has one central message of relevance to education in Turkey: while improving resource flows and providing plenty of technical/pedagogical capacity development and support to the education sector may be useful in improving access by the poor to quality education, it is by no means sufficient: instead, schools and bureaucracies must be held accountable for using the inputs they are provided in an effective manner. International experience with decentralization has motivated a by now well-known typology, first presented by Rondinelli (1981) and adapted to education by Winkler (1989) 6. Most decentralization typologies begin with the requisite references to 6Rondinelli (1981, 1986, & 1989) created the original basic vocabulary for describing the various ways in which governments may be expected to pursue administrative decentralization. 1) Deconcentration involves the central or federal government granting greater authority to its own sub-national authorities under its direct control. It is the weakest form of decentralization for it does not transfer any significant authority to sub- national governments. 2) Delegation involves creating semi-autonomous agencies, such as state-owned enterprises or public corporations. 3) Devolution entails the transfer of service delivery responsibility to independent sub-national levels of government, regions, provinces, municipalities, etc. 4) Privatization is often considered the most far-reaching form of decentralization. Early studies focused on fiscal decentralization; that is, the decentralization of functions related to public finance and public financial management. Fiscal decentralization can be further divided into two broad categories: 1) revenue-side fiscal decentralization, which involves granting sub-national levels of government greater control over tax and other revenue sources, and 2) expenditure-side fiscal decentralization, which involves greater expenditure responsibility on the part of sub- national governments. Revenue-side fiscal decentralization almost always includes expenditure-side fiscal decentralization; however, the latter may take place without the former, with the central government usually transferring financial resources to sub-national governments via grants or revenue sharing schemes. 3  deconcentration, devolution, delegation, and privatization. This is particularly true when education decentralization is part of a general government decentralization--often also part of a public sector reform effort to improve democracy and the legitimacy of the state. Recently, attention has focused equally if not more on decentralization to schools and school management committees (commonly called school autonomy and school-based management, SBM) as opposed to decentralization to (or of) governments.