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Hallak, Jacques, Ed.; Caillods, Francoise, Ed.Educational Planning: The International Dimension.International Rureau of Education, Geneva(Switzerland).ISBN-0-8153-2024-8; ISBN-92-3-103036-195

307p.UNESCO, International Bureau of Education, P.O. Box199, 1211, Geneva 20, Switzerland (Garland ReferenceLibrary of Social Science, vol.1032--ISBN-0-8153-2024-8;UNESCOISBN-92-3-103036-1).Books (010) Collected Works General (020)

MFOI/PCI3 Plus Postage.*Educational Administration; *EducationalDevelopment; Educational Economics; *EducationalPlanning; Elementary Secondary Education; *ForeignCountries; Futures (of Society); Government SchoolRelationship; *International Education; Long RangePlanning; Resource Allocation; Strategic Planning

With the exception of one essay, the content of thisbook is a selection of articles from past issues of "Prospects,"UNESCO's quarterly review of education. Most of the articles werewritten in the late 1980s or early 1990s. They identify trends ineducational planning and management and explain why planning is morenecessary than ever. Following "Introduction: A New Scope forEducational Planning," by Francoise Caillods and Jacques Hallak,articles in part 1 examine new issues for the educational planner:(2) "Teaching/Learning Conditions in Developing Countries" (FrancoiseCaillods and T. Neville Postlethwaite); (3) "Planning the Quality ofEducation: Different Informac'-n for Different Levels of DecisionMaking" (Kenneth N. Ross and T. Neville Postlethwaite); (4)

"Educotional Reform and Planning in the Current Economic Crisis"(Martin Conroy); (5) "The Impact of the Debt Crisis on Educatic,n inLatin America: Implications for Educational Planning" (Ferna:IdoReimers); (6) "Education, Work, and Employment in DevelopedCountries: Situation and Future Challenges" (Henry M. Lavin andRussell W. Rumberger); (7) "Management and Administration ofEducation Systems: Major Issues and Trends" (Benno Sander); (8)

"Managing Schools for Educational Quality and Equity: Finding theProper Mix To Make It Work" (Jacques Hallak); and (9) "The Role ofthe State in Education" (Juan Carlos Tedesco). Articles in the secondpart examine the practice of educational planning in differentregions: (10) "Educational Planning, Administration, and Managementin Africa" (Vinayagum Chinapah); (11) "Educational Planning andAdministration in Latin America: From Optimism to Uncertainty" (FabioM. Bustos); (12) "Review and Prospects of Educational Planning andManagement in the Arab States" (Antoine M. Gennaoui); (13)"Commonality among Diversity: A Review of Planning and Administrationof Education in Asia" (Cheng Kai Ming) ; and (14) "EducationalPlanning and Management in Europe: Trends and Challenges" (IngemarFagerlind and Britt Sjostedt). Part 3 discusses the possibleevolution of educational planning. Articles include: (15) "Seeking

New Paradigms To Plan Education for Development--the Role ofEducational Research" (Daniel A. Morales-Gomez); (16) "EducationalPlanning Problems, Decision Making, and Communication" (Dan Inbar);(17) "Integrated Development of Human Resources and EducationalPlanning" (Vinayagum Chinapah, Jan-Ingvar Lofstedt, and Hans Weiler);(18) "Does Company Strategy Have Any Lessons for EducationalPlanning?" (Alain Bienayme); and (19) "Does Education Need StrategicPiloting?" (Sylvain Laurie). References accompany each article'and anindex is included. (LMI)

Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be madefrom the original document.

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BEST COPY AVAILABLE

"PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THISMATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY

TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCESINFORMATION CENTER (EMI"

IBE STUDIES ON EDUCATION

EDUCATIONALPLANNING

GARLAND REFERFNCI: LIBRARY01: SOCIAL SCIFNCI:Voi..1032

.-

On the eve of the twenty-first century, education-3 planning hasbecome elastic. It has expanded its activity f. cover not only schools,but nonformal education and questions of ed, cational quality as well.Experience has also shown that, to be effecti; , planning 1ias to comecloser to the actionit must be flexible, inte, .ctive and pragmatic,taking the educational, social, cultural, financial and humAn dimen-sions into consideration. As planners juggle with a statisticai cocktailof projections, analyses, indicators and targets, the challenge in termsof training and capacity building is enormous.

Planning activities, far from disappearing, have developed at both thelocal and central levels, both inside and outside ministries of educa-tion and in the developing and industrialised countries.

`i 4

EDUCATIONALPLANNINGThe InternationalDimension

edited by

Jacques HallakFrançoise Caillods

WHOInternational Bureauof Education, Geneva

International Institutefor EducationalPlanning, Paris

GARLAND PUBLISHING, INC.New York & London 1995

BEST COPY AVAILABLE

Copyright 1995 UNESCO: International Bureau of EducationP.O. Box 199, 1211 Geneva 20, Switzerland

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Educational planning : the international dimension / edited byJacques Hallak, Francoise Caillods ; International Bureau ofEducation.

p. cm. (IBE studies on education) (Garland referencelibrary of social science ; vol. 1032)

Chiefly articles selected from past issues of Prospects, publishedbetween 1984 and 1991.

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-8153-2024-8 (Garland : alk. paper). ISBN 9231030361

(Unesco : alk. paper)1. Educational planning. 2. School management and

organization. I. Hallak, Jacques. II. Caillods, Françoise.III. International Bureau of Education. IV. Prospects.V. Series. VI. Series: Garland reference library of social science ;V. 1032.1_,C71.2.E39 1995371.207dc20 94-46771

CIP

Printed on acid-free, 250-year-life paperManufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Preface vii

Introduction: A new scope for educational planning ix

Françoise Caillods and Jacques Hal lak

I A New Agenda for the Educational PlannerTeaching/learning conditions in developing countries 3

Frangoise Caillods and T. Neville Postlethwaite

Planning the quality of education: different information for differentlevels of decision-making 25Kenneth N. Ross and T. Neville Postlethwaite

Educational reform and planning in the current economic crisis 43Martin Carnoy

The impact of the debt crisis on education in Latin America:Implications for educational planning 53

Fernando Reimers

Education, work and employment in developed countries:situation and future challenges 69Henry M. Levin and Russell W. Rumberger

Management and administration of education systems: majorissues and trends 89Benno Sander

Managing schools for educational quality and equity: finding theproper mix to make it work 107Jacques Hallak

The role of the state in education 119

Juan Carlos Tedesco

vi Contents

II The Practice of Educational Planning in Different RegionsEducational planning, administration and management in Africa 143

Vinayaguni Chinapah

Educational planning and administration in Latin America:From opfimism to uncertainty 159Fabio M. Bustos

Review and prospects of educational planning and managementin the Arab States 167Antoine M. Gennaoui

Commonality among diversity: A review of planning andadministration of education in Asia 185Cheng Kai Ming

Educational planning and management in Europe: Trendsand challenges 199Ingemar Fagerlind and Britt Sjiistedt

III The Future of Educational PlanningSeeking new paradigms to plan education for development

the role of educational research 215Daniel A. Morales-GOmez

Educational planning problems, decision-making andcommunication 229Dan Inbar

Integrated development of human resources and educationalplanning 237Vinayagum Chinapah, lan-Ingvar Leifstedt and Hans Weiler

Does company strategy have any lessons for educationalplanning? 259Alain Bienayine

Does education need strategic piloting? 273Sylvain Lourie

Index 285

With the exception of the essay "Managing schools for educational qualityand equity: finding the proper mix to make it work", the content of this bookis a selection of articles drawn from eight past issues of Prospects, UNESCO'squarterly review of education, namely: No. 52 (vol. 14, no. 4, 1984); No. 58(vol. 16, no. 2, 1986); No. 67 (vol. 18, no. 3, 1988); No. 69 (vol. 19, no. 1, 1989);No. 70 (vol. 19, no. 2, 1989); No. 72 (vol. 19, no. 4, 1989); No. 76 (vol. 20, no. 4,1990); No. 77 (vol. 21, no. 1, 1991).

The idea of collectthg these articles aryl publishing, them as a separatevolume originated with Zaghloul Morsy, at that time editor of Prospects, andProfessor Philip G. Altbach, until recently director of the ComparativeEducation Center, State University of New York at Buffalo, and presently atthe School of Education, Boston College.

As of 1 January 1994, and with the retirement of Zaghloul Morsy,editorial responsibility for Prospects has passed to the International Bureau ofEducation (IBE) and, with it, the task of producing this book. Happily, theIBE has been able to count upon the enthusiastic support of Zaghloul Morsyand Philip Altbach, and to them it extends its deep gratitude. The index hasbeen prepared by Hyaeweol Choi, and to her too we extend our thanks.

The IBE invited Jacques Hallak, director, and Françoise Caillods of theInternational Institute for Educational Planning, Paris, to select these worksand write an introduction, giving an up-to-date overview of the educationalplanning situation over the past decade in different regions of the world.

Since 1989 there has been an unprecedented number of changes in thestatus of countries, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. Many of thetexts reproduced here were written at a time when these changes had nottaken place and could hardly have been envisaged. Since these texts havebeen reproduced directly from the pages of Prospects, these changes are notreflected here and we apologise to readers beforehand for any expressionsthat must now be considered out of date.

The first attempt to publish collections of articles from Prospects inbook form led to Higher Education in International Perspective: Tothard the 21st

vii

viii Preface

Century (UNESCO/Advent Books, New York, 1993, 218 pp.), edited byZaghloul Morsy and Philip G. Altbach. The Challenge of Illiteracy: FromReflection to Action, the first in this series of IBE Studies on Education, waspublished in the fall of 1994 by Garland Publishing.

The International Bureau of Education expresses its gratitude to theauthors of this collection of articles but reminds readers that the authors areresponsible for the choice and the presentation of the facts contained in thisbook, and for the opinions expressed therein, which are not necessarilythoseof UNESCO:IBE and do not commit the Organisation. Furthermore, the'designations employed and the presentation of material throughout thepublication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on thepart of UNESCO:IBE concerning the legal status of any country, territory,city, or area, or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitations of itsfrontici s or boundaries.

Juan Carlos TedescoDirectorInternational Bureau of Education

NV).

INTRODUCTIONJacques HallakFrancoise Caillods

A New Scope for Educational Planning

It was in a context of unprecedented economic growth that educationalplanning developed in the 1960s. At the time, educational planners foundthemselves entrusted with the task of orchestrating the tremendousexpansion of education systems, with the dual aim of both universzlisingeducation and providing national economies with the qualified manpowerthey needed. In most countries, one or more planning units were created.Great hopes were placed in educational planning, which was meant to serveas a framework for setting objectives and priorities, directing educationalpolicies and optimising the use of resources.

Twenty-five years later, educational planning, just like economicplanning, has lost much of its prestige. On the one hand, the universal beliefthat education is a basic condition for development and the great leveller ofsocial inequality has been shaken. As a result of the economic recession,graduate unemployment has become an acute problem almost everywhere.In spite of subtantial investment in education and training, poverty isgrowing in ma y countries and new environmental and health problemshave emerged. Liberalism and free market ideologies have spread, creatingconsiderable pressure to reduce the dominance of the state in all domains,including education.

At the same time, educational planners themselves have been accusedof being too normative, too 'rational' and not sufficiently political or'interactive'. Others, on the contrary, blame them for having been toopolitical and for not having properly guided the decision-makers. The maincriticism of educational planning, however, is that it has not been sufficientlyconcerned with implementation issues. Thus, in th 1990s, it is no longerfashionable to speak of planning, programming or forecasts. These words have

ix

Introduction

been progressNely replaced by such terms as policy analysis, policy dialogue,labour market analysis and strategic management.

What is at stake, however, is not the need to forecast, organise andplan. On the contrary, what is at stake is a certain type of planning. Rigidmandatory planning clearly appears unsuited to today's world, but otherforms of planning are not. It remains essential to explore the future, detectmajor trends and anticipate problems before they become so critical that theycannot be solved. More than ever before, there is a need for a coherentfromework and an overall rationality to the various projects and programmesthat ministries of education, and other actors on the educational scene,undertake. It is also vital to ensure that the new resources made available foreducation be used in the best possible way.

The need for planning and anticipating is still there, but significantchanges have occurred in education and the way it is planned, making itnecessary to adapt its scope, approaches and methods, as well as the actorsinvolved.

Many of the contributions presented in this bookdrawn from pastissues of Prospects, UNESCO's quarterly review of educationwere preparedfor a seminar organised in 1988 by the International Institute for EducationalPlanning to mark its twenty-fifth anniversary, with a view to mapping outthe new trends in educational planning and management and to explain whyplanning is more necessary than ever. Others were prepared for theInternational Congre_., on Planning and management of educational developmentthat UNESCO organised in Mexico in March 1990.

Some of the contributions presented in Part 1 examine the new issuesfor the educational planner, which constitute major challenges and imply anew approach. They include:

The deterioration of teaching and learning conditions, which leads to adecline in the quality of education, making it crucial to shift theemphasis from quantity to quality and to develop a better adaptedinformation base.

The impact of structural adjustment programmes on public resourcesavailable for education, which makes it necessary to find new sources offinance and develop new cost-sharing arrangements involving parents,communities and industry.

The technologic.il revolution, which means that any country wanting toenter the information age has to raise substantially the educational levelof its work torce.

Introduction xi

The lack of efficiency of many administrative systems and the need tosearch for new paradigms highlighting decentralisation and thepromotion of collective participation.

Last but not least, the crisis of the state and the increasing lack ofconfidence in its ability to perform its functions adequately has directimplications on educational planning.

A number of other contributions examine the practice of educationalplanning in different regions. These are presented in Part 2.

Finally, the way educational planning could evolve in future is thequestion that papers presented in Part 3 address.

Five years later, many of the issues and trends presented in thesecontributions remain the same. However, the situation has changed andsome new important elements have entered the game.

Mobilizing the international Community to Provide Education for All

The first new element is the Jomtien Conference and its outcome. Theinternational community has mobilised itself to provide the broadestpossible access to learning, to improve the quality of education and put morefocus on outcomes. Education is considered a right, "the pre-eminent meansfor promoting universal human values, the quality of human resources, andrespect for cultural diversity". Based on the results of a number of rate-of-return studies, education, and basic education in particular, is considered tobe one of the most profitable long-term investments that any developingcountry can make. Hence, at Jomtien, developing countries committedthemselves to making primary education universal by the beginning of thenext century, and to extending learning opportunities to children, youth andadults. The donor community has similarly committed itself to backing theseefforts. The implications for planning are, on one hand, that education is nowa top priority of countries and donors, and on the other, it puts right back onthe agenda some of the 'mechanical' approaches and instruments used forplanning. Primary, and in some countries lower secondary, education cannotbe generalised in such a short time without making enrolment projections,forecasting the number of teachers to be trained, analysing costs, preparingbudgets, planning the location of schools, that is, without using the well-established instruments of rational planning. At the same time, however,enroling the last 10 or 20 percent of the school-age population (girls in

xii Introduction

remote rural areas, street children in large cities) and retaining them inschool require diversifying the learning programmes offered and adaptingthem to the needs of these specific clienteles. Calling on various actors, suchas local communities, private associations and NGOs to deliver suchprogrammes, also becomes a necessity. New flexible planning instrumentshave to be developed and more attention has to be paid to theimplementation, monitoring and evaluation of these projects.

Diversifying the Sources of Finance

Financial constraints caused by the debt burden, structural adjustment andausterity programmes continue to affect educational budgets. In order tofinance the ambitious programmes for basic education, the resources inMinistry of Education budgets hay.e had to be reallocated, taking funds awayfrom secondary vocational, technical and /or higher education. Providingbasic education for all, while respecting the need for balanced developmentof the entire education system, means that other sources of finance are alsoincreasingly being tapped. Not only does the share of private educationincrease in a number of countries, particularly at the post-primary level, hutthe state is also entering into partnership with communities, NGOs andenterprises for the financing of its own schools. Parents increasinglycontribute through tuition fees. More and more countries are launchingstudent loan programmes. Communities are asked to build schools in ruralareas. Enterprises are encouraged to bankroll and also to organise their owntraining programmes. In several countries aid agencies play an increased rolein educational funding: they finance nearly all capital expenditures, a largenumber of programmes on teachei training or textbook development andsometimes even salaries. The conditions imposed by donors contribute torestricting the countries' freedom of action by interfering systematically intheir policy choices. This role goes far beyond their actual share in the overallspending on education. It is likely to continue for many }.oars, unlesscountries strengthen their capacity for policy negotiation and dialogue withdonors and reinforce their planning mechanisms.

Growing Concern for Educational Quality

More and more countries are concerned with the declining quality of theeducational service and are making efforts to reverse the situation. Forexample, textbooks are being distributed in the basic schools of a number ofcountries. Research has shown that improving the management of schoolsand granting them more autonomy in adapting content to local conditions

-

Introduction xiii

could considerably improve the quality of education. Many countries aremoving in this direction, but a lot of time and training is needed before suchmeasures can bear fruit. Where teachers remain underpaid, or simplyunpaid, because of budgetary difficulties, the issue remains untouched.Planners' concerns, however, go beyond the simple analysis of teaching andlearning conditions. They now deal with questions of relevance anddiversification of content and have to monitor how much pupils learn. Usersof the education systems, starting with pupils and parents, increasinglydemand higher quality and better 'results'. Under pressure to be morecompetitive, companies are also insisting on higher standards when they hirestaff. Systems of assessment are therefore created in an increasing number ofcountries, often under the auspices of the educational planning entities.Measuring the pupil achievement levels is recognised as an integral part ofthe activities conducted for monitoring the development of an educationalsystem and measuring its efficiency.

New Delivery Systems

The multiplication of nonformal and distance learning programmes allowscountries to contain costs while satisfying the needs of an increasinglydiverse clientele. More recently, the information technology revolution thatthe world is experiencing is challenging established approaches to thedelivery of educational programmes at all levelsas well as the operation ofeducation systems. The costs of computers on one hand and of informationstorage and manipulation on the other hand have fallen so drastically that, inthe near future, electronic, audio and visual methods of communicationcould be used the world over. At the same time, the prevailing contrastbetween the world of education, predominantly guided by public serviceconcerns, on the one hand, and the world of information technology mostlydetermined by private market rules, on the other hand, will need to beaddressed by all actors concerned and particularly by the educationprofession.

Making Educational Management and Administration More Efficient

In many developing countries, administration is centralised as a result of thegovernment's determination to control educational content and quality, itsdesire to reduce regional disparities and promote national unity. This is alsoa result of 'he lack of qualified staff at regional and local levels. Over theyears, many such systems have become hishly bureaucratic and inefficient,incapable of responding quickly to new requirements and of implementing

Introduction

reforms and policies defLned at the central level. In an attempt to modernisetheir administration systems and to bring decision-making closer to thelevels concerned, many countries have started devolving authority in mattersof governance, financial control and content to lower levels. With a view toincreasing the efficiency and quality of education, a number of reformsencourage school-based management, giving schools more autonomy todecide, in co-operation with various local actors, how to adapt the content,the teaching-learning process and the distribution of resources to meet localneeds. However, such transformations take time to be implemented and theirsuccess is not necessarily guaranteed. It largely depends on the existence ofadequate financial and human resources at the regional and school level, anappropriate information system and clear accountability procedures. Controland close ic,onitnring of what is happening become essential. Compensatorymeasures are also needed if wide dispthities are to be controlled. It thenbecomes the responsibility of the central level to address resource allocationproblems, train the required staff, adopt relevant performance indicators, setup an elaborate and diversified information system and define clear rulesand regulations.

Another major trend worth mentioning would be the 'renaissance' ofthe role of universities in the social and economic development of countriesand the realisation that they need to undergo substantial structural changesto play this role. They should, among other things, become autonomous,detached from governments, capable of securing funds from diverse sourcesand developing linkages with industry. Generally speaking, they should takeon an expanded role in development and community service.

The Extended Scope of Educational Planning

In a large number of countries, the state is still directly operating mostschools, centres and sometimes post-secondary institutions. In such contexts,the traditional planning activities described above, extended to give moreemphasis to quality aspects, continue to exist. Gone is the time, however,when the planner could hope to define, on the basis of a number of technicalstudies, be it rate-of-return studies, manpower forecasts or labour marketanalysis, what might be an optimal solution, leaving others to implement thepolicy and the programmes. Experience has shown that, to be effective,planning has to come closer to the action. It must be more open andpragmatic, taking full consideration of the real conditions and theeducational, social, cultural, financial and human dimensions that determinethe development of education systems. It has to be more operational as well,working more closely with administrators in a concerted attempt to link the

Introduction XV

plan both to the programmes and projects submitted for external supportand the annual budget.

In countries where economic and financial conditions are so difficultand dependence on external aid is so strong that planning has been replacedby the continual preparation of a succession of projects, traditional planningactivities, such as collecting reliable information, budget preparation orschool map exercises, are crucial. These activities should take place alongmore strategic lines aimed at promoting a national dialogue on education,communicating the system's goals to the various partners and stakeholdersconcerned and clarifying priorities for the next decade.

The scenario that will emerge in the medium term, however, is onewhere the state will have less and less of a role to play as the direct operatorof educational institutions. Its role will be confined to defining policy, co-ordinating, regulating, setting standards and certificating, evaluating andallocating resources according to well-cieimed criteria. The role of theeducational planner in such a context is to prepare the process of decision-making and policy-formulation (constructing scenarios, conductingfeasibility studies to give the best possible information to the policy-makers)and to organise or participate in a continuing dialogue with the variousactors involved before the policy is formulated. Once it is formulated, thecentral planner is responsible for defining the rules and standards,suggesting incentive measures, and organising compensatory programmeswhere necessary. In addition, effective planning and management requiresmonitoring policy implementation and negotiating the programmes andprojects.

Planning becomes much more strategic and interactive. To help themin their tasks, strategic planners have to juggle a variety of traditionalplanning techniques, such as population and enrolment projections, costanalysis, assessment of future labour market requirements, budgetpreparation, collecting reliable statistics and defining indicators in order toset up an efficiency-based management information system. They shouldalso be greater consumers of research be it on the quality of theteaching/learning process, the transition from school to work or the impactof various strategies for improving learning outcomes.

What we are proposing here is in many respects more a prospectivevision than a reality. However, this vision is likely to affect the trends andchallenges for educational planning in the coming years.

On the eve of the twenty-first century, the field and scope ofeducational planning has become elastic. On the one hand, it has expanded,englobing nonformal education and issues of educational quality; on theother, it has become oriented toward very specific actions and programmes,in close contact with administration and management. Planning activities, far

xvi Introduction

from disappearing, have actually developed everywhere in various agenciesinside and outside the ministries of education. The challenge in terms oftraining and capacity building is enormous.

SECTION I

A New Agenda for the Educational Planner

Teaching/learningconditions

in developing countriesFrancoise Caillods and T. Neville Postlethwaite

Teaching/learning conditions

; Many factors operate to produce pupil learningand achievement. The child's home back-ground, the curriculum, the materials, thclanguage used, the time devoted to instructionand homework, the work ethos of the school,the pupils' motivations, the teachcrs' percep-tions of the ability of thc class, their educationand status, their behaviour and teaching prac-tices all intervene in this nctwork of influences.

Since teachers arc a key element in theteachinglearning process and since they consti-tute in most developing countries the main, ifnot the only, agent of transmission of know-ledge in schools, wc shall start with some

Francoise Caillods (France). Staff member of theInternational Institute for Educational Planning

Unesco). Author of nwnerous works on educationcosts; planning the location of schools; micro-planning;education, work and employment. She is currently incharge of a project on education and the developmentof human resources.

T. Neville Postlethwaite (United Kingdom). Professorof Education, University of Hamburg. Interest incomparative and international educational research.Co-editor-in-chief with Torsten Erwin of the 1,n-

volume International Encyclopedia of Education.Numerous publications including most recently the

1E4 publication, Science Achievement in SeventeenCountries: A Preliminary Report.

comments on teachers' level of qualifications,training, working conditions and teaching en-vironment.

TEACHERS' LEVEL OF QUALIFICATION

No recent international statistics exist onteachers' level of qualification. It seems, how-ever, that the number of years of educationrequired from primary-school teachers varies agreat dcal from country to country and fromcontinent to continent. In Latin America, mostcountries recruit their primary-school teachersafter some years of teacher-training at a levelequivalent to the cnd of secondary school. Thetendency is increasingly to recruit teachers withsome training aftcr secondary education. InAfrica and Asia, the situation is more variable,but primary-school teachers have often receivedsome years of training after primary educationonly or have a lower-secondary-education quali-fication with or without teachcr-training.

The proportion of teachers having receivedsome training has increased but the situationremains bad in rural areas, where it is difficultto send qualified teachers (Unesco, 1986a). An

extreme example of this phenomenon can besccn in Brazil. While unqualified teachersrepresented 25 per cent of the whole teachingforce in first-level schools at the national levelin 1982, they constituted 73 per cent of ruralteachers. In municipal schools (basically rural)of north and north-east Brazil, nearly half of

Prorpecis, Vol. XIX, No. a. 195y

1

Franenise Caillods and T. Neville Post lethwaire

the teachers had not even completed first-leveleducation (Brazil, 1985).

In certain countries thc situation has de-teriorated at secondary-education level wherccrash programmes cf expansion have ledministries to recruit mai'y untrained and insuf-ficiently educated teacheis.

There is, of course, deli. te on the extent towhich teachers need to posess a lot of know-ledge. Some argue that, provided the teacherhas certain teaching skill' it is sufficient forhim to know only marginally more than thepupils need to learn. Others maintain that allteachers situ-al:I Lave a high level of generaleducation and that secondary-school teachersshould have a very good knowledge of the sub-ject they are teaching. This is not always thecase, however, and the level of knowledge ofteachers in developing countries can sometimesbe fairly low. Shukla (1974) tested teachersteaching science to 14-year-olds in India andfound that their average achievement in sciencewas lower than that of 14-year-old students insome European countries. In a numbcr ofcountries, primarily in Africa, the problem isfurther complicated by the fact that teachingat primary and/or secondary level takes place ina language which is neither the teachers' northe pupils' mother tongue. In the UnitedRepublic of Tanzania for example, English isintroduced as a major subject in primary edu-cation and it becomes the medium of instructionat secondary level. Criper and Dodd noted intheir study of the teaching and learning ofEnglish throughout the Tanzanian cducationsystem that 'most primary teachers do notapproach the level of fluency and accuracyneeded to teach even primary children' (Criperand Dodd, 1985, p. 14).

Thc United Republic of Tanzania is not theonly country in that situation and similar coin-ments can be heard in neighbouring countriesand in French-speaking African countries.Generally speaking, the IEA has pointed outthat, within countries, students having teacherswith more years of post-secondary educationperform better than those students havingteachers with fewer years 01 post-secondary

education. Thus in spite of some improvementin the educational level of teachers, muchremains to be done to improve their level ofgeneral knowledge and to upgrade their quali-fications both in primary and secondary edu-cation.

TEACHERS' WORKING CONDITIONS

Where the situation has improved most is inthe arca of pupil/teacher ratios. These ratioshave decreased in developed and in developingcountries and in primary and secondary edu-cation. Pupil/teacher ra..ios in first-level schoolsdecreased from an average of 45 in 1970 to 42in 1984 in Africa, from 33 to 29 in Asia duringthc same period and 35 to 28 in Latin America.Such average figures hide vast disparitiesbetween countries, between rural and urbanarcas and between schools. Eleven countriesof Africa still had an average pupil/teacher ratioabove 50 and six countries had an average ratioabove 6o in 1985 (Uncsco, 1987). In some urbanareas the numbcr of pupils per class is wayabove 70 or 80 while it is much lower in ruralareas. In Benin, for example, the average pupil 'teacher ratio decreased at national level from43 on average in 1981 to 33 in 1985. The averagesper district, however, vary from 18 in some ruraldistrict to 64 in the capital city (Benin, 1985).In Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), thc number ofpupils per class in certain schools is higher than120 pupils, while the national average is 62.This variation, which is not specific to Beninor Burkina Faso reflects to a great extent thediversity in population density. It reflects aswell, on the one hand, a ccrtain undcr-utilizationof teachers in rural areas and thus a need forredeployment and, on thc other, thc lack ofphysical facilities in cities. Class sizes tend to behigher than pupil/teacher ratios. The effect ofclass size will be returned to later below.

If teacher-training and pupil/teacher ratio%have improved, other negative factors haveaffected the teaching profession.

First of all, in many countries, and particu-larly in developing countries, teachers' salaries

Teachingllearning conditions in deseloping countries

have declined in real terms. This phenomenonis not a recent one but it has accelerated inrecent years due to the economic crisis and thcconsecutive budgetary cuts. Mexican teacherslost about 40 per cent of their purchasing powerfrom 1979 to 1984, Peruvian teachers lost 35 percent of theirs between 1974 and 1980 and Boli-vian teachers 65 per cent between 1980 and1985.' In the Philippines, the government hasrecently doubled teachers' salaries; none theless they remain below the official poverty line.

In Africa, Zaire, Sudan, Ghana and theUnited Republic of Tanzania are also cases inpoint. The salaries of teachers, likc those ofother government employee:-, have not beenadjusted for inflation and have decreasedsubstantially in real terms over the last five tofifteen years. In Tanzania salaries, for example,fixed in 1974 for teachers were Mr reviseduntil 1981. In spite of promotions and incre-ments, the vast majority of teachers in 1987 hada purchasing power of about 40 to 75 per centof that of the lowest paid teacher in 1977 (An-derson and Rosengart, 1987). In Ghana, thepurchasing power of the lower-level publicservice pay scale was, in 1984, only one-fifth ofits value in 1977. In higher grades it was just6 per cent. Even if such losses were mitigatedby promotions, increments or other payments-in-kind, the effect on motivation has been verynegative. In Zaire, real salaries in the civilservice have lost 85 per ccnt of their purchasingpower between 1975 and 1984. Thc ILO, ina 1987 report, notcs, 'In some cases in Africawhere real pay has fallen so per ccnt or more,the effects on standards of public adminis-tration have been devastating . . . Manyobservers have associated the large absolute andrelative decline in public sector pay with thedeparture of thc most productive employees,increased absenteeism, illicit practices, loon-lighting both during and after regular workinghours Or simply low work effort' (ILO, 1987,p. tot).

Teachers are no differesit from other civilservants, and observers of the Latin Americanand African scene arc well awarc that teachersat all levels arc becoming more concerned in

5

some countries, probably rightly so, withmaking a living than with teaching.' Wheneverpossible, teachers take up a second or a thirdjob. In some countries where thc shift systemoperatcs it is quite common for teachers to teachone shift at one school and a second shift atanother school. In urban areas, teachers opensmall businesses (e.g. taxis). In rural areas, theyspend more time on their farming plots. Giventheir long working days they prepare theirclasses less and less, fail to correct homcworkor arc simply abscnt. Quality definitely suffers.In the University, professors and lecturers takeup consultancy work with private companies,and spend less time with their students andeven less in research.

The situation is fortunately not as bad as thiseverywhere. But salaries have rarely kcpt upwith inflation (even whcn they have beenincreased) and in more and more countries theyare paid late. The effect on teachers' level ofmotivation is similarly negative.

The decline of the status of the teaching pro-fession is connected with thc relative decreasein salaries (but the decrease in salaries is notthe only reason). Primary-school teachers nolonger have the authority and prestige thcy hadin the past. An indication of this lack of statusis the fact that fcwcr and fewer graduates, parti-cularlymale graduates, want to enter the teachingprofession at least at primary level. Teaching ismore and more considered as a women'sprofession and the income received is consideredas only a supplementary increase for the house-hold. This decline in the status of the teachingprofession affects both developed and develop-ing countries and has become a matter cfconcern to education authorities in some indus-trialized countries such as France.

TEACHERS' ENVIRONMENT

To mike matters even worse teachers oftenwork in an unfavourable environment.

r4

Frantosse Cadlods and T. Neville Postlethwaite

Teachers' guidance and supervision

Many untrained teachers have been recruited;many new graduates have been scnt to ruralareas assuming that thcy would receive atten-tion, guidance and supervision from qualifiedheads and supervisors. No recent study existsat thc international level either about the levelof qualification of head teachers or about thefrequency of supervision. Few countrics,however, organize training programmes forschool principals. In some cascs, particularlyin rural areas, their educational level is hardlyhigher than that of their teaching staff. Theconsequences can bc scrious not only for thcorientation of young teachers but also for therunning of the schools and thc managementof their budgets. A survey on a probabilitysample of Indian schools shows, for example,that heads of schools do not spend much timcon supervision and guidance to teachers (Sin-ghal, 1988).

As for supervision, it is a well-known factthat many supervisors rarely visa schools in theremote rural areas and the situation has becomemuch worsc, with the onset of the economiccrisis resulting, in a number of African and LatinAmerican countries, in a total lack of transportat their disposal. When supervisors do visitschools, they oftcn limit their activities toroutine administrative mattcrs such as checkingthe collection of data and attendance sheets, andvery rarely carry out their function of helpingor encouraging teachers in thcir teaching duties.

This lack of guidance and supervision canbecome a real problem in countries that havea high proportion of one-teacher schools as, forexample, Guatemala (54 per cent), Ecuador(85 per cent of rural schools) or Columbia.'Mese teachers often have received no specialtraining for this sort of teaching, and do nothave enough teaching aids; they arc thereforevery isotated.

Teaching aids

Teacher increasingly do not hme the necessaryteaching aids at their disposal (blackboard,textbooks, 'library', i.e. stock of books avail-

able, science kits in secondary education, etc.).Schools and classrooms are not always adequatein terms of lighting, ventilation, furniture, sani-tary facilities, available drinking water, and thelike. Information is not systematically collectedon these points at the national level. Hence, nocomprehensive national or international sta-tistics are available. Sparse evidence from sur-veys conducted in different countries show nonethe less that:Teachers do not have handbooks in sufficient

quantity for their own use. In the Kirundodistrict of Burundi for example, only 30 percent of the teachers had all the books theyneeded for their teaching (IIEP, 1982b).There arc not enough recent surveys to showthe extent of the problem elsewhere but moreand morc reports on African countries aswell as in somc Asian and Latin Americancountries draw attention to the critical situa-tion in this respect.

Schools arc sometimes in a veiy bad conditionand/or do not possess the minimum sanitaryfacilities. 42 per cent of thc schools in theKilosa district in the United Republic ofTanzania had no water available and to percent had no latrines (IIEP, 1982a). Some20 per cent of thc schools in the Ed Dueimdistrict in Sudan had no water and 57 per centhad no latrines (IIEP, 1983a). 8o per cent ofschools in thc Scti region of Nepal had leakingroofs, only 28 per cent had toilets and 20 percent were in a state of collapse.

Blackboards arc not available in every class-room. A probability sample of Indian schoolsshows that 40 to 44 per cent of primaryschools do not have enough furniturc forteachers, 61 per cent do not have enoughblackboerds (i.e. it being desirable to haveonc per classroom), 49 per cent do not haveenough maps and charts and 49 per cent donot have any desks and chairs for students(Singhal, 1988).

Teachers' housing in rural areas is either notavailable or, when it is, in very insufficientquantity. The difficulty of finding housingcontributes to the reluctance of qualifiedteachers to go to rural areas.

Teachinglearning conditions in developing countries

Many primary-school pupils have to sit on thefloor. That is the case of 8o per cent of pupilsin the district of Dhamar in Yemen (IIEP,1979), 98 per cent of pupils in the Bilencdistrict in Mozambique (IIEP, 1987), 56 percent in Nyong Mfoumou Department inCameroon, and 65 per cent in Lesotho'schurch primary schools.

Many other examples from African and Asiancountries could be given. Although not all ofthese factors may have a direct influence on thequality of the teaching process, they do influencethc degree of commitment and motivation ofteachers and, therefore, have some bearingon the quality of education. The list of reformswhich failed because the teachers did notsupport thcm or because they had not receivedthe proper information (including textbooks andmaterials) is endless.

STUDENTS' TEXTBOOKS AND MATERIALS

Textbooks, exercise books, pupils' slates andchalk and pencils arc in short supply in manycountries. Some regional studies have outlinedhow critical the situation can be in certaincountries.

In thc Parish of St Thomas, Jamaica, 13 percent of thc pupils had neither pens nor pencilsat the time of the survey; 42 per ccnt ofprimary-school pupils and 49 per cent ofmiddle-school studcnts had no textbooks(IIEP, 19836). In the Kilosa district of thcUnited Republic of Tanzania, pupils had notextbooks at all in 52 per cent of thc schoolsand there was an insufficiency in 79 per ccntof them (IIEP, I9820). 70 per cent of the pupilsat Kirundo, Burundi, did not have thc requiredbooks either in French or in Kirundi (IIEP,19826). At Bilenc, Mozambique, textbookswere available for less than to per cent ofGrade 1 pupils and less than 50 per cent ofGrade 3 pupils (IIEP, 1987). The situationtends to be slightly better in Latin America,with the exception of rural areas and shanty-towns. 5 per cent of the primary-school pupilsin lharra county, Ecuador, had no textbooks

7

at all and 77 per cent of them only had allthc books required (HE?, 1981). In three statesof North-East Brazil, 29 to 54 per cent ofschools did not receive primers for all studentsin 1983 and 50 to 58 per ccnt of pupils did notuse textbooks (Armitage ct al., 1986).

Such equipment and materials are normallysubsumed under thc proportion of recurrentexpenditure devoted to non-salary expenditure.This proportion has always been very low,particularly at primary-education level but .itcan also bc relatively low at the secondary-education level. Thc expenditure on instruc-tional materials pr pupil in I980 had beenestimated at $1.68 in South-Asia, $2.24 inSub-Saharan Africa, $2.47 in East Asia and$8.99 in Latin America (World Bank, 19860).On average, developing countries spent $4.80 oninstructional material per pupil annually,22 times less than in developed countries. Theper-pupil non-salary rccurrent expenditureshave an extremely large range over countries,from $o.tt in the Philippines to 05er $250 inCanada. Many developing countries spcndundcr $4 per child on these items. Budgetaryrestrictions arc resulting in a decrease in thestate expenditure per pupil in non-salaryitems. Increasingly the responsibility for buyingbooks and stationery is transferred to families.As thc purchase of a small item of equipmentcan represent a significant investment for somefamilies in rural areas and shantytowns, it is notsurprising that the situation mentioned aboveshould prevail.

The fact that pupils have rarely any oppor-tunity to read or study from printed material hasprobably serious consequences for thc develop-ment of literacy skills. What can pupils learn,seldom reading, listening to a teacher who isnot necessarily well trained or motivated, andnot always able to exercise or transcribe whatthey have heard because of lack of exercisebooks or slates?

8 Francoise Caillods and T. Neville Posslethwaite

Pupil retention and achievement

In this section of the article, an overview willbe presented of some outcomes of the teaching!learning process at the level of the school. Twotypcs of indicators are commonly available,namely indicators of internal efficiency: rep-etition ratcs and retention ratios and levels ofachievement.

REPETITION (GRADE REPEATING)

The level of repetition is not a clear indication ofpupils' learning achievement: certain countries,including French-speaking countries, tradition-ally have a high level of repetition while othersencourage low repetition or automatic pro-motion. This reflects a divergence in thepedagogical philosophy more than a differencein pupils' cognitive achievements. Repetitionratios can also change fairly quickly whenministries of education issue instructions in thisrespect. It is therefore not possible to compareratios between countries and care should betaken when making comparisons over time. It isnonetheless worrying to note the high per-centages of repeaters in certain countries.Twenty-three countries in Africa, six in LatinAmerica and three Asian or Arab states had apercentage of repeaters in primary educationabove 2o per cent in 1982/83. Thirteen countriesin Africa had above 25 per cent. One out ofevery four pupils in these countries wasconsidered as not having assimilated theprogramme in his/her grade sufficiently to bepromoted to thc next grade (Uncsco, 1984).Even more preoccupying is the fact that thispercentage shows no sign of declining. It hasremained stable on average in Asia and LatinAmerica' and seems to have increased in quitea large number of African countries. Care mustbe taken when drawini; conciusions hut thefigures seem to indicate a certain deteriorationin the level of outcomc of pupils in Africancountries.

RETENTION RATIOS

How many children progress through the vari-ous grade levels in school is a function of manyvariables. Among these are: (a) the proximityof schools and the availability of places withinschools; (b) thc degree of motivation of parentsto send thcir children to school; (c) their abilityto pay for schooling where payment is requiredand to forgo thc work or the income thatchildren could have produced while staying athome; (d) the aspirations of pupils themselves;and (c) their employment prospects and theirlevel of achievement. High wastage rates cannotbe blamed only on the school, far from it, but ithas been shown several times that low pupil-achievement, irrelevant curricula, and the nega-tive attitudes of teachers, tend to di;courageparents from sending their children to school.Thus, low retention rates and high drop-outcan be takcn as an indication of the inefficiencyof thc school system.

Weighted averages of survival rates by regioncomputed by Uncsco show that the proportionof children in primary education around 1982/83who reach Grade 4, is low: 64 per cent in LatinAmerica, 71 per ccnt in Africa (23 per cent inPortuguese-speaking countrics), 85 per centin Asia and Oceania as compared with 92 percent in Europe (Uncsco, 1986b). Retention rateshad on average increased in all regions be-tween 1970 and 1980 which is encouraging.Individual country data however remains worry-ing. Retention ratios have declined in twelveAfrican and Arab countries, sometimes verysharply between 1980 and 1983 (Togo, Benin).'In Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, about h4lfof all pupils drop out at the end of thc firstgrade and only 35 per cent of entrants completea three-year cycle (Unesco, 1984). In LatinAmerica the difference between urban andrural areas is great. In Colombia only 18 percent of pupils in rural areas reach Grade 5compared with 62 per cent in urban areas(Colombia, 1985). In Guatemala 10.4 per centof new intakas in rural areas reach Grade 6compared witn 42.5 per cent in urban areas.

Teaching/learning conditions in developing countries

Various studies have shown that those whodrop out of school early have a good chance ofrelapsing into illiteracy, mainly because theyhad never attained a function level of literacywhile in school in the first place (Hartley andSwanson, 1986).

ACHIEVEMENT

It is one thing to enrol and keep children inschool; what they learn is another matter. Allschool systems aim to ensure that the childrenenrolled acquire at least basic literacy andnumeracy. Those who proceed to secondaryschool arc expected to acquire higher levels ofknowledge in mathematics and science, foreignlanguages, literature and social studies (history,geography, etc.). It is important to be able tomeasure how much they learn and how theirlevels of achievement compare from country tocountry.

Onc difficulty of commenting on achievementoutcomes is that there is a paucity of hardevidence. It is difficult enough to find data onachievement of pupils in developing countriesfor one year. It is quite impossible to find time-series data which would provide evidence onwhether standards have really fallen, beenmnintained or improved. Examination resultsare hard to use because they rarely produceevidence on what children can or cannot do.Examinations tend to be norm referenced andthe norms change from year to year, in somecases according to the number of placesavailable in the following level. The cut-offpoints for the allocation of those passing andfailing, or those receiving an A, B, C or D mark,depends on the distribution of scores so that acertain percentage, say, 6o per cent will passthe examination this year. In such aises, nocomparisons over time arc possible. Criterion-referenced measurement on the other hand(showilnr which objectives have been attainedar d whicii have not been attained) is rare indeveloping countries and when it exists it isusually available for onc specific year only.

There is, however, some evidence that

9

cognitive achievements in many, but not all,developing countries arc low and, in general,the achievement is lower than that observed indeveloped countries.

Recently, an unpublished study for thePlanning Institute of Jamaica showed that inprimary schools in Jamaica 35 per cent of pupilswere reading at below-grade level. Of these35 per cent nearly two-thirds were non-readers(i.e. not able to read). In a sub-study of thesedata in some schools it was shown that 25 percent read haltingly and 14 per cent were unableto read. In the United Republic of Tanzania,Criper and Dodd found that two-thirds of pupilsin the last grade of primary eduimtion wereunable to read and understand any text inEnglish. In spite of five years of learning Englishin school, 95 per cent of primary-school childrenhad not started to master this language. By thesecond term of Form i secondary, where pupilsare supposed to be taught in English, 60 percent of pupils are still at the level where theycan only read 50o-word picture books; 'there isno way that such pupils could follow instructionin other subjects through English' (Criper andDodd, 1984, p. 14).

The International Association for the Evalu-ation of Educational Achievement is beginninga study of reading literacy at the end of 1988.Some 46 countries will participate and morethan half of them are developing countries. Oneof the aspects of reading to be examined willbe basic literacy skills (sometimes called literacysurvival skills) and these will include criterion-as well as norm-referenced measures. The studywill concentrate on 9-year-olds and 14-year-olds,but countries will be able to assess other agegroups should they wish to do so. Thc IEA willalso undertake ai,alyses to identify those factors'causing' differences between countries' levelsof achievement as well as between schools andpupils within countries. The search, in particu-lar, will be for 'alterable variables, that is, thosevariables which am be changed by ministriesof education. The insufficient level in readingand writing is becoming a matter of seriousconcern for governments, parents, educatorsand employers in all countries. Hence, the

10 Francoise Caillodt and 7'. Neville Postlethwaite

attempt to discover how it can be improved.Carc should be always takcn when comparing

achievements between countrics. First, curriculamight differ; second, the socio-economic en-vironment and the cultural context of the pupilsarc generally different; and, third, the set ofvalues, attitudes and commitments that thesociety and schools may want to encourage canalso be different. School systems are none theless assigned increasingly similar objectives vis-a-tis such basic-skill subjects as science, math-ematics and reading comprehension. Thus,without emphasizing the notion of an inter-national educational standard, it is useful forcountries to know how much their pupilsachieve and how these achievements comparewith other countries, developed or developing.

Using the data from IEA and other surveysin twenty-five countries, Heyneman and Loxley(1983, p. 1173) concluded that `schoolchildrenin low- and middle-income countries havelearned less science after the same, or approxi-mately the same, length of time in school aswealthy countrics. In the United States theaverage mean is 32.8, in Japan 40.9. . . Howeverin India it is 20.6, in Colombia 24.0 and inThailand 28.2' (sec Fig. 1).

In an IEA mathematics study in 1981, 13-year-olds in the OECD countries scored anaverage of 52.9 per cent (i.e. 52.9 per cent ofthe items were corrcct) and the same age groupin Nigeria and Swaziland scored an averageof 34.5 per cent. The overall standard deviationwas 11.2. It looks as though there is a gap inthe mathematics achievement of 13-year-oldsof some three to four years between OECDcountries and the two African countrics(Robitaille and Garden, in press).

A similar study on science achievement wasundertaken in the period 1984-86 in which fivedeveloping countries participated together withdeveloped ones (Fig. 2). The 14-year-olds inthe OECD countries scored 6o per centon a thirty-item test, while Ghana, Nigeria,Zimbabwe and the Philippines scored 46, 41, 41and 38 per cent respectively. On thc other hand,China (Grade 9) and Papua New Guinea(Grade to) scored 59 and 55 per cent respect-ively. (The Chinese sample did not include allof China but only the three large provincesround Beijing.) It should be stressed that theintended curricula in science (i.e. what thepupils were meant to learn) were very similarin all the countries covered (IEA, 1988). In

10-yoar-olds

C.'0,7 '5,43

t".0

14.year cAds

no. 1. Reading comprehension at three levels of education, 1970

121h.gradels

Achievementtecel (%)

.4

Teaching/learning conditions in developing countries l I

0

FIG. 2. Soence achievement of 14/15-year-olds, 1984-86.

fact, all countries underlined that thc test wasfair for their pupils and that comparison withother countries' achievement was legitimate.

It will bc noted that the achievement differ-ences in science arc less than in reading andmathematics. Thus, in order to measure theachievement of a school system, it would bedesirable to test in various subject areas atthe same time and to plot the profiles of achieve-ment of all countries and subject-matters in acommon scale. To describe the achievement inone subject-matter only can be misleading sinceit could occur that a country which has highperformance in one subject area may have lowperformance in another.

It is not sufficient when evaluating the qualityof the teachinglearning process to limit our-selves to the end-product of a system. We haveto take into account it% capacity to impartknowledge to all students who enter or shouldenter the system, as in theory, it is easier toattain high levels of achievement when only

highly selected group enter, say, secondaryeducation Thus, before leaving the sparseInformation on achievement two further con-

ctx'46

4:0co

cepts are introduced: 'achievement yield' and'equality of educational opportunity'.

ACHIEVEMENT YIELD

Consider Figure 3 below. Four yield curves arepresented: for Japan, the Philippines, Thailandand the United States. The test is an inter-nationally constructed science test said to beequally fair to each of the countries. It hasthirty items shown on the horizontal axis.On the vertical axis appears the proportion ofthe pupil enrolment and of the age group whoget one, two, and up to thirty, items right.

Sonie systems have too per cent, or nearlyoo per cent, of an age-group in school (Japan

and the United States). For the Philippines andThailand a distinction is made between thosein school (all those in school counted as too percent) and the pi oportion of the age groupactuilly i. nrolled (in the case of the Philippines6o per cent and in the case of Thailand 32 percent). The area under the curve represents thepercentage getting one item right, the per-

4 3

;ti-

12 Francois* Cai nods and T. Neville Posilethwaite

Phi N- 10.874 studentsYield chart for 60 and 99% enrolment

100 -in Efficiency index 24.09 %

Efficiency index 39 75 %

Score

Thailand. N. 3.780 studentsYield mart for 32 and 99% enrolment

Japan. N. 7.610 studentsYield chart for 99% enrolment

10 15 20

Scor

tja Efficiency index 18 09 %

80 - Efficiency index 55 99

60 -

4o -

5 10 15 20 25

Score

30

Pm. 3. Yield curves of four countries (Grade 9, science).

Untied States. N. 2.519 studentsYield chart lot 99% enrolmont

'00 -

25 30

EtIcioncy Index55 73

5 10 15 20 25

Score

30

Testchingflearning conditions in developing countrics

centage getting two items right, etc. (an invertedcumulative frequency distribution). If all pupilsanswered all items correctly thc whole rectanglewould be filled. The proportion under thc curve(how many achieve how much) can be calculatedas a percentage of the total. This is rcportcd inthc rectangle as the efficiency index of theschool system, on the assumption that an ef-ficient system where every pupil correctlyanswers all questions would have an index oftoo per cent. It can be sccn that, on thc basisof pupils in school, Thailand and the UnitedStates have very similar indices (55.99 and55.73 per cent respectively). When the fact istaken into account however that only 32 percent of an age-group is in school in Thailand,thc index declines to 18.09 per cent: the yieldis much lower. (This assumcs that those notin school would have scored zero, which isobviously not true, but since those not inschool were not tested it is impossible to makean estimate of what they do know.) Thecomparison of 'achievement yield' indices doesthen allow a comparison of how many learnhow much. In the case of Thailand it couldbe an argumcnt for increasing the proportionof an age-group in lower secondary school andit is perhaps not surprising that thc Thaiauthorities have now taken steps to incrcasethc proportion of an age-group to about50 per Cent.

The Philippines, on the other hand, has60 per cent of an age-group in school atGrade 9 level, but it is clear that more emphasisis needed in that country on improving thcquality of education at that level before ex-panding enrolment. Japan's yield curves arepresented simply to give an idea of what isposible in a relatively high achieving country.

EQUALITYOF EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY

_

In any system of education there are acnieve-ment differences between schools and there areachievement differences between pupils. The

, question arises as to what extent the differences

I 3

between schools account for thc total differencesbetween pupils. In some school systems therewill be little difference between schools andmost of the variation in achievement will bebetween pupils within schools. In other cases,the variation will bc mostly between schoolswith relatively small differences between pupilswithin schools. An index known as ROH can becalculated which describes the between- towithin-school variation in achievement. InScandinavian countries thc between-schoolvariance accounts for as little as 2 per ccnt ofpupil variance and is always less than to per cent.To take Sweden as an example this means thatit makes very little difference in terms ofachievement which school a pupil goes to. Thisis not thc case, however, in many developingcountries where the between-school differencescan account for 30 per cent of the pupil differ-ences at Crade 6, 50 per cent at Grade 9 and60 or 70 per cent at Grade 12. It makcs, there-fore, a grcat deal of difference which school achild attends.

In some cases these between-school differ-ences are associated with urban-rural differ-ences. In many cases, also, it can have to dowith teacher qualification and motivation, andwith availability of resources. If children arc tobe given equal opportunities it is crucial thatcountrics with large differences between schoolsundertake regular surveys to identify the differ-ences in teachers and resources and try toredress the balance through differential allo-cation of resources.

This section has cited results from somestudies of national achievement in differentcountries. There arc othcr examples of nationalsurveys of achievement (the sixth, ninth andtwelfth grade surveys of achievement in Indo-nesia, the primary-school survey in Malaysia,the secondary-school survey in Thailand) butstudies, so far, have focused more on factorsaffecting outcomes rather than on measurementsof actual levels of achievement. This evidenceis still sparse, especially in African countries.The World Bank policy study on Education inSub-Saharan Africa cites somc quite distressingresults from a test administered to fifth-grade

I 4 Francoise Cai Hods and T. Neville Postlalnoane

students in one Francophone African country:'Students in primary education in this countryare learning virtually no mathematics' (WorldBank, 1988, p. 33). Many morc surveys needto be undertaken by countries and reported.They have two major useful outcomes. Theyidentify which objectives in the curriculum an.being poorly achieved and which factors areassociated with differences between provincesor regions, differences between schools anddifferences between pupils. These studies shouldbe undertaken and carried out locally and theirresults should become part of the informationpolicy-makers and planners should have attheir disposal.

Factors affectingpupil achievement

What do wc learn from studies cxamining theeffects of certain factors or variables on achieve-ment? This scction attempts an overview ofsome of their major findings. The disentangle-ment of the effects of variables on achievementis not an easy matter. The results of correlationalresearch need to be tried out in experiments.Any one result needs to have occurred severaltimes before we can be sure of our ground.Hence, the use of meta-analyses--analyses ofanalyses. From various World Bank and IEAanalyses a number of 'alterable' variables (thoscwhich can be changed by Ministries of Edu-cation) can bc identified.

Before presenting them, one word of cautionis in order. Thc meta-analyses mentioned above,which make it possible to identify patterns ofrelationship across societies, do not by dcfi-nition take into account structural and culturaldeterminants of variations in achievement.Before deftning the policy for one specificcountry, it would be useful to have at hand theresults of a survey carried out there. Moreover,quaniitative macro-level studies should, when-ever possible, be complemented by other morequalitative-type research. These, based on ob-servational methods and interview techniques,allow the researcher to pick up nuances and

identify variables operating in classrooms andinfluencing achievement, which cannot bc other-wise identified.

The following alterable variables have beenselected for presentation.

CURRICULUM

The curriculum can be differentiated into'intended curriculum' (what is in the syllabusor lists of learning objectives), 'implementedcurriculum' (what the teachers actually teach;in research jargon this is often known as OTL,or opportunity to learn), and 'achieved curncu-lum' (what the children actually learn). Thereis much evidence to show that the curriculumdemand has an impact on achievement. In othcrwords, if pupils gct thc opportunity to learnsomething thcy usually do so; if thcy do not getthe opportunity thcy cannot learn it. In short,the more that is demanded in the 'intended'curriculum, other things being equal, the morethe children will learn.

Many developing nations have curriculumdevelopment centres. Although many curriculahave been made 'national' to remove the influ-ence of thc ex-colonial power's curriculum, itis the case that either certain other nations'curriculum programmes arc used (e.g. NuflieldScience) or at the other end of the spectrum, notsufficient attention is paid to what other nationsdemand of their children, particularly in reading,maths and science. The African CurriculumOrganization and organizations such as SEI'A(Science Education Programme for Africa,based in Ghana) have done much to try andimprove curricula, but much yet remains tobe done.

There is a technology of curriculum devel-opment (Lewy, 1978) and there are certaindeterminants of the curriculum which must bctaken into account. Many require small studies.Curriculum centres must pay attention to thesideterminants.

There has been a tendency to add more andmore to the curriculum but never to discardanything. Lately, there have been moves to

Teaching/learning conditions in developing countries 15

trim back the curriculum as though it were thecause of poor standards. The curriculum shouldbc trimmed, but with care. Attention should bepaid that at a minimum the school teaches whatschool-leavers will need to start work. Studentsshould also have the basis to be able to continucto learn and grasp quickly the content of what-ever training they might follow upon leavingschool or later on.

Various programmes have been tried out,combining education and productive work, orintroducing pre-vocational subjects into thecurriculum. The evaluation of such programmesseems disappointing so far as solving the unem-ployment problem, encouraging self-employ-ment of school-leavers or raising resources arcconcerned (Psacharopoulos and Loxley, 1985;Lauglo, 1985). Some studies suggest, in fact,that what is potentially most useful to self-employed adults ti urban or rural arcas areliteracy and computational skills, agriculturaland/or some scientific knowledge. Pedagogi-cally some of these vocationalized programmesseem none thc less to have had interesting results,so long as teachers were very motivated andknew how to integrate thc teaching of practicalsubjects with the teaching of more theoreticalones making the former supportive of the latter.Their success, in fact, depends a grcat deal onthe resources available. This is often thc case;curricula are often accused of bcing thc causeof bad achievements. Causation is howeverusually multi-faceted, and poor teacher know-ledge is clearly a problem in some countries asto why the curriculum is failing.

The language of instruction and thc languagein which thc instructional materials arc writtcnis a further problem. After independence,Nigeria, for example, adopted English as thclanguage of instruction in school starting atGrade 1. A child in the Yoruba-speaking areawill learn his local language first, thcn Yoruba,and then cuter school to be instructed inEnglish (somewhat akin to an English childentering Grade 1 and being taught in Japanese).There have been studies in the Yoruba- andHausa-speaking areas of Nigeria where it hasbeen shown that children learn more when

being instructed in Yoruba and Hausa thanwhen bcing instructed in English. But, tochange or rewrite all instructional materialsinto Yoruba or Hausa would be a costly under-taking. It could also become a political issue,as some groups may resent the use of thelanguage of another group. Thus, this problemremains in many countries.

Finally, national examinations should reflectwhat is in the curriculum because teachers teachaccording to what is in examinations. In all thcactivities the curriculum centre should playa crucial role.

BOOKS AND MATERIALS

Where there is a shortage of books and materials,achievement is lower. Providing one book perchild (and ensuring that the books reach theschools and arc used by teachers and pupils)increases achievement and retention rates.Indeed, in the Philippines whcn the number ofbooks provided to primary-school classroomschanged from tcn pupils to one book to twopupils to a book, the proportion of studentsachieving at 'grade level' rose from 50 to70 per cent in one year (World Bank, 1986h).

Fuller (1986) indicated that a shortage oftextbooks was more of a problem in somesubject areas than in others; but it always has aneffect on achievement. The major problemsarc how to produce sufficient textbooks (oreven loose-leaf files) cheaply and, at the sametime, to ensure that the materials reach thepupils in the schools, particularly in rural areas.Studies on textbook distribution in Nigeria andIndonesia have pointed to the types of problemswhich occur, and remedial action has now beenundertaken. Again, it is not enough to printtextbooks, we have to make sure that th.. ma-terials ;,..stually reach the schoolswhich is anadministrative problemand that they areused by teachersa pedagogical and adminis-trative problem.

Connected with instructional materials is theavailability of books through a school library.Both Fuller and IEA have reported that the

1 6 Fran fOtsl Ceti !lads and T. Neville Pordethwaite

' more books are borrowed from a school librarythe higher the pupil achievement and, in pri-mary schools, the more a classroom cornercollection of books is available thc higher thereading achievement.

TEACHERS, TEACHINGAND TEACHER-TRAINING

There has been much research on methods ofteaching and what it is that teachers do whichimproves learning and achievement.

Teachers' experience

Teachers with more teaching experience tendto develop strongcr instructional and classroom-management skills. They reduce the amount oftime spent on administrative procedural mattersin the classroom, are quick at restoring orderand develop a tempo of teaching which fostersmore 'time on tasks' on the part of the students(Anderson et al., 1.988). Thc implication of thisis that all efforts need to be made to allocateexperienced teachers equally between urban,peri-urban and rural areas and to reduceturnover. This is linked to the question ofsalaries and status raised earlier.

Lesson preparation and marking

Teachers who spend time preparing lessons andmarking homework and classwork tend toachieve bettcr results with their students thanthose who do not. If teachers do not have towork to earn cxtra money and if teacher-training stresses this point, thcn this shouldhelp improve learning.

Skills

Teachers who are perceived by their pupils todemand a lot of them (high teacher expectationof pupil work), who are quick in keeping orderin their classrooms, who organize feedback ina systematic way (feedback in the sense thatthc teacher, and pupil, knows exactly what anindividual pupil has learned and has not learned,

of that which was to bc learned), who usecorrectives (help children to learn that whichthey failed to learn the first time), and who helpthe pupils to structure the morc importantlearning tasks from thc less important tasks, tendto produce higher achievement in their pupilsthan those teachers who are not perceived to dothese things (Anderson et al., 1988; Nitsaisookand Postlethwaite, 1987).

Some dedicated teachers arc able to inspirechildren to learn in thc most deprived areas.Avalos (1986), in her study in four Latin Amer-ican countries, has called these the'Sefiora Rosa'teachers. More intensive studies of these kindsof teachers arc required in order to identifyexactly what they do which results in goodachievement in disadvantaged children.

Teacher education

General education. LEA (Peakcr, 1976) hasshown that teachers with more post-secondaryeducation achieve more with their pupils thanteachers with less post-secondary education.Such a finding, however, gives little solace tothe educational authorities in countrics withfalling educational budgets and growing enrol-rnents where one-year crash courses have to beorganized for pupils finishing junior or seniorhigh school so that they can start teaching insecondary schools.

Pedagogical training. Passow et al. (1976) foundno difference in pupil achievement accordingto the different length of teachers' pedagogicaltraining. This result points to the problem ofthe content of pedagogical training. Whichteacher activities are required for the teaching/learning of different typcs of educational objec-tives in different subject areas? Some resultsabout teaching practices which result in morelearning on the part of pupils were given above.It is from such studies that the content of thepedagogical part of teacher training should bederived. The amount of time devoted io peda-gogical training can he pared down I only oncondition that there is a strict selection of thatwhich is essential.


In-service training is typically of two types: aweek's course, or what is called 'on-service'training. In the latter, the teachers teach duringthe week but meet one evening per week (or ona half-day at the week-end) with other teachersfrom neighbouring schools (a cluster of schools)at a teacher centre (often a room in a school).They meet not only with each other to discusscommon problems but also with a supervisoror a master teacher. It is often said that the firsttype of coursc (in-service teacher training) isworth only twice its own length. That is to saythat if it is a onc week course the teachers revertto how they taught before the course two wceksafter having returned to their school. Flugger(n.d.) has produced initial results showing thaton-service training courses produce longer termeffects on changes in teacher activities (andcognitive learning) than do in-service teacher-training courscs. Again, however, more researchof this kind is needud before general conclusionscan be drawn.

There arc somc countrics where in/on-serviceteacher-training is not compulsory. The IEAresults indicate that where teachcrs have under-gone in/on-service teacher-training and whcrcsuch training has involved practical activities(e.g. producing instructional materials, con-structing assessment instruments) the pupilslearn more than under teachers who have hadno such in/on-service training or under teacherswho have been to in-service courses of a theor-etical nature only.

Many countries have a set number of schooldays per year but let the pupils off while theteachers undergo in-service training as part oftheir regular duties, i.e. without extra pay. Othercountrics, on the other hand, pay thcir teachersan honorarium for attending in-scrvice trainingover and above their travel and subsistencecosts. This can be an expensive precedent.

The suggestion is that in/on-service trainingshould be compulsory without cxtra payment toteachers, that the courses bc given a practicalbent and that more emphasis should be placedon on-service training.

17

TIME AT SCHOOL AND HOMEWORK

Allocated instructional time is important. Ingeneral, the more time children study, otherthings being equal, the more they will learn.The number of school days per year rangesfrom 120 to 240. The number of instructionalhours per day ranges from two to seven. Thcagc of entry to school varies from 4 to 7 (or evenmore) years of age. Hence, even for thosechildren remaining in school up to say 14 yearsof age; the difference in instructional hours canrange from 4,000 to 10,000 (Passow ct al., 1976).

It is the real number (rather than the papernumber) of hours of instructional time that isimportant. There are many countries whereofficially there may be, say, 24o school days peryear, but in effect 30 are given free because oflocal public holidays, visiting dignitaries, andteachers' absence (for whatever cause, illness,death or marriage in the family, attendingcourses, etc.); thus the real number of days ismuch less (210 in this case). Teachers' attend-ance at school is another important problem.In some countries measures have to be taken(involving, for example, the community or theparents in the management of the school) sothat teachers actually turn up in schools forthe lessons they have to teach.

Thc cumulative number of hours of a subjectstudied is the important factor, that is, howmany hours per week for how many years, butagain there must be a point at which a plateaubegins. More information is needed here.Carroll (1975) suggested that for a pupil tobecome proficient in reading comprehension inFrench as a foreign language, an average of sixyears' continuous study (i.e., four or five periodsa week) for about 40 weeks a year would beneeded. If the motivation of the pupils werevery high and the teaching very good, thc sixyears could be reduced to four, but not lessthan that.

Another aspect of time is 'time-on-task', thatis, the amount of time within a class period thatis actually devoted to teaching/learning whichshould take place and thc amount of time each

I 8 Franeoise Cad lads and T. Neville Postlahwaire

pupil actually spends on learning (as opposcdto, for example, day-dreaming). There is agrowing body of research to indicate that, otherthings being equal, the more 'time-on-task' themore the pupils learn. Thc structuring of thetime within the period and the tempo at whichthe teacher conducts the class affect actualconcentration. Both of these aspects should bedealt with in the teacher's pre-, in- and on-serv ice training.

Finally, homework is important. Pupils whodo homework learn more than those who do nohomcwork even if it is not markcd. If the home-work is marked and gone through individuallywith each pupil, to help pupils to see their short-comings and how to improve them, then thechildren learn much more. It goes withoutsaying that if teachers are not motivated or ifthey have other activities, the probability of thehomcwork being markcd is low.

SCHOOL ORGANIZATIONAND FACILITIES

School size. No significant differences in pupilachievement have been found in terms of schoolsize (Fuller, 1986; IEA, 1988). Where populationdensity allows it, it should be possible to increaseschool size but on condition that school prin-cipals receive appropriate training.

Class size. In general, students in smaller classesdo not achieve more than students in largerclasses except in classes of fewer than 15 studentsin which the teachers individualize the work.Again, in general, achievement tends to be lessin classes over 45 in industrialized countriesand over 55 in developing countries. But inbetween-country comparisons (IEA, 1988), thcRepublic of Korea with an average of 6o studentsper class, and Japan with 42 students per class,were equal first in a comparison of Grade 5students in fifteen countries. Hence it is notthe cla.:s size per se that. is important. It is whathappens in the class and how it is organizedthat is important. Nothing is known of theachievement of class sizes greater than 6o, but

it could be envisaged to have this number as amaximum size, always of course on conditionthat the classrooms are big enough for 60 andthat the teacher knows how to teach in theseconditions.

One problem that exists is that teacherswithin a country arc normally trained to copewith classes of what is perceived to be an averageclass size within that country. It is importantto recognize that if class size is increased thenthe teachers must be taught how to manage (andarrange the teaching) for larger-sized classes.

Double and treble shifts. Double or treble shiftsystcms help to increase enrolment with noextra capital cost. Thc pupils' level of achieve-ment does not seem to be impaired on conditionthat, whichever shift thc pupil is attending, it isalways the teacher's first shift.

However, many teachers do teach two shifts(often in two different schools) in order to earnextra money and most parents prefer thcirchildren to go to the first shift when it is coolerand their children arc fresher. At thc same time,though several countries have moved from aone-shift to two- or three-shift system, it doesnot seem to have affected their results toomuch. It would be very useful to have infor-mation accumulated on the pros and cons ofdifferent shift systems.

URBAN OR RURAL SCHOOLSAND STAFFING

In many countries there arc large urban-ruraldifferences in educational achievement. Oc-casionally these arc in favour of rural areas withlarge urban slum areas performing poorly but,for the most part, the rural areas perform worsethan urban areas.

Two points deserve mentioning. The unequalallocation of resources to the different schoolshas effects on achiLvement (see the point madeabout ROIl on page 179 above). It is a relativelysimple matter when undertaking thc collection ofschool census data to have a count of the numberof desks and chairs per pupil, the number of


usable blackboards per ciasroom, the numbcrof classrooms with mud, bimboo, wood orcement floors, thc lighting per classroom, theclassroom practical science equipment (or evenin richer countries the laboratory space and usagcper pupil) and so on. Where this kind of basic in-formation is lacking at the district, regional andnational levels it is imperative that it is collected,at least once every fivc years. If school census dataarc not collected then surveys using a probabilitysample of schools could be undertaken. The datashould bc analysed and remedial action shouldbe takcn to make school provision more equi-table. Communities could be asked to contrib-ute, but so should aid agencies as well. Thereis much to be learnt from India's national policyon cducation and 'operation blackboard': essen-tial facilities such as two reasonably large rooms,blackboards, maps, charts and other learningmaterial will be provided to all primary schools.

There are special problems experienced byschools in isolated areas. One is that the schoolsmust be small and oftcn with only three teachers(somctimcs one teacher only) teaching six gradesat primary level. Teachers should be trained totcach in these conditions. This is rarely thc casein developing countrics and much is to belearned from the experience of developedcountries. A second problem is how to attractgood teachers to rural (often isolated) schoolsand keep thcm there (see Chivore, 1988). Theunwillingness of traincd teachers to go to andremain in rural areas is well known. The qualityof teachers going to rural schools is often as-sociated with differences in achievement. Mon-etary reward and free housing systems can beexpensive and arc not always sufficient. In arecent IIEP training course (1987188) the Thaiparticipant recounted a Thai strategy: send onlyyoung male teachers for two years, followed byyoung female teachers for two years. Then, thcymarry a local and stay there. Thc system, shereported, worked well.

Thc role of the school principal is crucial.Fuller (1986) has indicated that the role of theschool principal is often conditioned by theschool type (academic, vocational) and the cul-ture attached to it. The school climate also

BEST COPY AVAILA811-

19

depends a great deal on what is demanded by Ithem. Thc formal training of school principals,once they have been selected, has positive effectson the way they run thc school and should beundertaken, probably as part of in- or on-servicetraining. The cost of such on-service training isnegligible except for the team working out whatthe content of such courses should bc and theprcparation of the necessary materials. This con-tent should, of course, be worked out nationallyand great care should be exercised when exam-ining what the content of such courses is inother, especially industrialized, countries.

In areas where many parents arc either illiter-ate or semi-literate, school principals can insti-tute programmes of teacher-parent workshopsin which the school inculcates in the parentsvarious behaviours s uch as asking their chi ldrento read to them, or tell the parents what theyhave just rcad about. Such programmes can havedramatic effects on the rcading achievement ofsecond- and third-grade pupils classified aspoor readers (Sawadiscvec et al., 1982). Manyinitiatives have taken place which would beworth recording and summarizing. In all of theseinitiatives the school principals' roles have beenimportant.

DISTANCE EDUCATION

When a distance-education programme usingradio or correspondence as supplemental toclassroom instruction is well developed andimplemented it can have an effect in increasingachievement (MeAnany et al., 1982).

The initial production of curriculum andclassroom lessons is costly. Thc delivery to pu-pils can be efficient in terms of costs per pupil.However, as McAnany et al. (1982) emphasize,it is important that each component be testedout and, where necessary, revised before theprogramme is implemented. When the exerciseis undertaken too quickly and without propertrialling, no effects on achievement can be seenand the initial production costs will have beenwasted.

I would like to comment that there are many

20 Franoise Cai !lads and T. Neville Postlethwaite

factors which influence learning and more re-search has been undertaken than we have beenable to recount here. As research progressesit is important to be able to synthesize from re-search what we know about the effects of dif-ferent factors. It is important to have infor-mation on which factors have a positive influ-ence, which have no influence, and which havea negative one.' There is much mythology ineducation about the influence of different fac-tors. In addition, it is essential that each nationhas a mechanism for judging the 'health' ofits educational enterprise and for planningpurposes.

Parents and teachers need information onhow Johnny or Mary, Arnina or Mohammed,are performing in various aspects of each subjectarea in order to know where more effort is

required for each pupil. The school principalneeds to know about thc relative strcngths andweaknesses of each class in the school (andabout sex differences) as well as how his/hcrschool's performance at any one gradc levelcorn7ares with othcr similar schools. Thc prin-cipal must plan the overall activities in thcschool and must have this information to planthe following year's activities. The district orprovincial officer needs information on howeach school is performing, on urban-rural dif-ferences and the like, to know where extraresource inputs will be useful. The nationalplanning office needs to have Information onthe relative performance of the different districtsand provinces in the country and informationon what factors (location, plant, books andequipment, teacher education, teaching quality,school principal management, ctc.) are associ-ated with achievement differences in varioussubject areas between locations and schools. Theplanning office also needs to know how wellschool learners integrate into society, how easilythey find work and what are their contributionsto the economic and social development. Theseconsiderations, however, go beyond the scope ofthis article.

It is possible (Ross and Postlethwaitc, i988)to collect such data and provide them to thevarious levels of decision-makers through reg-

ular monitoring exercises. Where systems ofeducation do not have information on such basicfacts as thc number of children per school/class,number of classrooms, book provision, desk pro-vision and thc like, it is easy to collect such datin the course of such monitoring exercises.

Where there are large differences in provisionand practices from school to school, or districtto district, it is possible to assss the effect ofthese differences on outcomes of schooling suchas achievement, attitudes, and skills. This is thetype of information required by planners fortheir planning. At the same time, it is useful forsystems to have comparative international dataon their national ac:iievement levels in order tosee the magnitude of differences with othercountries (especially with countries of similareconomic standing) and how the magnitude ofdifferences within their own compares with thcmagnitrie of differences in other countries.

Without regular monitoring, it is impossibleto know the 'health' of thc system. A monitoringunit will typically cost 0.5 per cent of thc pri-mary and secondary school budget.

Tentative conclusions

Schooling will not necessarily be improved bymanipulating a few qualitative variables only. Insomc instances, the improvement of thc teach-ingllearning process may require rethinking ofthc very purpose, organization and length ofschooling. In addition, many variables outsidethe school system influence pupils' achievement.These include, for example, thc children's nu-trition level, parents' attitudes, and their edu-cational level, as well as the way thcy interactwith the school. Bearing in mind, none the less,thc poor state of the teaching:learning con-ditions in many countries and bearing in mindthe financial constraints what suggestions mightbe made which are realistic? There arc caseswhere a piecemeal approach modifying, notone single variable in isolation, but a whole mixof variables can he useful. Opinions will differsince the interpretation of results is a functionof thc memory, testimony, and introspection of

Teaching/learning condition.s in developing countries 2 1

the interpreter. What follows should be seen assuggestions to improve the teachingilearningprocess within the school. They arc made in aprovocative way and need to be discussed.

Larger classes. Thc suggestion is that class sizecould be increased to fifty on condition that theteachers be trained to deal with larger classsizes and on condition that there is little vari-ation in the country around the average classsize adopted. This size will lower the cost perpupil and allow more children into school. Itis recognized that the feasibility of this measuredepends on the Fpulatioa density; where popu-lation density is low, smaller class sizc will haveto be defined. Also, where school classroomshave been built to hold only thirty or forty thiswill be a problem.

In urban areas it is possible to increase schoolsize (probably up to 2,000) without detrimentaleffects on achievement but, again, on conditionthat school principals and teachers arc trainedfor thc management of larger schools. Main-tenance expenditures will increase, but, none-theless, such a measure should reduce per pupilcosts (recurrent and capital).

Desks, blackboards, instructional materials. At-tempts must be made to ensure that a deskplace for each pupil exists, that each classroomhas a usable blackboard (i.e. not so worn orshiny that the pupils cannot read from it) andthat each pupil, or groups of two pupils, haveinstructional materials (textbooks, workbooks,loose-folders) when working. There is sufficientevidence to show that these are essential pre-requisites for learnini4. No matter how goodthe teachers arc, they will have a limited effectwithout these prerequisites. If class and schoolsizes arc increased, the saving on the per pupilcost could go to providing these prerequisites.The industrialized world could be challengedto identify cheaper ways of printing instruc-tional matei ials. But preferably, developingcountries should get together and co-operate onthe preparation of teaching materials to beproduced locally.

Renuniration of teachers. Many teas hers aredemotivated, poor, and have low status in theircommunities. Action needs to be taken torcmotivate thcm. It is obvious that whatevereffort is put into other items, distribution oftextbooks, blackboards, curriculum reforms,they won't any have impact if the teachersare not co-operating, or if they are absent.Governments can initiate propaganda systemsto enhance the status of teachers as kcy personsfor teaching children. Teachers can be asked toplay other roles in the community. Their self-concepts can be raised through teacher training.Something has to be done with respect to theirsalaries as well. Where salaries in real termshave decreased so sharply that no teachercan hope to survive on his/hcr salary only,corrective measures have to he taken. In asmuch as possible, pay differentials vis-a-visother groups in the community should bc kept.

All measures aiming at organizing teachersin a team or in a community, such as clusters ofschools, should be encouraged. Innovation isnormally thc fruit of a co-operative effort. Thisis linked with the training and functions of theschool principal.

Teachc- training. Although morc pre-servicetraining would be desirable as seen from somcof the evidence put forward in this article,it is beyond the financial resources of manycounn.i,- to undertake.

Compulsory in- and on-service training isdesirable. It can be organized so that it doesnot cost more than et present. It is the contentwhich should be changed to take into accountsome of the facets of teaching already men-tioned for which there is evidence that they arceffective in improving learning and achievement.It is through good in- and on-service trainingthat teachers can become excited about thechallenges they have, how they can helpchildrento learn more and how they can help in thecommunity.

Planning the content and the production ofsome materials involves a cost but the runningof on-service training within clusters of schoolsor at teachers' centres does not necessarily

22 Franeoise Caillods and T. Postlethwaire

involve a cost to the state. This is on theassumption that participants arc not paid forparticipating in on-service training.

Instructional time, homework and time on task.Real instructional time within the year can beincreased. It is suggested that the school yearcould bc increased to forty weeks of five-and-a-half days per week (i.e. 2 to school days) withan average of six hours of instruction per day insecondary education. The implementation canbe tricky because of teacher resistance but somecountries have done so. It would be useful ifthe various political and administrative pro-cedures on how this can be done could besummarized and widely disseminated. Incountries where enrolment ratios in primaryeducation are s 11 low, more flexible forms ofeducation, part-time teaching, shorter length ofcycles, could be considered, provided othermeasures to increase the quality of schoolingare taken. Homework is highly associated withincreased achievement and it is important thatit te.kes place in greater amounts as pupilsascend the school system. Finally, it is possibleto make learning an exciting rather than adreary experience. How this is donc shouldform part of thc in- and on-service training,sincc it is important for effective learning tohave all children interested and paying attentionthroughout thc lesson. It is possible to increasetime, homework and time on task withoutinvolving extra costs.

School management. School principals shouldundergo in- and/or on -service training. Some ofthe content of such courses (e.g. ways ofmotivating teachers, organizing the timetable,obtaining and allocating the budget, workingwith parents, making the school an integral andpositive force within the community, etc.) hasbeen suggested.

Curriculum. As society changes, so must thecurriculum be changed to adapt to the needs ofthe society and to the needs of the individuals.Content must be revised and renewed. Theaccompanying teacher manuals must include

ij

suggestions on teaching methods for differenteducational objectives and on !low to make theteaching/learning experience an exciting one.

Curriculum centres exist in many developingcountries. It is their task to monitor theeconomic changes, the social changes, and thechanges in the perceptions of parents andteachers as to what should form the content ofthe curriculum. At the same time, they must beaware of changes in the curricula of othercountries in an increasingly interdependentworld. It is important that they do not continu-ously add to the curriculum; they must also trimit.

Feedback and correctives are importantcomponents of the teaching learning process.Several curriculum centres produce materials(such as tests) for teachers to use and obtainfeedback on the extent to which each Mildhas learned each educational objective. Simi-larly, curriculum centres produce remedialmaterials which comprise a large part of thecorrectives process.

A curriculum centre typically costs o.s percent of the primary and secondary school budget.It is difficult to imagine how some countries '

manage without such centres. It is necessary forcurriculum centres to be revitalized and stimu-lated from the outside with ideas of thepractices of other national curriculum centresand of theoretical ideas.

Monitoring the 'health' of the system. Withoutcollecting census data from schools and withouthaving periodic checks on how well childrenarc learning what they are meant to he learning,it is impossible to be aware of the strengths andweaknesses of the teachinglearning process indifferent schools, districts, regions and thenation as a whole. Not only is it possible toidentify the weaknesses but it is often possibleto identify the causes of such weaknessesthrough small research projects.

The establisionent of a monitoring unit isessential. But, the stall needs to be trained ardretrained. In many cases, where such unitsexist, the latest research techniques are notlearned because the relevant journals and books

Teaching 'learning conditions in developing countries 2 3

cannot be purchased due to lack of funds.Again, this is an area where intermtional aidcan help in providing mechanisms not only forthe provision of journals and books to poorcountries but also by ensuring that internationalintensive courses arc run to update knowledge.

Agenda for future research and training activities.The number of tasks to be undertaken byinternational agencies arc manifold. However,it is suggested here that some practical taskshave high priority if thc teachingflearningcondition is to be improved in many countries.These tasks should include the production ofshort state-of-the-art reports on: (a) proveneffective ways of increasing class and schoolsizes; (b) proven effective ways of enhancingthe status of teachers; (c) the relative effects ofdifferent forms of in- and on-service teacher-training programmes; and (d) political andadministrative procedures for increasing instruc-tional ume.

They should also include the organization of aseries of international intensive courses for therevitalization of curriculum centre personneland the monitoring and research unit personnel.As with all endeavours, thcy must be donc wellto succeed. Money alone will not solve prob-lems. It is !he foresight, intuition, dedicationand perseverance of those responsible in under-taking the above ninc tasks which are crucial.

Notes

t rhcy have been increased since but salaries still remainvery low

2 In the Indian subcontinent (Bangladesh, Nepal, India)the absenteeism of teachers and the existence of 'ghostmashers' have been known for years, but it has neverbeen possible to measure the extent at thc problem.

3 In Latin America the percentage of repeaters had infact declined between ttoo and 1975 but It rose againin 193o and 1983 (Unesco, 1980).

4 I.urther studies are required to deternune to whatextent this decline is linked to the erosion in thequality of schooling or to other factors (cost of school-ing, low employment prospect).

5. Often, policy-relevant variables are omitted fromresearch studies. Windham (t988) has produced verygood lists of indicators for school systems. In the designof studies, the variables (indicators) to be used must bevery carefully thought through.

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HARTLEY, Michael J.; SWANSON, Eric V. 1986. Retentionof Basic Skills Among Dropouts from Egyptian PrimaryS,haoh,, Washington, D.C., World Bank. (Dacussionpaper.)

I IRYNEMAN, Stephen P.; LOICLEY, Wiliiani. 1983. rheEITCCIS of Primary School Quality on Academic Achieve-ment Across Twenty-Nine High and Low IncomeCountries. American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 88.

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IEA. 3988. Science Achievement in Seventeen Countries:.4 Preliminary Report. Oxford, Pergamon.

ILO (International Latwur Organisation). 1987. WorldLabour Report, No. 3. Geneva, ILO.

IIEP. 1979. Intensive Training Course on Microplanning andSchool Mapping. San'O', Yemen Arab Republic, IIEP.(Report on an IIEP Intensive Course.) (In Arabic.)

--. 198i. intensive Training Course on Microplanningand S:hool Mapping. Ibarra, Ecuador, I IEP. (Trainingmaterials, mimeo.)

19820. Intervive %raining Course on Microplanningand Schou( Mapping. Arusha, Tanzania, HU.

19$26. Coun intensif de formation sur la mithodologiede la ,arte scolairc. Bujumbura, Burundi, IIEP.

----. 19830. Intensive Training Cousse on Microplarmingand School Mapping. Omdurman, Sudan, IIEP.

--. 19836 Intensive Training Course an Microplanningand School Mapping. Ocho Rio, Jamaica, IIEP.

--. 1987. Carso insensivo de formar& ern micro-planifi-cacdo e nietcdologio da carta e-colar. Maputo, Mozam-bique, 11E.P.

EAUOto, II. i985. Practical subjects in Kenyan AcademicSecondary Schools: General Report. SIDA. (EducationDivision Document, No. so.)

LOWY, A. 1978. Handbook of Curriculum Evaluation.London!Paris, Layman:Unesco.

MCANANY, ;030 Batista Oliveira; ORIVEL, Francois;STONE, John. 19e2. Distance Education: Evaluating NewApproaches in Education for Developing Countries.Evaluation in Education, Vol. 6, N. 3.

MOSHA, liernle Joseph. 1988. A Reassessment of 177eIndicators of Primary Education Quality in DevelopingCountries: Emerging Evidence from Tanzania, Inter-national Review of Education, Vol. 34, No. 1.

NITSAISOOK, Mater; POSTLETIOVAITE, T. Nevilk. 1987.

Teacher Effectiveress Research. An Example fromThailand. International Review of Education, Vol. 38,No. 4.

PASSOW, A. Harry; NOAH, Harold J.; ECKSTEIN, Mill A.;MALL1A, John R. 1976. The National Case Study: AnEmpirical Comparative Study of Twenty-one EducationalSystems. New York, John Wiley.

PEA/UR, G. F. 1976. lEA: A Technical Report. New York,John Wiley.

i'SACHAROPOULOS, G., LOXLEY, W. 1985. Diversified Sec-ondary Education and Development: Evidence fromColombia and Tanzania. Baltimore, Johns HopkinsUniversity Press.

ROBITAILLE, D.; GARDEN, R. Mathematics Achievement In11 Countries. Oxford, Pergamon. (In press.)

Ross, K. N.; Posn.rrnwarre, T. Neville. 1988. DifferentLevels of Information for Different Levels of Decision-making. Prospects, Vol. 19, No. 3.

SAWAOISEREE, A.; jtvot.10, NORDIN, A. B, 1982. Six Edu-cational Evaluation Projects in South-East Asia. Evaluahem in Education (Oxford, Pergamon), Vol. 6, No. t.

Sttugt..A, S. 1974. Achievement of Indian Children inMother Tongue (Hindi) and Sci. nce. Comparative

Education Review, Vol. t 8, No. z. (Special issue: 'Whatdo Children Knox%)

SiNGIIAL, R. P. 1988. Indian .Sehools A Study of Teacher-pupil Ratio New Delhi, Vikas.

THORNDIRE, R. L. 1973. Reading Comprehennon in FifteenCountries; An Empirical Study. New York, John Wiley.

UNESCO. 1084. Evolution of Wastage in Primary Educationin the World between 1970 and 1980. Paris, Unesco,Division of Statistics on Education. Office of Statistics.

-. 19560. Trends and Projection of Teachers in Primaryand Secondary Education in the World-197o 2000: AStatistical Analysis. Paris, Unesco, Division 01 Statisticson Education. Office of Statistics.

--. 19866. A Summary Statistical Review of Educationin the World 1970 084. Paris, Unesco. (Documentpresented at the International Conference on Edu-cation.)

-. 1987. Statistical Yearbook. Paris, Unesco.WINDHAM, Douglas M. 1988. Int-heaters of Educational

Effectiveness and Efficiency. Improving the Efficiency ofEducational Systems (TEES).

WORLD %var. 19860. Financing Education in DevelopingCountries. An Expluration of Policy Options. WashingtonD.C., World Bank.

--. 19866. Investing in Children; The Economics ofEducation. Washington D.C., Education and TrainingDesign Division. Economic Development Institute.

1988. Education in Sub-Saharan Africa. Policies orAdjustment, Revitalization and Expansion. WashingtonD.C., World Bank. (A World Bank policy study.)

Planning the qualityof education: different

information for differentlevels of decision-making

Kenneth N. Ross and T. Neville Postlethwaite

In recent years, educational planning has often been focuscd on alimited range of activities concerned with forecasting numbers ofstudents, teachers, and support staff, and predicting the demand for,and location of, supporting plant and equipment which is likely tobe required by an education system at any one point in time (Lewin,1988). All this work provides excellent information for guidingdecision-making concerning the quantity, but unfortunately oftenprovides very little input concerning the quality, of education. Thisis indeed an unfortunate situation, because ministries and depart-ments of education in most countries are charged with the responsi-bility of making informed decisions in both ot these domains.

In addition to this problem, there is often a lack of understandingwithin educational planning agencies that the collection and man-agement of useful research information about the quality of educationrequires an acknowledgement that planning decisions in this domainneed to be made at various organizational levels (Tyler, 1986). Thisarticle explores the typcs of information that might be employed

Kenneth N. Koss (Australia). Senior Lecturer in Education, Deakin University,Australia. Formerly member of the staff of ,the Australian Council for EducationalResearch. Current interests in sampling theory and practice for education surveys andexperiments. Several p in these and related fields.

T. Neville Postlethsvaite (inited Kingdom). Professor of Education, University ofHamburg. Interest in comparative and international educational resear..-h Co-editor-in-chief with Torsten Ilus,:n of the ten-volume International Encyclopedia of Education.Numerous publications including most recently the !HA publication, Science Achieve-ment in Seventeen Countries: A Preliminary Report.

Posp.r,ls, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, s yttt

2(3 Kenneth N. Ross caul T. Neville Postlethuraite

to guide decisions about the quality of education, and presentssome approaches for reporting this information in formats that areappropriate for the various levels at which decision are made.

For the purposes of illustration, four broad levels of decision-making in cducation are described: (a) parent and teacher decision-making concerning a particular student; (b) school-principal decision-making concerning a particular school; (c) official state or provincialdecision-making concerning a particular group of schools; and(d) official national decision-making concerning all a nation's schools.

Information for different levels of planning

Education, as delivered through formal and non-formal schooling,typically comprises an enterprise designed to facilitate an indi-vidual's or a group's cognitive, affective, psychomotor and sociallearning. Those responsible for successful outcomes in these areasinclude parents, teachers, school principals, state and provincialofficials, and national officials.

These persons need to monitor various educational processes andoutcomes and, with the assistance of appropriate information, makedecisionstomorrow, next week, next month, next year or in a fewyears' timewhich will influence the education of those in theircharge. However, the types of decisions these people have to makeand, therefore, the type of information they require is often quitedifferent.

TEACHERS AND PARENTS

Teachers and parents need to gather and share information con-cerning the nature of the educational behaviours (knowledge, skillsand values) that have been taught, the extent to which these have beenlearned by thc child, and the contexts in which the child has demon-strated these behaviours with either competence or difficulty.

In some circumstances this information will describe studentperformance on individual test items or particular tasks. However,carc needs to be taken to ensure that any single item or task providesa stable and representative sample of a defined behaviour acrosssuitable areas of content and context. Generally, it will be necessaryto employ a group of items or tasks in order to be able to makereliable statements concerning a defined behaviour for a particularchild.

Planning the quality of education 27

The information needs to be expressed in a manner which avoids

technical and educational jargon in order to permit a clear agenda forteacher and parent action to be prepared. This agenda can only

address effectively the child's learning strengths and weaknesses in

situations where teachers and parents both understand, and agree to,the nature of the child's educational requirements.

SCHOOL PRINCIPALS

School principals seldom need to have information about the edu-cational behaviours of individual children. When this kind ofinformation is required, the principal can consult with the appro-priate teacher. How,ver, principals often need to be informcd aboutthe progress of learning for each class in the school. Informationexpressed at the classroom level is more suitable for assisting withdecisions concerning the deployment of school resources to ensurethat all classes achieve the school's educational goals which have been

set by the principal, teachers and parents.In addition, the principal needs to have information on how well

the school is performing in comparison with other similar schools.This is especially important in respect of 'core' educational goals

which are also valued by these similar schools. Principals can use thisinformation to review the school's goals, set priorities among thesegoals, and focus a whole-school effort on improving the school'slearning environment in ways which are relevant to the students'aptitudes, interests, and home circumstances.

STATE AND PROVINCIAL OFFICIALS

State and provincial officials do not require information as detailed

as that required by school principals because they are far removedfrom both the daily operations of schools a .1c1 the daily responsi-bilities of parents, teachers and principals. The broader rolc requiredof these officials, be they administrators, co-ordinators or supervisors,dcmands that they should make decisions only after having exami,-!edinformation which is sufficient to establish the existence of problemsserious enough, or opportunities great enough, to warrant a consider-able commitment of thcir timc and state or provincial resources.

Information appropriate in this context should be presented insuch a manner as to help officials to employ planning approaches thatwill provide large groups of schools with the expertise and resourcesrequired to set up and evaluate their educational programmes, and

28 Kenneth N. Ross and T. Neville Postlethwente

then, guided by the results of the evaluations, to adopt proceduresthat will improve their effectiveness.

To assist planning decisions in this area there is also a need fora periodic and independent appraisal of student progress withrespect to the agreed goals of schools within the state or province.This would entail an 'audit' of a sample of the agreed goals and, ifsome major discrepancy were noticcd between school-level infor-mation and state-level information, a more detailed investigationcould be undcrtaken. These audits require care because appraisalof a school calls for the support of students, teachers, parents andschool principal. This support will not be forthcoming if the col-lection of information takes up too much student time, results inmajor disruptions to the school programme, costs too much ordoes not provide reliable, valid and useful results.

NATIONAL OFFICIALS

National officials require less detailed information than do state orprovincial officials. These officials do not work with individual childrenor classes, and they are unlikely to concern themselves with the affairsof an individual school or a small group of schools. Rather, their roleis to make broad policy decisions concerning the linkages betweenthe legislated directives of past and present governmems, and theplans and resources required to attend to these directives. Thesedecisions are expected to have impact across whole or large partsof school systems and therefore, because of the conservative inertiaof educational institutions and the high costs of initiating system-wide change, a great deal of accurate information about students andschools needs to be collated at the system level.

National officials must have access to information that willidentify long-term trends in their education system's capacity toassist all students to make progress towards achieving a high standardof physical, social and cognitive development. In some circumstancesthese trends will call for intervention in what is seen as an emergingand widespread problem of the inability of students to achievesuccess in a specific section of the curriculum. In other circumstances,the focus will be on the curriculum itself because it may be seen asbeing in need of revision and restructuring in order to take accountof recent research and/or new social and economic conditions. Formost school systems, decisions concerning these matters arc groundedin comparative data for various demographic groups within thesociety and therefore thc system-wide information will need to be

Planning the quality of cducation 29

expressed according to breakdowns associatcd with, for example,gender, ethnicity and socio-economic factors.

Mechanisms for providing information

In many countries a great deal of the information required for thevarious levels of decision-making is already available in the form oflarge-scale datasets obtained from national and international surveysof educational achievement. Some examples are: the AustralianStudies in School Performance Project in Australia (Bourke et al.,1981); the Assessment of Performance Unit (APU) in England(Gipps and Goldstein, 1983); National Assessment of EducationalProgress in the United States (NAEP, 1986); the Indonesian 6th, 9thand 12th Grade Surveys (Jiyono and Suryadi, 1982); thc Inter-national Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement(IEA) surveys in some forty countries (Pelgrum and Warries, 1986).

The data associated with large-scale surveys usually containuseful benchmarks of student performance on at least some of anation's agreed educational goals. In addition, many of the so-calledindependent variables used in these surveys often provide importantdescriptive information which may be of usc to state and nationalofficials.

It is important to note that care needs to be exercised whenemploying survey data to ensure that the sample designs were drawnup and executed in a scientifically valid fashion. Those surveys thatneglect to provide a clear description of the target population, theobjective procedures used to select the sample, the stratificationdecisions, the stages and units of multi-stage sampling, the pro-cedures used to minimize the dangers of bias through non-response,the size of the designed and achieved samples, and the magnitude ofthe sampling errors, should be treated with great caution.

Another important source of information may be found in datagathered as part of a national examination system. These data canbe provided at many levels of aggregation, for example, as averageschool scores and as average scores for groups of schools servingcommunities with similar socio-economic characteristics.

If neither survey data nor examination data arc available, thenschool systems may be faced with the design of their own per-formance monitoring procedures. A recent example of this has beenthe state-wide testing procedures adoptcd by the State of Californiain the United States (Staff, 1987).

,

30 Kenneth N. Ross and T. Nail He Postlethcoaste

Examples of the information to be provided

A tentative list is presented below of the kinds of questions thatmight be asked at the four 'planning' levels described above. Inassociation with each of these levels a hypothetical table of resultshas been presented in order to illustrate how information might beassembled and displayed in order to provide appropriate responsesto the questions.

Teacher's question: What are my students' achievements on specificsub-dimensions of mother tongue, mathematics and science?

The sub-dimensions considered for each of the three subject areaswould depend on the curricular components that have been taughtwithin the teacher's class.

For example: the first sub-dimension in the mother tongue areacould be spelling; the second could be reading comprehensionrequired for understanding simple instructions; the third, readingcomprehension required for making inferences; the fourth, creativewriting, and so on. In the mathematics area the sub-dimensions couldbe estimation, arithmetic calculations, elementary equations, etc.In the science area the sub-dimensions could be the solar system,differences between plants and animals, properties of metals, etc.Generally, for any reasonable level of reliability in judging a student'scapacity to have mastered a domain associated with a sub-dimension,it would be necessary to have at least eight to ten items (Morgan,I 979).

If we assume that there are six sub-dimensions, numbered i to 6,and a total score, for each of the three curricular areas, and that tenitems have been used to assess each sub-dimension, then a hypo-thetical table of results for a particular class might be displayed asin Table 1. For the sake of illustration, only four students have beenincluded.

The results listed in Table i would enable the teacher of this classto discern a number of interesting performance patterns, both withinthe profiles of individual students and among the profiles of allstudents in the class. The teacher would need to digest this infor-mation and then, in association with parents and colleagues, formulatea plan of action for individual students and for the whole class.

For example, from the hypothetical results presented in Table I,the teacher can see that all students have performed quite well onall sub-dimensions associated with science. The teacher and studentswould be very satisfied with their performance in this area of thecurriculum.

Planning the quality of education 3 1

TABLE 1. Hypothetical table of results for a class

Student Mother tongue Mathemat Ica Science

I 1 3 4 5 6 Total a 3 4 5 6 Total 1 2 3 4 5 6 Total

A 9 10 4 9 10 10 52 4 5 5 3 7 5 29 9 10 9 10 9 10 57

9 8 8 9 to 45 9 7 8 9 7 7 47 8 8 9 9 9 8 51

9 7 3 8 9 9 45 8 7 9 8 7 7 46 8 10 8 9 8 8 si9 9 2 9 8 9 46 8 7 9 7 7 7 45 8 9 10 8 9 9 53

All students, except for Student A, have performed reasonablywell on the mathematics sub-dimensions. Student A, however, hasperformed extremely well for the other two areas. On the basis ofthese results the teacher may suggest that this student shouldconcentrate his efforts a Little more on mathematics in order toobtain a better and more balanced performance across all three areas.

An unusual pattern of results has emerged for the mother tongue.All students have performed reasonably well, except on sub-dimension 3. The teacher would need to reflect upon the factorswhich may have prevented effective learning in this area. Some ofthe factors which might have resulted in this unusual pattern couldbe: (a) that insufficient class time was allocated to learning thematerial associated with this sub-dimension; (b) that the studentswere confused by the way in which the teacher explained thematerial; (c) that the textbook devoted insufficient space to thematerial; (d) that no applied examples or homework was given toconsolidate the learning of the material; (e) that the material coveredfor this sub-dimension was unusually complex relative to the otherfour sub-dimensions; and (f) that the material was presented in afashion which was not relevant to the students' interests andbackgrounds.

School principal's question: On what sub-dimensions of which subjectareas and at which grade levels is my school doing well or poorly incomparison with other similar schools and all schools in my district?

In order to be able to addrcss this kind of question, the schoolprincipal needs one or more points of comparison: a 'relative' levelof performance which will focus on thc performance level of hisschool with respect to other similar schools, and an 'absolute'measure of pc-lormance which will provide information concerningthc amount of thc agreed curriculum which has been mastered bythc students.

A relative measure of performance could be estimated by comparingthe school's performance with other similar schools within the same

3 2 Kenneth N. Ross and T. Neville Postkthtz,nte

school system. The term 'similar' here refers to other schools servingstudents from the same kind of socio-economic background, havingthe samc standard of staff and equipment, and teaching the samecurriculum. Thc comparisons between these schools could becarried out using breakdown variables which define importantgroups of students within the schools in terms of gender, ethnicity,year-level, etc. One of the important benefits associated with arelative comparison of schools is that it may bc possible to learnfrom the teaching mcthods and educational environments of otherschools that serve similar communities but arc more productive interms of student learning outcomes.

An absolute measure of performance could be estimated by usingpre-set levels of achievement which indicate several broad bands ofperformance for the whole school. For example, if 75 per cent ormore of the students at a particular grade level master the materialassociated with a specific sub-dimension thcn the performance forthis class level is said to be 'good'. If the percentage of studentsmastering the material is between 50 and 75 per cent then this isdefined as 'moderate', and below 50 per cent is designated as 'poor'.Each of thcse three levels of performance would lead to differentactions being required of the principal. For example, a poor per-formance level may require a major redeployment of school resourcesand effort in order to improve student learning, whereas a goodperformance level may require the principal to limit his activitiesto providing positive feedback to students and teachers in the formof encouragement.

In Table 2 a hypothetical table of the mean and studcnt standarddeviation of raw total scores has been presented for the mothertongue, mathematics and science. These results enable us to considerthe relative, but not thc absolute, performance of School Y comparedwith other similar schools, and compared with all schools in thesame state. Thc results suggest a different kind of response isrequired of the school principal for each of the three curriculumareas. Thc scores in this table would need to be expressed in theform of 'mastery' levels in ordcr to make statements about absolutelevels of performance.

In the mother tongue, School Y is performing poorly relative toother similar schools, and poorly relative to all othcr schools in thesame state. This situation would warrant a review of the school'smother tongue educational programme with a view to improvingthe performance of thc students. The review might begin by visitingsome of thc other similar schools to try to find out what features oftheir programme appear to be resulting in a better learning environ-ment for their students.

Planning thc quality of education

TAISLE 2. hypothetical results for a relative comparison of 3 school with other similarschools and all schools in the sante state

Schools Mother tongue Mathernatks Science

MeanStandarddeviation Mean

Standarddeviation Mean

Standarddeviation

School YMales 40.6 2.1 45.8 2.4 50.3 4.4

Females 4 (.3 2.2 33.4 2.3 49.7 4.5

Total 40.7 2.5 39.5 4.4 50.0 4.5

Sinislar schoolsMales 55.4 2.4 40.1 2.7 50.1 2.2

Females 53.0 2.3 39.2 2.2 49.2 2.1

Total 54.2 2.4 39.6 2.8 49.5 2.2

All schoolsMales 54. t 2.3 39.0 2.6 57.3 2.1

Females 5 , .9 2.2 38.1 2.3 56.2 2.2

Total 53.1 2.3 38.5 2.7 56.7 2.3

The scores for mathematics show that the school is performingabout as well as other similar schools and also marginally better thanother schools in the same state. However, when thcse mathematicsresults are broken down by gender, it becomes apparent that, forSchool Y, there arc unusually large performance differences betweenmales and females. The magnitude of these differences exceedssubstantially the differences notcd for similar schools and otherschools in the same school district. This result would warrant adetailed investigation of the learning environments and opportunitiesthat are being provide'd for female students within the school. Theextremely high mathematics performance displayed by the malestudents suggests that some excellent mathematics programmes arcavailable within the school, and that action should be taken to ensurethat female students are able to benefit from this high-qualityteaching.

The mean total scores for science indicate that the school isperforming poorly with rcspcct to all othcr schools in the samc state,but about as well as other similar schools. A pattcrn of results likethis could be associated with a major difference in school scienceresources between, on the onc hand, School Y and other similarschools, and, on the othcr hand, all other schools in the same district.In this situation it may not be easy for the principal to improve thclearning environment for science in his school because the mainreason for these differences might bc the availability of expensivelaboratory facilities, which represents a factor beyond his control.Furthermore, an important issuc associated with thc pattern of

33

34 Kenneth N. Ross and T. Neville Postlethwaite

standard deviation scores in science would need to be addressed bythe school principal because the variation between student scoresin his school is extraordinarily high when compared with similarschools and other schools in the same state. This result would requirean investigation to find out why, within the same school, there issuch a high variation in student performance.

The discussion presented above addressed the school principal'squestion in terms of 'relative' performance. In order to consider thequestion from an 'absolute' perspective the performance of theschool would need to be expressed as a table reporting the percentagesof students achieving mastery in the three curricular areas. Theprincipal could then use the previously described benchmarks of'poor', 'moderate', and 'good' to analyse his school's performance.The setting of percentage mastery levels for these three categorieswould need to be carried out in association with the most experiencedclassroom teachers.

State official's question: Which schools andlor groups of sclwols in mystate are performing well or poorly?

State officials are mainly interested in the efficient deployment ofstate-wide resources so that all schools for which they are responsiblehave an opportunity to optimize the quality of their educationalenvironments. In some instances, these resources may consist of staff,plant and/or equipment, whereas in other instances less tangible'resources' may consist of information and ideas that facilitateeducational improvements without requiring substantial financialinputs. An example of a successful deployment of the latter type ofresource would be found in situations where teacher-constructedcurricular materials that have been shown to improve learning areshared as part of a pool of teaching aids.

In Table 3 hypothetical results that would address the informationneeds of school district officials have been presented. For the sake ofillustration, only four schools in the district have been included.These results list the overall performance of each school in thethree subject areas described above and then provide a compositescore, for example, by using a summation of scores for each arca.

The task of the state official in examining these data is to look forpatterns of results which might suggest an opportunity for the stateto target resources in a more effective and efficient manner. Forexample, at thc individual school level it can bc seen that, accordingto the levels of the composite scores, the overall perfo, mance ofeach school listed in Table 3 is quite similar. However, from anobservation of the subject scores it may be noted that each school


TABLE 3. Hypothetical results for all schools in a Srate

Schools Mother tongue Mathematics Science Composite Score

Mean Stan- Mean Stan- Mean Stan- Mean Stan-

dard dard dard dard

devi- devi- devi- devi-ation anon anon at ion

t 40.7 2.5 50.3 2.4 59.4 2.5 51.6 2.6

2 42-3 2.2 52.8 2.5 56.2 2.5 51.2 2.3

3 58.3 2.6 22.2 2.7 42-6 2.3 50.9 2.4

4 58.1 2.2 26.3 2.1 44.3 2.0 50.2 2.2

State 53-1 2.3 38.5 2.7 56.7 2.3 50.8 2.5

has both strengths and weaknesses. Probably of more importance isthe appearance of two internally homogeneous 'clusters' of schools,the first containing schools (1 and 2) having poor performance inthe mother tongue and excellent performance in mathematics andscience, and the second containing schools (3 and 4) having excellentperformance in the mothcr tongue and poor performance in math-ematics and science. The existence of these two clusters shouldprompt a more detailed investigation of why these clusters exist.For example, can the existence of the clusters be explained in termsof differences in student backgrounds, teacher's qualifications,curricular emphases, etc.?

A further question that comes to mind is to ponder whether themother-tongue teachers in the first cluster could profit by experi-encing direct observation of the mother-tongue programmes ofschools in the second cluster. And, vice versa, whether the scienceand mathematics teachers in the second cluster would learn somethingby observation of equivalent programmes of schools in the firstcluster.

Where important patterns exist in school scores, like the clustersdescribed above, it may be important for state officials to seeksupplementary information from 9ocal' sources concerning thespecial circumstances of the schools in each cluster. An interestingexample of this occurred during the 1970s in Indonesia where itwas found that the English-language scores of students in certainschools in Bali were several standard deviations above the scoresthat could bc expected of the most able students in the country.These results were explained following thc discovery that the schoolswere located close to golf courses frequented by English-speakingtourists, and that after school hours, and at weekends, many of thestudents spent a great deal of time practising their English conver-sational skills while working at the golf course.

Kenneth N. Ross and T. Neville Postlethwatte

National official's question: What are the major factors associatedwith differences between schools in my country, and are these differencesevident in terms of spatial differentiation (for example, provincialdifferences, urbanfrural diffe:-ences, etc.) or in terms of demographicdescriptors (for example, ethnic status, socio-economic status, etc.)?

The nadonal official's iisk in addressing this many-faceted questioncommences with decisions concerMng the kcy indicators to he usedin order to judge the performance of the education system. In thepast many countries have employed 'coarse' performance indicatorsconcerned with enrolment rates and graduation rates. However,more recently, there has been greater interest in highly specificindicators concerned with such matters as attendance rates, reten-tivity rates, student 2a hievement levels, and discipline problems.Murnane (1987) notes the emergence of this trend in the UnitedStates where, although enrolment data had been collected at thenational level from 1867, there was no data collected at the nationallevel to as',ess what students learned in school until too yearslater.

Spatial differentiation and demographic descriptorsTable 4 presents a hypothetical set of results in order to consider thepatterns of student achievement across the nation according to twovariables that describe spatial differentiation: state location andurban/rural setting. A similar table could be prepared to showdemographic variables by displaying student achievement accordingto several classifications of variables concerned with ethnic andsocio-cconomic status. It is these kinds of tables that provide essentialinformation when national officials attempt to devise long-termeducational planning strategies.

The results in Table 4 indicate that, at the national level, thereare negligible differences between urban and rural areas in all threesubjects. In addition, the overall performances of student in State 25is quite good, being generally a little more than two score pointsabove the national level, both for the total state figures and also forurban and rural areas. State 1, on the other hand, displays overallperformance figures which are substantially lower than the nationalaverage. In addition, within State i there are large variations instudent performance between urban and rural areas.

The evidence presented in Table 4 would provide grounds for athorough review of educational provision in State t. The nationalofficial would probably commence such a review by proposing acomparison of the educational environments provided for studentsin States i and 25. Some relevant questions to consider would be


"I-Atil I. 4 ll5pothetical table of results in urban and rural areas for each state and thc nation

-

c Mother tongue Mathetnatio Science Compocite S:ine

Mean Stan-

dard

devi-

ation

Mean Stan-

dard

dry,

ation

Mean Sun-

dard

devi-

auon

Mean Stan-

dard

devi-

anon

Stare IUrban 36.7 2.5 33.3 2 4 37.4 2.5 42.6 2.6

Rural 41.3 2.2 40.8 2.5 43.2 2.5 49.2 2.3Total 39.0 2.8 37 , 2.7 40.3 2.9 45.9 2.9

Stare 25Urban 45 8 2.1 45.3 2.4 47.7 2.4 53.7 2.2

Rural 45.7 2 2 45.1 2.6 47.6 2.4 53.5 2.3

Total 45.8 2.3 45-2 2.7 47 7 2.4 53.6 2.3

NatI011

lit ban 43.6 2.3 45 1 2.6 45.5 2.6 515 2.4Rural 43.5 2.4 42.9 2 8 45.4 2.6 513 2.5

Total 43.6 2.5 43.0 2.9 45.5 2.6 51.4 2.5

those concerned with differences between these two states in termsof teacher quality, school buildings, curriculum and, importantly,the socio-economic background of the students.

Factors associated with differences between schoolsThe 'circumstances' of schools should always be taken into consider-ation before making decisions concerning their performance aseducational institutio1.7 That is, the output of schools, as measuredby the amount of learning experienced by students, should beconsidered in association with the quality of student intake and theprevailing social and physical environment within which schoolsoperate. If schools are judged solely by the average achievement scoresof their students, then many schools that are doing an extremelyeffective job, given their circumstances, may be misjudged as beingineffective and vice versa.

For example, consider a school that has overcrowded and inad-equate buildings, has very kw textbooks, has limited access tocultural experiences for its students because of isolation, and hasmany students from very poor and illiteraie families. It would beextremely unfair to judge this school as performing poorly if it wasfound that the average literacy score of its students was slightlybelow the national average. In fact, after taking account of thcschool's circumstances, it would probably be considered that theschool has performed admirably.

3 8 Kenneth N Ross and 7'. Neville Postlethwaste

The circumstances of schools may be described in terms of twobroad classifications of variables that are sometimes labelled as'malleable' and 'non-malleable'. The non-malleable variables arethose that influence thc outcomes of schooling, but are not, in theshort term, readily amenable to manipulation by those decision-makers responsible for thc management of the education system.Some examples of these kinds of variables would be the socio-economic circumstances of students' home backgrounds, the geo-graphical environment of the school, and the distance of the schoolcommunity from various educational and cultural facilities. Themalleable variables are those that influence the outcomes of schoolingand, in thc short tcrm, may be manipulated by decision-makers.Some examples of these would be textbook provision, teacherin-service training programmes, homework requirements, schoolstaffing, school curricula, etc.

The national official, being unable to influence the non-malleablevariables in the short term, is most likely to pose thc following twoquestions: What are the differences between schools in terms of thciroutput, after taking into account school circumstances as measuredby the non-malleable variables? Which of the malleable variablesare most influential in assisting schools to become more effective?

One approach to providing answers to these two questions wouldbe to begM by using a between-schools regression analysis with thenon-malleable variables as predictor variables and mean studentachievement scores as the criterion variable. The resulting regressionequation could be used to create a measure of school output whichhas been statistically 'adjusted' for the circumstances of the school,as measured by the non-malleable variables. It should be noted herethat the calculation of adjusted scores requires a great deal of carewith respect to using data aggregated to the school level. (SeeKeeves and Sellin, t9sifi.)

This adjusted output measure would be equal to thc schoolresidual score calculated by subtracting the 'expected', or 'predicted'student mean achievement score, obtained from the regressionequation, from thc 'actual' mean student achievement score. A largeposnive residual score would indicate that a school was performingefiicienay because it was doing 'better than expected' after takingaccount of the non-malleable variables. Similarly, a large negativeres.dual score would mean that a school was performing inefficientlyl-,ccause it was doing 'worse than expected' after taking account of'the non-malleable variables. It is important to note that, generally,some degree of 'confounding', or 'overlapping', tends to occurbetween malleable and non-malleable variables in most educationalenvironments. Consequently, there may be a tendency to over-adjust

t-ti

Planning thc quality of education 39

for the non-malleable circumstances when forming the residualscores by using regression analysis. Fortunately, this statisticalartefact tends to result in conservative estimates of thc residualsand accordingly increases the confidence by which schools with largeresidual scores may be classified as being either efficient or inefficient.

Following these analyses, a sample of very efficient schools couldthen be compared with a sample of very inefficient schools in termsof their differences with respect to the malleable variables. Thecomparison of these two groups of schools would address the secondof the questions presented above.

In some situations it may be deemed important to conduct a testof statistical significance between the two groups with respect to animportant malleable variable. Carc should be taken with this pro-cedure on order to ensure that the test incorporates an allowance forthe sampling of intact groups of students. This matter, in associationwith a method for calculating an appropriate allowance, has beendiscussed by Ross (1987).

Consider, for example, a situation where the major differencebetween the two groups of schools was concerned with libraryprovision. (Fuller's (1987) review of school effects in Third Worldcountries notes that library size and activity contributes consistentlytowards improved learning outcomes.) In this situation the nationalofficial would need to launch an investigatic 1, probably of a qualitativenature, to find out why this had occurred. l ..c reason for the situationmight be linked to any, all or tione of the following possibilities.Perhaps there were problems associatcd with the distribution oflibrary books. Perhaps some schools were able to obtain morc booksthan other schools. Perhaps the books incorporated a cultural biaswhich resulted in their rejection by certain schools which servedparticular ethnic communities. Perhaps a simple clerical error hadresulted in some schools not receiving their books.

Unfortunately, in most educational settings the differencesbetween the two groups of schools will probably be associated notjust with one clear malleable variable as described above. Rather,there will probably be a range of interrelated variables which willneed to be grouped according to the different actions that need tobe taken and the costs of these actions. Some actions may be inex-pensive and easy to implement (for example, correcting the clericalerror which interfered with the distribution of the books) while otheractions may be expensive and difficult to implement (for example,purchasing new books for each school and ensuring that they fitthe cultural requirements of the local community).

When all actions arc grouped and costed, they may be presentedto kcy decision-makers for consideration. At this stage, a prioritization

BEST COPY LAURI 1

40 Kenneth N. Ross an.' T. Neville Postlerhwane

process will probably bc required in order to enable those actionsthat are selected for implementation to be manageable within acountry's budgetary and political situation. For example, someactions which involve large expenditures may need to be deferreduntil better economic conditions prevail, while other actions, whichfocus on complex ethnic and cultural issues, may require lengthypreliminary negotiations with community leaders before implemen-tation commences.

This article has presented a rationale, and some hypotheticalexamples, for considering the different levels of decision-makingwithin education systems and the ways in which relevant informationmay be gathered and displayed in a manner that will assist withdecision-making.

We believe that therc arc many low-cost opportunities for fruitfulsharing of information across decision-making levels provided thatsufficient prior thought is given to the nature and presentation of theinformation that is collected. For example, the regular data collectionsconducted by teachers and school principals about thcir own schoolscan sometimes be co-ordinated among a cluster of schools in orderto also provide information that is of interest to state or nationalofficials. Similarly, by including some supplementary data collections,large-scale surveys of educational achievement can report theirresults in a form required by national or state officials and also in aform that assists teachers and school principals.

The discussion presented in this article concerning the notion ofcomparing school performance after adjusting each school's outputfor the quality of its input is not a new idea for educational researchers.However, it is relatively novel concept for most parents and, sur-prisingly, it is an idea that is often by-passed during 'informed'discussion of schools and their rcputations for excellence. The schoolmcan test scores for large school systems in the United States whichare regularly reported in the mass media, with little interpretivecomment, represent excellent examples of the dangers associatedwith this approach (Staff, 1987).

In conclusion, we consider that the issucs that have been canvassedin this article have implications for future changes in the ways inwhich educational planners arc trained. In particular, the currenttendency to provide intensive training in quantitative techniquesneeds to be supplemented by experience in linking these techniquesto decision-making requirements concerning the quality of educationat all levels of education systems. Hopefully the discussion prescntcdhere will go some way towards stimulating debate on this subject.

Planning the quality of education 4 1

References

Bouaka, S. F.; MILLS, J. M.; STANYON, J.; HOLZER, F. 1981. Performance in Literacy andNumeracy: 1980. Canberra, Australian Government Publishing Service.

FULLER, B. 1987. What School Factors Raise Achievement in the Third World? Review ofEducational Research, Vol. 57, No. 3, pp. 255-77.

thrrs, C.; GOLDSTEIN, H. 1983. Monitoring Children: An Evaluation of the Assessment ofPerformance Unit, London, Heinemann.

JIYONG; SURTADI, A. 1982. The Planning, Sampling, and Some Preliminary Results of theIndonesian 9th Grade Survey. Evaluation in Educati.,i, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 5-30.

KEEVES, J. P.; SELLIN, N. 1988. Multilevel Analysis. In: J. P. Keeves (ed.), Educationaliesearch, Methodology and Measurement: An International Handbook. New York, Per-gamon Press.

LEWIN, K. 1981. Educational Planning for Scientific and Technological Development.International E wyclopedia of Education, Supplement 1. Oxford, Pergamon Press.

MORGAN, G. 197.,. A Criterion-referenced Measurement Model with Corrections for Guessingand Carelessness. Melbourne, Australian Council for Educational Research. (OccasionalPaper, No. 13.)

MURNANE, R. J. 1987. Improving Education Indicators: The S21:11e Problems? EducationalEvaluation and Policy Analysis, Vol. 9, pp. tot.-16.

NAEP (NATIONAL. ASSESSMENT OF EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS). 1986. The Reading Report Card:

Progress Toroard Excellence in Our Schooli. Princeton, N.J., National Assessment of Edu-cational Progress.

PELGRUM, H. WARRIES, E. 1986. lEA 1986: Activities, Institutions, and People. Enschede(Netherlands), International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement.

Ross, K. N. 1987. Sample Design. International Journal of Educational Research, Vol. xi,No. i, PP

STAFF, 1987. L.A. School Achievement Test Scores. Los Angeles Times (Metro Supplement),8 November, pp. 1-2.

TYLER, R. W. 1986. Changing Concepts of Educational Evaluation. International Journalof Educational Research, Vol. to, No. t, pp. 1-113.

rti

=-2

Educational reformand planningin the current

economic crisisMartin Carnoy

Educational decision-makers worldwide facefinancial pressures to reduce educational spend-ing and, at the same time, to find new ways tomeet undiminished social demand for more andbetter 'schooling. I will argue that in this 'crisis'thc underlying rationale for educational ex-pansion that prevailed in earlier, more favour-able economic circumstanccs has not changed.What has changed arc the economic constraintsfor educational planners and the political-ideological context in which educational de-cisions arc made. Rather than succumbing topressure to abandon mass education and theideal of achieving greater social equality andparticipation through expanded, highcr qualityeducation, decision-makers should develop newstrategies (a) to increase thc share of publicspending dedicated to both formal and non-formal education and (b) to improve thc qualityof mass education, particularly primary school-ing for marginal populations.

Martin Carnoy (United States of America). Chair-man, Stanford International Development EducationCommittee and Professor of the Political Economy ofEducation at Stanford University. Among his numer-ous publications in this area, his most recent booksinclude Schooling and Work in the Dcmocratic State(co-authored with Henry Levin) and The State andPolitical Theory.

Two opposed conceptionsof education

Slower (and in some regions, even negative)economic growth in the last fivc ycars accen-tuated already slower gross domestic product(GDP) increases in both petroleum-importingand exporting nations during thd 1970s. Thiseventually had to strain public spending, in-cluding spending on education, and I shall showthat it did. But from an educational planningperspective, the slowdown has complex impli-cations. The quantitative and qualitative ex-pansion of schooling and even non-formal edu-cation in developing countries needs cconomicgrowth for adequate financirk Yet, investmentin education appears to contribute significantlyto future economic growth (see, for example,Becker, 1964; Carnoy et al., I982). So even in aperiod of austerity in public spending, it isunclear that spending on education should bereduced.

The issue of how much to spend on schoolingis made even more complex by the specialpolitical-economic role that schooling plays inthe development process. Schooling representsmore than a contribution to economic growth.In most societies, how much schooling one getsdictates how well an individual does materially

rnoecti, Vol. XVI, No. 2 , istts

44 Martin Carnoy

and socially (Carnoy and Levin, 1976). Schoolexpansion is viewed politically as providing thepossibility of greater social mobility and morcequal income distribution (Carnoy et al., 1979).Further, using schooling for improving socialmobility and equalizing income distributionmay imply a very different educational (andpublic spending) strategy than one which stresseconomic growth.

The views of education as an input into econ-omic growth (capital accumulation) and as asource of social mobility (economic and socialequity) conflict historically (Carnoy and Levin,1985), primarily in terms of where educationaleffort should be placed and what kind of edu-cation to provide. Those who support the firstview argue that an investment in educationspecifically for growth and in a way that allo-cates resources in a growth-efficient way is acrucial contribution to the dynamic of capitalaccumulation in any country, and by gearing theschool systcm to this purposc, eventually every-one (even those who do not get schooling) willbe better off. Those who support educationalexpansion for social participation in the devel-opment process argue that economic growthwithout the full participation of all members ofsociety is only partial development. In addition,they contend that by gearing the educationalsystem to full participation, society can mobilizesocial resources that will reduce the costs ofschooling and incrcasc school yields. In a sense,thcy argue that it is morc 'efficient to stressparticipation rather than cconomic efficiencyfor growth objectives.

Which of these goals for educational expan-sion is pursued and which solutions arc adopted(efficiency versus mobilization and participation)is part of a dynamic situated in a political/economic/social conflict where the educationalsystem and the resources (both financial andhuman) It commands become an important siteof conflict.

It is pretisely during periods of economiccrisis that this conflict manifests itself in theshape of proposals for educational reforms.When funds are short, those who hold the ef-ficiency view want to reform education by

sharply slowing down educational cxpansionand by increasing educational quality throughfocusing on those who already do well in school.The participation view wants to reform edu-cation by continuing to increase access to edu-cation and by focusing on improving the qualityof schooling of those who do least well (the poor,minorities, marginal groups).

Therefore, I shall argue, arguments for andagainst increasing, and improving mass edu-cation are conditioned principally by two some-what related realities.

The first is economic: it is more difficulttoday for most countries to generate resourcesfor education because of thc sharp slowdown inworld economic growth in the 198os and thedeficit financing that was used to spur suchgrowth aftcr 1973.

The second is political-ideological. Whetherto expand and improve education or not, or howto reform education, given the real financialproblems faced by most countries, represents amuch wider debate concerning efficiency anddemocracy. Education sits squarely in the centreof this debatc, precisely because of its crucialrole in the development process. There is aninherent conflict between school;ng's role inpreparing labour for a modernizing economy(the investment, economic efficiency, or repro-ductive function of schoolingsee Inkeles andSmith, 1974) and its role in equalizing oppor-tunity and providing for social mobility (theequity or legitimating function of school-ingsec Giroux, 1981; Apple, 1982).

Educational expansionand economic crisis

The available statistical evidence suggests thatfrom 1960 to the early 1980s there was a rapidand large increase in the amount of cducationavailable to thc world's young people. Table Ishows that in every group of countries, primary,secondary, and higher education expanded sig-nificantly. Nevertheless, the figures indicate thatmany countriesparticularly those with lowincome per capitaare far from a situation

Educational reform and planning in the current economic crisis

TABU. 1. Enrohnent in education, by level, as a percentage of age-group, [960 and tot: t

45

Prima). Sesondary thew

Country group 960 19111 [960 1951 1960 IçII---jots uwinne N.) 94 Is 14 4

China and India 90 t02 :1 18 4

Other 15 72 7 it; 2

Middle income 7: [02 [4 41 It

Oil importers 54 99 15 44 4 13

Oil exporters 54 106 9 17 8

High intorne oil exporter> :9 83 3 43

Industrial market econtunic> 114 tot 64 60 10 37

East European non-market i I t05 49 58 20

Source World Bank, World net dopr,,na , Nrw York, Oxford Untversay Preys. 1,4+4. table 2s.

where most children complete primary edu-cation. Even so, these same societies arc rapidlyexpanding their higher educational institutions.And as Coombs (1985, pp. 78-9) notes, thc highprimary school enrolment percentages shownin Table i hide the low percentage of childrenwho finish primary school. In that regard, thepercentage enrolment in secondary school is agood indicator of the amount of primary schoolreceived by the average child. Assuming that15 to 20 per cent of the pupils in secondaryschool arc over-age (outside the age cohortassociated with a particular level of schooling),

only about one in three youth in the secondary-school age cohort iu middle-income countrieswas enroled, suggesting that perhaps 40 percent of the relevant age cohort finished primaryschool. The corresponding figure is much lowerin thc non-China India low-income countries.The fact that educational growth has been im-pressive, therefore, does not mean that the massof the world's young peoplc is receiving even aminimal education.

One of the most important barriers to thecontinuation of past expansion is the slow-downin world economic growth after 1973. Tables 2

l'An; F 2. G rowt h rate of real GDP of industrial and developing economies, t960-5 fpercentage

100growth rJICS

_:Ayer4ge annual change)

GDP per [960 .- 1971-

Country grodp 1'1,11. 0. 'S 79 1011 102 1083

Des elop:ng countries 65c, 6 3 (.2 91.5 2 4 I 0

I.ow-incorne-1,14

(Ihno

290291,

2.1

ci,S 9

4 8C 2

5 .7 f

4 [['24 `

t. 2

4 6

7 I

4.7

.1

India 24, ii, 4 fl 2 9.4

Aft!. a 2C1.. : I I t .2 5 0.1

Middle-rri.otne oil importers I SOU 1, 1 .1 0.3

Last Asia and Paoli> I 110 42 ! 1 2 6 4

rixt .1[61 7'orlh2rn 2 4 S s 2 0

Soh Sahara Alr64 I I 0.

Stunheru I ttrupe : .

[ 46n .% mertra and I 4171,1-emt : 4

e 111-911e t yit[utel [ 1: [1 4 i 7

I hgli- miome oil exporters 1

-

Industrial mar) it t On1.11111: .1 u 5 I 1 Il5060, Woill II troIJ Do pno, 094. 1,[k. [[..r.1 t luceryoy 1[1,, 1574, IA

46 Martin Carnoy

TABLE 3. Average GDP growth of industrial and developing economies, 1960-95 (average annual percentage change)

1985-95

Country group 1960-73 1971.79 19So-85 Ifigh case Low case

Low-incomeAsia 5.9 5.2 5.8 5.3 4.6Africa (Southern Africa notincluded) 3.5 2.1 1.7 3.2 2.8

Middle-income oil-importersManufacture exporters 6.7 5.8 1.6 6.3 5.2Other 5.3 4.3 1.9 4.3 3.8Middle-income oil exporters 6.9 4.9 2.4 5.4 4.7Industrial economies 4.9 2.8 1.9 4.3 2.5

Souret: World Bank, World Development Report, 1984, table 3.1.

and 3 indicate that this slow-down has beensteady and significant for all groups except thelow- and middle-income Asian countries. Chinaand India dominate the lower income Asiangroup, and they apparently have been much lessaffected by the world economic crisis thansmaller economics that arc more dependent onworld trade and foreign investment. AlthoughWorld Bank projections (sec Table 2) suggestthat growth rates in developing countries shouldimprove substantially even under more con-servative assumptions, thc projections alsosuggest that economic growth over the nextdecade will be considerably less than the ratesin 196o-73, and could be less than thosein 1973-79.

Unless countries are willing to increase sub-

stantially the percentage of GDP going to edu-cation, these lower growth rates make it virtuallycertain that the growth of formal education inthe world will slow down in the next ten years.What is the likelihood of increasing thc budgetfor education as a percentage of gross product?Coombs (1985, p. 41) shoNks that in theperiod 1960-75, public spending on educationrose steadily in the developed countries from 4to 6 per cent of GNI', and in the developingcountries, from 2.3 to 4 per cent. In 7975-79,however, education's share of spending in bothdeveloped and developing countries levelled offand began to fall slightly.

Table 4 Indicates another aspect of the prob-lems that education faces in the 1980s. For allbut middle-income oil exporters and the indus-

TABLE 4. Central government expenditure ."(.C,)', by category and as pert entage 01 GNP, 1972 and i9g1

Cr,1-

_Percentage of

I Mem, i ducktion.

COW) ry poop 19 1991 1;7, 19,11 1981--^ - - - -_ - --I.ow-income (exsludingChina anti India)Middle-income

71 0

I'? 6

0 4

24.011.4I 2

I g.3

9.6t 6.4

I 2.45-9

14. 3Oil importers 21 s. IA, 10 tiOil exporters .., , fo 21 4 t 6.6Iligh-ithome oil exporter, Or 6 26 9 26, I 1.s 9.2Industrial market eionotnies 21.7 23.

S 14.6 4 1 5.1

Now,: World Ilank, 1904, adapted from table 26.

Educational reform and planning in the current economic crisis 47

trial market economies, spcnding on educationbetween 1972 and 1981 fell as a percentage oftotal central government expenditures, whereasspending on defense increased. In the first halfof the 198os, with the United States leading theway, it is likely that military spending increasedin the industrial market economies and edu-cational spending decreased. Of course, centralgovernment expenditures represent only a frac-tion of total public educational spending, andthis fraction varies from country to country. Butthe figures in Table 4 suggest a trend: inthe 1970s, within a generally rising amount ofcentral government spending (as a percentageof GNP and in absolute real terms), cducationwas losing out to increasing militaxy spendingin the developing world. By :981, assuming thatall defence spending was 'central government',it had reached approximately 3 per cent of GNPin developing countries, almost as large a shareof output as educational spending.

The combination of slower growth rates ofTables 2 and 3 with the shift in spending fromeducation to military in Table 4 suggests thateducational expansion in the 1970s and early198o5 confronted a falling share of a fallingincrease in available resources. When wc addCoombs's observations about the rising costsof providing formal cducation per pupil (bothbecause the average training of teachers is

increasing in each level of schooling andbecause the average education taken by cachpupil rises for every new cohort), the econ-omic reality of educational expansion is ratherpessimistic.

Education faces another, less obvious, prob-lem. The private sector (especially banking) indeveloped countries is attempting to convincedebtor developing countries as well as the publicsector in their own societies that public sectorspendingespecially social spendingmust becut to increase economic growth. The Inter-national Monetary Fund requires debtor nationsto undertake domestic austerity programmesand export promotion as a pre-condition ofshort-term financial assistance. As a result,public social spending is under considerablepressure from those who see it as a primary

cause of inflation and hence, as an obstacle toeconomic growth.

Nevertheless, educational expansion and im-provement could continue at a moderate butsubstantial rate both in developing and devel-oped countries if the World Bank projectionsare correct and if societics are willing to increase,rather than decrease, thc percentage of theirGNP going to education. The overriding issucis one of competing for public resources withtwo powerful political foes: the militaries of theworld (and their supporters), and those whowould diminish public sector resources in thenamc of increasing economic growth.. The 'austerity' faccd by educational plannersand reformers who view education as crucial toincreased growth and a more equitable, partici-pative society is therefore anything but an absol-ute. Higher short-term economic growth is fun-damental to educational expansion, and the less-than-adequate availability of resources causedby low growth rates can only be overcome bytaking economic policy steps that increase thesavings ratc and efficiency in the allocation ofresources. But there is no single path to highergrowth, and austerity in educational spendingimplies risking longer-term growth for tenuousshort-tcrm results. Furthcr, even if publicspending as a share of GNT has to bc reduced,military spending, which uses a significant per-cent of output and is of questionable invest-ment value, could be even more susceptibleto spending reductions under austerity thaneducation.

These choices arc not based on hard-and-fasttechnical rules. They arc largely political.Equally political arc the types of educationalreforms that arc associated with the more gen-eral decisions about austerity versus expan-sionary policies, and thc decision whether tostress social versus military spending. To a largeextent they hinge on the kind of society that de-veloping countries aim to produce. An edu-cational system that reflects a drive for high-level skills in a period of 'austerity', imposed inpart by an increasing fraction of national re-sources going to a sophisticated military and tosubsidize foreign and domestic exporters, will

6 3

48 Marlin Carnoy

be a system that focuses on high-quality school-lug for the few. An educational system that aimsto contribute to increasing domestic demandand to expanding the capability of the economyto meet that demand, will tend to focus, instead,on improving the quality and quantity of pri-mary and secondary schooling for the mass ofchildren and even adults. This is not a newconflict, but it is exacerbated in periods of econ-omic crisis. To understand thc nature andrcasons for this conflict, we must have a betterunderstanding of the socio-political role ofschooling in changing societies.

Educational expansionand political/ideological conflict

Elsewhere (Carnoy and Levin, 1985), we suggestthat the dynamic of educational change canbest be understood as a condensation of amuch wider social conflict inherent in thc de-velopment process. The conflict emerges fromunequal power in production and social re-lations, and inequalities of income, wealth, andpolitical participation. These inequalities gen-erate struggles by subordinate, relatively power-less groups for greater equality, economic se-curity, and power over social decisions. In apolitically democratic society, the space for suchstruggles is provided by the state (Carnoy, 1984).But even in undemocratic societies, the state isthe focus of social movements that want toexpand their rights and power over resources;thc struggle, however, tends to be less insti-tutionalized (Cardoso and Faletto, 1979).

In public education, thc social conflictis expressed in the conflict between reformsthat reproduce the educational inequalities re-quired for social efficiency under hierarchically-organized production and reforms that equalizeopportunities in order to achieve the ideals ofsocial mobility, democratic participation, andcorMitutional protect Ion.

Thus the history of the expansion of schoolingin most societies is characterized not only bycorrespondence to changing (hierarchical andunequal) work-places but also by an impetus

toward greater equalization, democratizationand participation through education. Educationis subject to internal stresses created by thetwo contradictory directions of inequality anddemocracy, both emerging from social conflictsand the prominent place of education as anarcna of social conflict. These movementstoward equalization and democratization areevident not only in thc overall culture sur-rounding education (and teacher, student andcommunity belief in education) but also in thedirect challenge to existing laws and in theestablishment of new legislation that allows forunions for teacher and thc increasing rights ofparents and students in schools. (For a fullerdevelopment of this theory, see Carnoy andLevin, 1985.)

Thc statewhere much of the conflict overeducation is played outhas itself has becomean increasingly important part of the produc-tion system (Carnoy, 1980). Increased stateintervention is part and parcel of social conflict.The present array of social welfare spendingin many industrialized countries, for example,is in large part the result of state responses topotential conflict during the economic crisis ofthe 1930s and the social struggles of the 1960s.So there has been a shift of resources from theprivate sector to thc state. The relationship ofproduction to ideology remains structurally in-tact, but the site of its dynamic has shifteddramatically. The nature of thc capital-labourconflict has been altered by the state's inter-vention through social spending on social sccur-ity and health care and directly in productionand employment. While inherent contradic-tions still exist in production, much of the socialconflict related to these contradictions hasshifted to conflict over resources commandedby the state for reproducing and sustainingthe private sector.

Education, as part of the state, is also anarena of social conflict. II the state in mostsocieties is viewed as responsible for justiceand equitability in an inherently unjust andinequitable system of production, education'sostensible role is to improve subordinate groups'social position by making relevant knowledge


and certification for participation available tothose groups. At the same time, the statc andits educational system must. by definition,develop skills for the (hierarcl ical) productionsystem and its unequal division of labour. Thistension between reproducing inequality andproducing greater equality is inherent in cdu-cation, just as it is inherent in all the institutionsstructured according to class, racc, and genderwithin a society in conflict. The basis of thisconflict is not ideology as such but ideology asit relates to the concrete reality of social pos-ition, material gains, and political power.

Thus, educational reforms can influencestruggles in the work-place, the state, and thecommunity, just as educational reforms aresituated in these struggles themselves. Whilesocial relations are shaped by the process ofcapital accumulation, and the role of thc stateand cducation must be situated in thosc socialrelations, the place and process of reproductionis also a site of social conflict. Of primaryinterest is the relationship between the strugglefor morc humanc work conditions, morc equi-table distribution of rewards, and greater con-trol over production decisions and the conc.mi-tant struggle for a morc equitable and justeducational system.

The world economic crisisand educational reforms

In politically democratic societies, the schoolsare an arena of conflict because they have thcdual role of preparing workers and citizens. Thcpreparation required for citizenship in a demo-cratic society based on equal opportunity andhuman rights is often incompatible with thcpreparation needed for job performance in ahierarchical system of work. On thc one hand,schools must train citizens to know their rightsunder the law as well as their obligations toexercise these rights through political partici-pation. On the other, sclmols must train workerswith the skills and pei.,onality characteristicsthat enable them to function in authoritarian,hicmchilly organized work regimes (Inkeles,

49

1966). This ..equires a negation of the verypolitical rights that make for good citizens.

Furthermore, schools arc conservative insti-tutions. In thc abscncc of extaaal pressures forchange, they tend to preserve existing socialrelations (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). Butexternal pressures for change constantly impingeon schools even in the form of popular tastes.In historical periods when social movementsarc weak and business ideology is strong, schoolstend to strengthen their function of reproducingworkers for hierarchical work-placc relations andthe unequal division of labour. When socialmovements arise to challenge these relations,schools move in the other direction to equalizeopportunity and expand human rights.

Such shifts in primacy arc not a coincidence.Strong pressure in onc direction creates contra-dictions that activate powerful social forces toshift the momcntum in thc other direction. Forexample, in thc developed industrial countries,the gains of big business over labour in produc-tion and in thc state (including in education)during the first three dccadcs of this centuryfostered social and educational inequalities thatwere contrary to the precepts of a democraticsociety. In thc next four decades strong socialmovements were unleashed to address theeducational nccds of the economically disad-vantaged in developed countries and of thcmass of totally unschooled youth and adultsin thc developing nations. Laws were passedproviding these groups access to national re-sources, programmes, and schools not ava;lableto them in the past.

Much of this shift took place, however, in aperiod of economic expansion during whichpersonal income was rising. The state in almostevery country in the worldbecause of itshighly visible and positive role during the greatDepression and because of the apparent successof economic planning in the Soviet Unionbetween wars was able to get an increasingshare of national resources after 1945.

With the onset of lower growth rates, inflat ion.and falling real wages in the 1970s, however,this delicate arrangement began to deteriorate.A fiscal crisis of the state further contrained

5 0 Martin Camay

educational expansion. Social commitments toincreased equity and equality bccamc the sub-ject of intense conflict, usually in the name ofincreasing economic efficiency for higher growth.Education seemed to lose its high priority as anincreasing proportion of students came fromworking-class and peasant backgrounds. In thedeveloped countries, an aging population andfewer children of school age.

Moreover, many of the educational pro-grammes and commitments to greater equalityand democratic participation incurred higheconomic COM (Coombs, 1985). The result wasthat public educational spending per pupilrose dramatically, butfaced by fiscal con-straintsgovernments had to slow down an edu-cational expansion that had not yet reachedmarginal groups, and, in most countries, fellfar short of satisfying social demand. In thatsense, the world educational expansion of the19505, 19605 and early 1970s, in which demo-cratic and egalitarian ideals prevailed, contrib-uted to and even stimulated the political backlashof spending cutbacks. The larger struggle overthe resources controlled by the stade duringthis prcscnt period of economic crisis resultedin drastic slow-downs of public spending oneducation, health, and other social services. Thedemocratic dynamic, so strong during thepost-war period, had been in part underminedby its own success: social problems had appearedsoluble by expenditure of what for a time wasa constantly growing source of public revenuesgenerated by steady, seemingly unending econ-omic growth. Once economic growth decreased,however, thc coalitions that supported ex-panding social services have had much greaterdifficulty maintaining the equalitarian dynamic.

Thus, the educational thrust of the 195osand 19605 was toward greater social equality,but thc economic crisis of thc later 197os andearly 19805 served to shift the momcntum to thcefficient development of a work-force thatv.ould respond to the needs of production. Ineconomies as diverse as in the United States,'Western Europe, and China, the call given tothe schools is to make industry competitivethrough increasing the rigour of education and

training. This emphasis was in sharp contrastto the preoccupation of the previous threedecades with educational equity, equality andaccess.

The reforms of thc 1980s thus far arc there-fore largely in the direction of greater efficiencyin the educational system with respect to theparticular outcomes considered important foreconomic vitality. Thc implicit message is thatbettcr education is a question not of morespending per pupil but of better 'management',better teaching promoted by competition, andgreater student discipline. Emphasis is placedon higher standards for preparing students forwhat is perceived as a work-place requiringhigher and highcr levels of skills for high tech-nologies. Resources for funding the reformshave generally not been adequate to the task,and the concern for equality in education andthe democratic goals of schooling have beenrelegated to a 'benign neglect'.

In this dccade, the pressures for using theschools for reproduction of the work-force haveachieved primacy over those on the side ofdemocratic and equalitarian reforms. Thoughmuch is said about the cconomy, little is saidabout democracy in pursuing educational change.But the struggle between thc two forces is stillvery much alive, even though thc present policyseems to favour capital acculumation ratherthan equity and popular participation.

Planning educationin the 198os

Undoubtedly the most important message toeducational decision-makers and planners im-plied by this analysis is that the present 'crisis'of education is situated in an historical dynamicof conflict between competing goals for theeducational system. The 'necessity' of slowingdown the expansion of education and of makingit fit better into thc needs of efficient production,is only a necessity in so far as those politicalforces that hold that view can convince thestate to undertake such reforms.

At thc same time, thc push for increased

6 t)


and improved schooling for the poorespeciallya radical improvement in thc quality of primaryeducationby the forces of democratization, iscertainly far from ended historically. It is pre-cisely these forces ;hat will expand in politicallydemocratic developing countrics because of thefundamental social role played by the edu-cational system. Planners and decision-makersconccrncd with developing the types of edu-cationboth formal and non-formaland econ-omy that serve the broadest needs of theirsociety and thcir citizenry would be well advisedto consider this historical dynamic. Even underthe present circumstanceswhen the quest forimproved educational services for marginalgroups is under subtle and indirect attack byconservative interestsit is the marshalling of!:ocial movements and democratic forces thatplaces limits on retrenchment and makcs thebattle costly for the other side. Planners anddecision-makers who undcrstand the ;mport-ance of high-quality mass education for aernoc-racy and long-term economic development willcontinue to work for the democratintion ofschooling and resist attempts to reduce edu-cational spending in thc name of austerity andshort-term economic expediency.

In practical terms, this means that plannersshould focus on primary education, especiallyimproving teacher quality and the universalavailability of textbooks, and on raising thequality of primary schooling for marginal popu-lations where that level is already widely access-ible to children of school age.

It also means foctr.ing on better schoolmanagement, not only so that existing resourcescan go farther, but so that primary schoolNtudents gct more and higher quality teaching-learning time. There is no inconsistency betweensupporting better management in schools andthe democratization of schooling. The relevantquestion to bc asked-is: better .nanagement forwhat and for whom? Greater school efficiency isoften interpreted to mean that disadvantaged,poorer students must be sepatated from thegifted; that the primary airn of education is toincrease standardized examination scores; orthat schooling must be made 'relevant' to the

51

kinds of work that pupils are likely to do oncethey finish school.

Bcttcr school management for thc dcmoc-ratization of society focuses, to the contrary,on the incorporation of all children of schoolage into primary schools and providing thcmwith the quality of teachers and materials thatenable them to become active participants in adeveloping society. This may require raisingthe level of nutrition of these children as weltas building schools, training teachers, andmaking non-formal education available to thechildren's parents. It also may require mobil-izing high school and university students intoteachingespecially in rural schools and com-munitiesas a primary activity for severalyears after graduation.

The key to such educational planning is tocomprehend the socio-political nature of theeducational project in both developed anddeveloping societies. As I have discussed, theworld economic crisis has conditioned thc pol-itical climate in which the educational projectis framed. But the principles of educationalplanning for the democratization of societyrcmain unchanged. Only thc proccss of movingtoward that objective have become more difficult.The present economic crisis has greatly strength-ened those forces who would use thc presentcrisis to reduce educational expansion and shapethe educational system for a very different setof goals. Under their assault, educationalplanning for democratization requires moreclearly defined objectives and concrete pro-posals for educational change. But as importantis the political strategy for implementing theseproposals. For, as this analysis suggests, edu-cational expansion in the I9Sos will requirepolitical acumen as well as technical expertise.

5 2

References

rtir artln Camay

ACM E, M. 1982 Caltut and Fimumnc ReproduitionEducation London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

BECKER , G. 1964. Human Capital. New York, NationalBureau of Ecunomn Resear,h

BpIIRDIEU, P., PASSLRON, C 1977 firproduition,qeverley Hills, Calif , Sage

CARnoso, F. II ; PALE F 19-9. Dependency and Detopulent en Latin .4merna Berkeley, Calif., University ofCalifornia Press

CARNOY, M. 198o rhe State and Political rheory Princeton, N J., Princeton University Press.

('ARNOY, M.; I .ESIN, II 1976. The lamas of Edw.Reform. New York, Das id McKay.

CARNOY, M ; LOBO, J.; TOLEDO, Ale/3.11(in). VFLI OSO,Jacques. 1979. Can Educational Policy Equalize IncomeDior:but:an in Latin America? Geneva, InternationalLabour Organization

CARNOY, M.; LEVIN, II M ; NUGENT. R ; SeEARA, S

TORRES, C. A.; UNS1CKER, J. 1982. The PoliticalEconomy of Financing Education in DevelopingCountries. In. IDRC, Financing Educational Develop-ment. Ottawa, International Development ResearchCouncil.

CARNOY, M.; LEVIN, M 1985. Se/waling and Work inrhe Democratic State. Stanford, Calif., Stanford Um-versity Press.

Coomas, P. II 1085. The World Criss, in Education: rheView from tl.e 1:,:htio. New York, Oxford UniversitsPress.

GIROUX, If. loft. ldealagt. Culture, and the Proce ofSchooling Philadelphia, l'emple University Press.

INKELES, A. 1966, The Socialization of Competen,e,/1,2rvard Edu.:anonal R I et. , 36, No 3, pp. 265-83.

INKELES, A., S M1711, I ) t974. Becoming Modem Cam-bridge, Max, , larvard versa,. Pies,

The impact of the debtcrisis on educationin Latin America

Implications for educational

planning*

Fernando Reimers

Fins :uncle exanunes the impact of the externaldebt in Latin America on education. It also dis-cusses some areas of educational policy that re-quire reform to cope etfcctivel with the adjust-melt process and emphasizes the implicationstoi educational planning and management.

Elle adjustment programmes implementedin response to the 'debt crisis' make up a newscenario for educational planning and manage-meta..1 heie are TWO ways the educ anon ssteincan adapt to this new scenario. Of quick-fix ad-

Fez nando Reunets Vette.. neia I Reseameh ow, hire

at the Harvard Immure tor Inteenauonal IterT1-opment i Ito article ts based on carber work on

. thr, cubfrit: 'Emends of Educational Finance in La-; tin Ametica. The Impact of the External Debt

0988i; Hie Impact of the Latin Ainet wan kx-teinal I febt in the Emancing Ii I.IltiatllnI [untended 1:11ects of the Lamm Amen( an I tebt(ilsis Elie Impact on Education (Ifyqui, II im-pai to de la deuda exteina I atinnaniei it and en elimam lamento de la multi, at

'

fustment of (b.: planned ieform. O) these,

planned refornt has a better chance to preset edirt C iencs and equits m the provision of educa-tion.

Quick-fix solutions ale the antithesis ot

planned change Eurthermoie, they inay lead toadjustments that ate mote attentive to the in-terests of the most oc al than to constdel tmt, ofefficienQ ot equits At a tecent conference onthe crisis of educational qualits in I atm AireticaI asked a provincial sec tetais (NI educalIMI 10 ex-plain the criteria according to which there hadbeen drastic reductions in the percentage of goyernment expendu 01 e on 1111m:11Y ethic anon and

teaching indict tals al id scholarships I Its Jinswei

was that such c flanges wele unintentional andunplanned

awing on the \coil; of I lewton 0986) inthe l'nited Kingdom, I plopose that Ow lecog.onion of this nes., SI emit io ift dimmislwd gov

1 . 1 1 1 . 1 1 , 3 1 - c l 1151 I I I r.11111 r-,, 11111C11!

pollY,Irli I,. I \ ',1 II 511,

54 I ernandd R, in,, rc

ernment resources for education (related to adebt crisis that seems more chronic than Ultteal), has to precede any attempts to reform educational policy. It is Important for educationalpolicy-makers to realize how drastically the fi-nancial scenario has changed in ()icier to pro-mote systemic reforms in education

Analysing the impact of reductions in educa-tion expenditure in the United Kingdom, less-

ton advances the notion of 'cultures of choice',referring to the organizational climate in whicheducational policy decisions arc made Ile sug-gests that reductions in financial resources re-quire moving from a 'crisis culture', in which thesense of direction is lost, to a 'culture of cuts',which attempts to controt the decline associatedwith reduced levels of expenditute..

11ewton proposes that ;he emetgence otcuts culture will proceed in three-stage m-ch.ess

of response in local bodies of educanona! de, i1 don-making: (a) defensiveness .ind denial of the

problem; (b) pragmatic adjustment - cut whinsou can - and (c) reform, where policy makersrealize that short-term adjustment has meant un-desired sacrifices in equity or elliciencs if Iewton1986, pp 128-43)

The Latin American financial -.1;sis has

proved long enough to require moving from acrisis cultur?' to a culture of i eforms iii cc hich

the reduced levels of government spending cc illbe pait of the new scenario of educational plan-ning and tnanagement

Debt and education inLatin America

Latin America is, tragicallc, the best ot all plat esto test the hypothesis that dcht-servic mg cansqueeze educational development It is a I egi,:n

1 in which education expanded vigotousis c the1960s and 197-ds Vet, since the early 1980s it Is

the ai ea of the world hardest hit Its extc t nal debtIn the 1950s education in 1 otin Aim:tic-a be

gait a process ot re:mut:able expansion .1 he nestButts sears wete a pet iod ot optinusn, Cccii scj

ling, and of increased IMportance of the educa-tional sector in the development agendas of .a-

tin American governments. An outhne of thathistory can be obtained by following the regionalconferences of Ministers of Education.

In 1956, the first regional conference in Li-ma, Peru, called the Conference on I-ree andCompulsory Education, set the stage for the im-pressive expansion that was to folloW As a resultof that meeting, UNESCO adopted in the samecein the Major Project on the Extension and En-provement of Primary Education in I .atin AmerIca, to he completed in 1966.

Ehe next regional conference held in Santia-go de Chile in 1962, was a toint meeting of Mm-isteis of Education and Finance It encouragedthe idea that education was a necessat y condi-tion for econonuc development. l'he Santiago(:onference set targets of universal primary edu-c anon in several of the most athanced LatinAmenc an countries Its 1965. One year lam,hoc,. ever, at the Bogota regional meeting, thistarget was postponed to 1975 The Buenos Acresconference in 1966 reiterated the notion adoptedin Santiago that education was an investment ineconomic development. The stimulus that edu-cation systems received from these meetings wasimportant, and all the countries in ;he regionmade significant Improvements This was partic-ularly cc view at the 1971 itgional conference,held m Venezuela. Between 1960 and 1970 thetotal in-school population in the region grew atan annual rate of 6 1 per ccnt (t 'NESCO, 1976d,p 21); this growth outpaced the growth of theschool age population in that pet iod. This ex-pansion of education systems would not havebeen possahle without maior imptovements itteducational finance. National public expendi-ture on educanon al the region incteased notice-

Educational expendame in Latin America,as a pet centage of gross national ptodut. iNP),ith leased Itom 2.8 pei cent :n 1960 (I NESCO,

976b, p. 9 3) to 4 pet cent :0 1976 ( Blatno. 1081, p. 70) It was against this bat kgroundot quantitative development that the conferenceHi Venezuela, and the next one in Mexico in97o, sit louhe, vets foi the impiovement of

qualitain e avec ts of ethic ation 0. 'Wins

s.

I he unpak t ol the debt crisis on education in I .aon Amerka 55

inipliSations tot educational planning

In 1979 a look at the suct ess ot the recent past Once governments are faced with the factseemed to lustify highet hopes and aspirations for that they have to cut their spending, the next de-the funny. Voi example, the Mexico conference cision is what and how much to cut in each secsuggested inct easing public educational expendi- tot . According to Lourie (1986, p. 10).isn to.a new goal 01 fi om 7 to 8 per cent of grossdomestic product (GI )1'). The underlying logic of The consequence of the economic 'crisis' is that

these new aspirations may have been that the ecu- education (considered by economic plannel S 31:

part of the 'soft social sect0i) needs to face the de-nomic progress which had helped finance themands of domestic austerity measures and in par-

educational expansion of the past would contin- ucular compete with priorities given to both exportue However, a rapid deterioration of the l.atin promotion and military spendings, notwtthstand-Ameiican economies had already begun at the I mg demands made the production and infras-time ot the 1979 conference. In fact, only three uucture sectors.years Mier the Mexico regional fneeting, Mexicanofficials soddenly announced their inability tomeet their debt obligations. Although Mexicowas not the onls indebted country, 1982 marksthe beginning of the recognition of a 'debt crisis'in Latin Amenca.

1.atin Amei Ica IS the most mdebted region ofme world. Lleven ot the seventeen most highlyindebted counti :es in the world are in I.atinAmerica (World Bank, 1988, Vol 1, p.

Fable 1 summarizes the increases in debt lev-els in I atm Amei ica The level of debt-servicingas a pet, entage of expoi ts increased substantiallybetween 1970 ,md 1987, averaging 4 per cent ofgrowth es ery veal from 1970 levels (unweightedas'cragc) Ont.. I laiti and Panama had lower ser-vicing levels in 1987 than in 1970. All the othercountries shins ed Increases in those levels (5 percen: per annum on avelage, excluding I lain andPanam.0 The ins teases in debt levels are mos:significant after 1975. The average (unweighted)annual growth in levels of debt-servicing for allthe countries of the region increased from under2 per cent between 1970 and 1975. to 5 per centbetween 1975 and 1980, and to 6 5 pet cent be-

Sevcial studies have shown a negative eilect ofthe debt and the adiustment process on educa-tion in Latin America.

In a paper discussing the impact of the ad-justment cf education in the world, I.ourie(1986) pointed out that the impact had been onthe rates of growth of expenditure rathei than ontotal les els of expenditure in most countries. Ilefurther noted that with declining GNPs, even amodest growth of the education share, which did .

not keep up ss ith growth of the school popula-tion resulted in declining net resources per pupil(I ourie, 1986, p. 6).

One study analyst:6 the social effects of thedebt in Mexico and concluded that educationwas one of the hardest-hit areas. In a single year(1982/83), educational expenditure fell from 5 5to 1.9 per cent of GDP and from 9.3 to 7.9 petcent of the total government budget (Dieguez,1986, p. 16). A similar report for Costa Rica con-cluded that 'during the crisis jof 1981/821 drop-out rates increased and enrolment rates de-creased (Vedova, 1986, p. 7).

Psachalopoulos and Steier (1987, p. 3) directlytween 1980 and 1987. examined the hypothesis that high debt-service

l'he likelihood of an impact of the external payments result in reductions of public expendi.debt on educational (mance is due to the ad- nue on long-term social investments such as eduiustment programmes undertaken as a response cation and health. The authors conclude that theto balanceofpayments difficulties. Structural reductions in education as a percentage of gov-adiust mem involves ieductions in government et nment expenditure in I .atin America are relat-

ed to the inc tease in government servicing in thegregate demand. Governments may implement debt. Pt awda (1989, pp. 182 -93) :mat yses how thead nistment (Ilow-amines voluntarily or under ballooning share ef debt-servicing in the Mexican

essuie loon inlet national financial mstitutions ; budget led to a lecline in the share In' education1 in in dei to let eive mote loans. and in expenuiture per pupil. libi (198)) showed

cxpendittn e as a means ot curbing domestic ag

Fernand., kewier,

1 00 1 I Changes in lesels 01 dcbt %co. it mg in I atm Ainci it a as a pelivmace 01 exports

14,, s'

.V4cntina 21 6 22 0 16 6 45 0 1" 15.42 4 4;1(010.i4 11 1 s ; 2 22 1 6 2s 12:7 -1 27 412111a111 12 1 9 14 6 14 09 3 64 4 ;(.11,1e 1', 2 2- 2. 21 21 1 7 21 - 4 24 s; II f9,( ,thonbia i I 6 ill 9 10 7 1 42 80 19 '5 5 89

.01Ia Rita III 12 156 9.44 .4,55 I 11

L,1111111( all

4 1 4 111 I 16 ; 2 16 99 7 9; 9 01I.stLidtlf Y: is 4 4 18 9 211 12 4 SA.X4 I So

1-.1 SA( adm I ii t I 19 4 29 II -18 11i 28 79 In-12(11,1,11c111.1id 4 Ii. 2 4 24 -24 61 5 92 19 68 7 4011.1111 I t, 4 r, 4 ( 22:1 1 2" 0 s7 fiIlondur.r. 2 4 2(1. 10 91 16 SA 12 48 ; 19Mesito 0 2 4 ,1 12 1 to I 1 08 C 21 .0 91 1 44Nut., ragua 2 0 16 IOW 2-1 92 -6 20 0 2>Panama 6 - 19 0 14 1 15 -099

H t 1112 21 1 . 4 6; 1 St, 11 09 I ;42, 6 11 1 12 5 17 1 s ; 47 12 21 0 44

21 41 2 12 4 24 4 It 6$ 21 55 10.15 tiroVelle/Ucla 1 22 4 I 20 20 ' '1 12 "X

is's,14,,

how the pressures that act on gos et nment bud-gets led to :Arts in go% ernment es:pendaure in sev-eral Latin American countries

Vsing data for the countries of 1.ann Arne]tea. I have examined elsewhere the associationbetween levels of external debt and public ex-penditure on education (Retracts, 1988, 1989a,19906). Combining time-senes analysis ss ith

several case-studies, this rcseatch ((includes thatthe impact of debt on education is not automatic.Of particular importance in this nnpact are theadjustment policies adopted b% many govern-.ments in the I 940s. The rainy ipal conclusion ofthese studies is that the influence of debt (viastructural adjustment programmes) o n ectica-

; non i% not linear. It had a negative impact in thel N0s. the decade of the debt Liras. Anodict pa

disc kisses the role ot polio( s and of otga-tuf.ational and but ea( ranc factors in the formula-tion of the government budget in thedispropor tionate t ed t ion s uì educat ion (Re

s, 9904

Reductions in educationalexpenditure

What has been the impact of th n:. adjustment pio-grammes implemented during the 1980s on goy-ei nment financing of education? Table 2 showsthat the annual growth-rate of constant expendi-ture on education was substantially higher before1980 than afterwards. In all the countries exam-ined constant educational expenditure grew, onaverage, b% 6.99 per cent per annum between1970 and 1979 (unweighted average). Aftet 1980,however, that growth became negative. -0 01 pet(XIII on average. The effect of the debt was thus to%los% down the rate of growth of educational expenditute. hsen thnugh there are no net !Milttions in many countries, in most of them the ex-pansion of educational expenditure flattens outdot mg the period of highest debt levels.

feductions m the rate of gtossth of ex-

BEST COPY AVAILABLE

I oi Ow tutu isis tin ed,alitm in I aim .\for educational prautlino

penditure (with rIsmg student popular tons) has eled to net reductions in expenditure on educa-tion pet capita as can be seen in Fable 3. lie-tss een 1970 and 1980 pet capita expenditure oneducation decreased in real terms only in Para-guas. By contrast, between 1980 and 1988 percapita expenditure decteased in real terms in fif-teen of the nineteen countries examined. On av-erage (unweighted) pei capita expenditure oneducation by central government increased by3 38 per cent in the 1970s but deci eased by 2 39per cent in the 1980s.

Changes in the structure ofeducational budgets by type and

level of expenditure

thei %Indy analysing the changes that occurin the distribution of expendo are showed thatdii ing the adiustment phase of the 1980s therewere incteases in the propm lion of current edu-cational expenditure. The numbei of countriesin uluch the percentage of current expenditure

teased in the period was seven in 197(1-75,urd 197s-80 but fourteen in 1980 86. lire un-o eighted average yearls grossthaate increasedhorn negative growth between 1970 75 and

57

countries spent less than I per cent of then current bud:, -t on teaching materials. Ihe rate ot'

decline this indicator as erages about 10 percent per annum. There are agam varianons ittthe pottion 01 the current budget foi scholatships. Half of the eight countries for which wehave data show reductions, ibile the othei half '

show increases in this item. 'the .eve.l 1 s iii vailability are restricted, since by 1980 scholarshipsalready represented a very small portion of thecurrent budget (Reimers. I 989a).

The distribution of expendnute by les el ofeducation shows no uniform pattern for all thecountries of the region. There are morF c01111.tries in (Om h the ielative Inds of expenditureon primary education have declined sin«- 1970than countries where those levels have in-

creased. There are more counines ssheie theproportion of expendtture on pi imarv educattonhas declined in reient years. There are also morecountries where the pioportion ot expenditureon higher education has Increased since 1970

than countries in which it ha% decreased Be-

tween 1970 and 1986 elesen countt les incieasedthe percentage of expenditure on higher educa-tion, whereas this figure decreased in only five ofthem Comparing the annual gross tha ate of pi

that of higher edtk anon berss yet,1980 and 1986 fin each countrs, we see ihai inten countries primary education sollered moie

1975 80 (meaning a highet percentage in cap- than highet education, whereas there wet e onls

mil expenditure) to a positive of almost 1 per .fis-e countries in sshich highei edit( anon suf.

cent of the base, %%Inch is a significant amount fered more Man primary education (Rennets,

, onsideting the high levels of these figures ; 1989a)

(1:ermers, 1989a, p 24) This suggests that the The disproportionate Impact of the adiust

Moi e te t en! years of the achustment phase have me»t on the lower le-els of the system can he it

seen a Iesset perCentage of des elopment expels- lustrated ssith data It Otil COMA R I( a ( I Ale 41

dilute on education. Expenditure on basic education declined in real

1 he next question is. ptopornonately more tetnss at an aserage of 4.78 per cent per .111111M1

t. iitii Ill expendinne on what Ihere is no tint- between 1980 mid 1987, whereas in highe: edit

h1111 panein in the change% in the percentage oh -at:on the decline ss-as only 0.25 pei ent pet ail.

MIL iii expendnure Itti tea( hers' salarres be- num on aveiage over the sante period .1s a pet

iss« n 1980 and 1986 In some «ninnies there is coinage of the total education budget,

gloss th, oi otners there is del line. lite print] e is cxpendome on basic education (let lined horn

mot( comment in regard to the petcentage of 63 per cent In 1980 to 54 per ettI in I 9S

spusdnate for teachtng matenals In .111 01111- oheie,ts expenditure on lughei educatton tat

II I( 's but hi uador :md VeliellIt la there are Slizntl- t leased trims ;4 to 40 per cent

,nit i 'thu !Ions, to the norm that by l986 most .1 able s shims that although t cal expendillur

58 Fernando Mum r,

.1-A1111- 2 . Changes in central gmiernment educational e penditute (in constant 1980 national cuilenc pints)before and aftel 1980

I ate. at,eal ewendauer

(AlAn0, l't6,1 BOA, 1.'9 I 9-9 \ ncr 1050___ ..._ . . ..-.. .. .. _Argentina 1976-86

_

;30 00 415 66 576 49ia 1972-84 2 Is c 30 c 51

3.0,011 gen.eln

Rel.., I ,e'y

8 0012 32

51151 18$0

-0 010 01

Braid 1970-86 46 00 107 86 14c 34 V 91 0 04Chile 197246 10 00 41 08 18 75 21 no - 0 02costa Rica 1972-86 1 103 6; 216 00 2122 24 12 49 -0 02Dominican Republic 1973-86 122 25 1,4 49 123.01 ; 98 -0 (13hcoador 1973-85 c 119 10 911 00 12142 60 6 "8 0 07H Sakador 1970-87 183 4- 792 60 149 77 A c,2 r.) 18Guaicmala 1972-79 99 00 109 11 109 14 I 4;Ilonduras 1972 .79 114 35 182 c2 182.53 6 88Mcmco 1972-87 46 6C 119 21 SI 94 14 14 110iNicaragua 1972-80 36 c 116 498 6C 714 00 1

Panama 1973-86 I (7 IQl'atagua,. 1972 86 4 486 "-

( IS) 60 225 8,001 67 6 544 72

2 96 4-

0 0S0 01

l'cru 19-2-82 1 c2 91 10- I" Iri9 90 -4 93Crugual. 1972-86 -1 -113 sh 1 -S4 11 1412 04 1164 -0 (11Vene/uela 1970-86 4 (182 )1, 9 }e(S) 90 10908 10 10 ill 0 01

I I he.- thad tA1.00:1 .1 dote 19 791 1hr expendettete A0t thr heone000t toe st,e, nide, a:ed .0 the te,e 10 pr. .0e .00lueltel N.H..00,1110 the eistnitturc Ict 19-0 I he 1,1 , ! . tolun.tt A:trl 91. tl. 'Is ette , tete 0,1 A. !... W..01:114- M1.1 01 the

setInd erluntel he teth re.qunnt ;annual gremth bele, 1'40' it +he at rea.te an 1.1.11 vete eniage 41000t 10 epend.eleAr tr10eeel 111e tegineteng eeIthe %el" and 19-9 Ihelast,o11111111 'annuai 10.041h Mete 1910 A Ole 41, I.:E. 61.`",1: pe:lciluge eweetin Aer arc, 10,4 and 1 he endeel the seceel

he t:gure, are getcn let the 101:00 Ing Unhis Argeni.0a 4.110 ales 1,1,1a, holes lame, 111.01,..10,1, (trait'. 0 -rad-, .1101e. en,. Chile.rents Ahdheens', COM, 1<114 Solon!, 1001100W. I 401000 an Iterateie,.. rt.., .11 I 1. UadO 10.11000,. I ..t I.Ar e 01..net nteIhon,lOalenlaja 94,1,1,` ,1101.1111 1'. 31,1, .... 6'. theooa0.It l'aetalta0,11401, Para( ha,, guarantet Peru. Inlis 01341,4-16 (1,s4..34. vcv, VNIrturla he... Iles .1

5...I, hot.: .. Sillne,11 I und, rem 1,11/rieni 51.111.11. Asur,- - - - - - -

per student decreased at all levels of education,this decline was sharper in primary education(averaging 7 per cent per annum) and smaller inhigher education (averaging 2 per cent per an-num) In 1986 expenditure per pupil on primaryeducation was 65 per cent of the 1980 figure Atthe secondary level expenditure per student was74 per cent in secondary-general, and 77 percent in secondary-technical, education of the1980 hguies. In higher education it was 90 percent

Conckisions and implications

This article supports the hypothesis that the pitisms' given to education by Latin American go%einments has diminished riming the c utient cc

()mimic crisis, which we hace discussed as the'debt crisis', and the achustment programmesthat followed.

I'he immediate implications of this rising ofthe debt for education is a slowing down of de-velopment of education in eat. h country. Giventhe continued population grim th in 1.atin Amer-ica, and the fact that the expansion ol the lasttscenty years had a qnahtative trade-oft, the im-plications are the same: othei things beingequal, the external debt has checked the abilityof the education system to continue expandingthe supply of education or impros ing its quality.

It is also important to lecogni/e that the im-t of the adjustment goes besond effects on

goccinment financing, that it also affects house-holds l'he crisis ma inc tease the opportunitsost ot sending a child to sl110411 and thus aflect

tlw demand for ethic anon I hese clic-els can I'

l'he impaLt or the debt crisis on education in Latin Amer Ica 59

unpli,anotis for educational planning

I Alt1 I ; 1 lennai goselninent expenditure on edu,ration pet ,apna bs counus,1970-h8 0988 t

Aitzeni 01,

Pr: . 4V4,11,re:ri 1.pc

ill 61 62

25 3, 37 1,

Itrahl 16 46 17 36

(:110c 87 20 100 in20 29. 16 AS

.1145 40

I 411111111..1n 26 727 1 11 41

10011. 11.1 2, Al to '911 '1.11,.1.3.,1 29 92 15 2'

l1:11(1,.11.1 25 44 11 1.11

11401 2 v2 I 5625 So 25 1.2

1,%,, 15 56' 69 01ls 40 14

1'.0t.90.1 84 71 1 l l 70

1%11.60.4, 14 89 6 44

Pew 49 -2 '1 4s64 42

1 11,11,5110,1

I()

.tee jliii1l.11 girtstli

trot Ir,

has e pattic uI.0 social bias to Ore extent that thepool sutler mote horn the admstment

I'm example, in Costa Rica hem ccii 1980.md 0S51 the number of students in sei. ondar veducation deiteased by 2.79 per cent per annumon asetage (Reimers, 1990c). Although this

Irby( t actual decreases in the numbei ofhildren in this age cohott (hating those %ears, n

mac also be due to more youngsters emet mg tin:labout !once to contribute to household income.Flom 1979 to 1982, 'non-heads of household in-t. teased then labour-force participation from

s7 1 to 6 : per cent for men and from 21 ln to21, 2 pei Lent fill v.onwn. As a result, in 1981 and102.(2, r110 e as 111,00 pet sons m the laltout%Sere seeking %cork t.o: the hist time as was the

case in 1070 and 980' (Fields, 1985, quoted m'Vedtts a, 1086, p 7).

III .11101011 to team nom m omput, whir, h

BEST 00! WAILABLE

Jqsli 1.4-11 si. ..17 20 58 -I. ',2 I 116

1 5 11' 1.9'. 161111 4 t14

17,97' li 54 1 1 4' ' 20rrl 95 1 42 6(.. I 79

19 99 6.50 / 99 41)-

117.16 9 11 6 44 1 VI

15,19 1 82 1 li

42 SI 12 72 5 lic 2 9-

26 81' 2 48 A SA .11 -:

32 85 2 In I, 11 119

I 3,,,, _'81 2 -5 0 91

15 29 1 04 1 -1 2 22

71 11. In 71 I 56 ' 2510 10 1 ,6 .145 0 70

I 4' Air 4 67 1 22 1 24

I '., 10 -S 01 12 .1 11 05

IS 60' I/ 3C .; , I 1,-

c 9 78 n 1- rr 91 II us

16C /o 2 In 114S

1 Is 2 19 110

could be expected from reductions in fiscal lc-sources in the education sectot , there mas be anadditional decline stemming from changes inthe nux of inputs, which can lead to reducedtechnical efficiency. Cuts implemented 0 lthshort-term focus on political expedieno (cutwhat is easiest to cut) lead to deterimation 01school buildings, lack of teaching matrrrals andsupport for students and to dispcopornonate «Itkin those types of education with less ability to op-pose them (for example, primarc edui anon,qualitc ot education in rural areas).

We haye discussed m this atticle the t educturns in capital investments m education and m

the pot tions of the edUlatInn budgets. II1.11

IS, 1110se not pu otected by comractual agt cements

with teachers' unions. The analysis of theI. hange in the structure of edit( abonal expendt

tore Suggests that lughet peit entages of the bud.

60 Fernando Reimer,

1..1811 4 Educational expendinitc hi ci cl oi edusanon iii Costa Rn a (in constant 1978 colones)

1 159 62 65 511 sh 1669 1 64 5X

619 11 iot 152 40 2:3-

1 597 949 1192 1 COO

\ Anif, J, plNi... .:d

. . .

hit 51 to79 665

180 30 2

I s.-8

get are going to recurrent expenditure. Amongthe countries examined there is no uniform pat-tern in the changes in the percentage going toteachers' salaries and scholat ships. But there aresignificant reductions in the pet( entage of or-ient expenditure on teaching materials.

Basic education may be less protected fromthe adiustment process than higher educationl'his is not surprising given The trends of educa-tional Oevelopment in Latin Amenca over thelast twenty years, but it is worrying given the un-es en income distribution structure of those so-cieties.

The impact of the debt crisis on governmenteducational expenditure operates in two Aays:dii ectly by reducing availability of foreign cur-encs for the education system; indirectly

through the adjustment process, which results inreduced real educational budgets.

The direct impact of the adiustment on theeducational inputs which aie put chased ss it h

Ain i s Real espendnute pci student hi Icieliii ( nista Rica (in 1978 ioloncs'

ii', S --.11tno

I

I I,'

It

Ii On

(

s2S c2 itS107 6 86628 40 26

- --847 53 68 -4 78103 f,A5628 19 80 0

foreign CHI rency should not be underestimated.Foreign curiency is used to purchase very spe-cialized inputs for educational provision. Theycan tange from advice international consult-ants to srcialized equipment, naming and lour-nals, of they can provide the resources for keyineinbers of the educational bureaucracy tomaintain contact with international networks.SInce these inputs are often the least visible partot an education system, it mas seem that theirabsence will not have significant effects. Yettheir effects can be just as 1111p01 tant as those re-sulting from restrictions on other more visibleinputs. An example is science labouratories Yu--walls paralysed owing to lack of material oiequipment. Libraries may ako have to canceltheir subscriptions to international iournals be-cause the cost in foreign curiency is beyond theirbudget. Educational researchers or policy-mak-eis mas have, by necessity, to cut their profes-sional contacts with colleagues in other parts ofthe win Id because they can no longet participateitt institutional exchanges, at 1tem. con.ferences or(nen read what is published elsewhere.

l'he effects of the adjustment, however, aretelt mostly through educational budgets failingto keep up with inflation. Several studies haveshins n that one of the destabilizing correlate% ofdebt in I .attn America is 11)perintlanon (Mallon,1988, Sachs, 1986) As a result of inflation tealedui expenditui e dei teases, ss htle nominal edui ational expenditure incteases In the%holt feint, c urrent levels of education supplsneed not 1. ;fflected to the extent that %tall areHot 1.11d OH; NH the impact mas soon be felt HI

he Impact ot :lie debt crisis on education in I aim Ant('tna 61

Imp): More. tot (*dui-11101141 plannIng

RR, iii 11475 C0i011eS;

19,4

1981.

R.116. 19%6 I. I 040

\r,o1..181. hi,

I 930 2 198 2 161

low 10 17 104 2 4 F.7 2945

I 4-X .6 71 I 104 8 14 I 'SI0 96 0 :+9 0 60

-X 21

the mini of linuts on lee ruunient and in the uonal Achievement (11;A). I lusen (1987, p. 40)

quality ot education provided by iow-paid teach- concludes that time is crucial to promote learn-

er s mg, including teachers' preparation ot lessons.

II example, data nom Costa Rica show thatas erage teak her s' salaries undement a net [ethic-non between 1980 and 1986 in primary and sec I he need for management reformsondai y education-. Whereas salaries of primary-school teachers ink:leased on avelage by 10.27 in response to the new financialpei cent per annum between 197s and 1980, scenarioihes dee fined 6.71 per cent per annum betweenI 980 and 1986 In 1986 salaries of primary-

hool teacheis were 66 pet cent of the 1980 Management reforms are called for in this new

In es 'Bs kompalison, in the I est of the economy, financial situation. The education ss stem needs

cal %sages, anei .1 10 pei cent decline in 1981/ to adapt to these reductions in the levels of pub-

82, hat e recoseted bs the end ot 1 987 then prc- hc finance (lith a long-term focus on ellicienc)(-cession les els' (World Rank, 1989b, p. 7) .l'he and equity rather than with the quick-fix, short-minimum legal ss age ss as I 5 per cent higher in term perspective examined here. Other %%Ise, [T-

ied! !elms in 1985 than in 198(1 and 55 pet cent ductions in financial inputs will inevitably meanlughei than in 1976 Vedos a, 1986, Table 16). reductions in the efficiency and/or equits of edo-

In \lesii.o salanes lot prima, v-sc hool teach- canon provision. The fact that the education en

ti s dek leased in teal teims by 14 pet cent be- sis desciihed here has .1 fiscal origin does notk% cell t U8 And I 488, and salaries lot primars necessarily mean that the solutions have to be

sc Iwo! teachets dek leased bs 40 per cent confined to financial reforms. Altliough muchitit Me same period 'I.he [eduction% in salary .

can be done in this field to tap new soul ces of fi-

nk 1 foi teak hets with higher les els of edit- nance (Schiefelbein, 1986) a systemic response

k anon I l'iaccda, I 98Q, p 197). to the fiscal constraints would require looking1 ten it teak het s of the same qualm continue lot policy options in the field of management as

i. be on ik led bs the !educed %alai ies (who h well. Hie rationale for management reforms is

mas not be the case if the impact of the ad that bettei utili/ation of scarcer iesources may

ni in tem mg salar ies is gicatet than it is pest:Re the efficiency and equity of education.

m allot n oti upanons 551111 Compai able edit- Benet management may pros ide the envn on-

, anon tcquii ilieu need to Supple wilt to implove the technical efficiency of the

tilt III I .11 OWL'S 11 101 additional lobs May ,ithect nu\ ill inputs. Management reforms tan ASO ID

thr qualits or their leaching In a ieview ot the ocase the ability of ministries of education to

s unpile a the studies of the Inter na implement these financial iefor ins and to devel-

him d the Et ahLotith ot hdot a 01, polo v olittoos to tespood Ole( hel) to the

BEST COPY AVAILABLE

62 Fernando Reimeri

For example, one of the problem% discussedin this article is the fact that the crisis mas affectthe poor disproportionately. For some this couldreduce their opportunity to send then childrento school, because of the need for all familymembers to contribute to household income. Aneffective government response to preserve equitywould he programmes for the disadvantaged.such as the school-lunch programme imple-mented in Brazil and recently adopted in Vene-zuela. But the success of these programmes de-pends on effecuve implementation, whichrequires highly competent organiz.anons. Man-agement reforms should try to build up thosecompetences.

One of the critical issues to implement policschanges that 1113 improve educational manaee-ment seems to he how to create the condition%under %%Inch the existing information, data andresearch become relevant in the decision-mak-ing process and hoss to create the conditions thatw:11 allow the education nuntstries to learn (tomtheir ossn experience. A study of the MexicanMinistry of Education gives a good descriptionof a common problem in Latin America(McGinn et al., 1983, p. 266).

The Amin% of the Secreiaria de Educamon to learnfiom sear to seat is limited by ceitain stilltAL11.11features A serious problem is the lack of ot ga-nizattonal memmv. The Mexican political ss stemis charactetued bs constant turnover, between andwithin ct semos Isix-ear terms of officef of high-tanking officials. A good proportion of high offi-cials in the Secretaria %sere appointed in the mid-dle of the .e.xenlo and did not has e pre% ious expel i-ence in educational planning or management. l'hedemi(' of each new government to leave theli ossnmat k, leads to structural reforms that make pollscommuits difficult. Lack of evaluatise informationabout the education system makes accurate (flag-

, nosis impossible, with the consequent risk ot duphcation of past mistakes.

A similar cony lusion is offered in a studs ot theelm m ellotts in Colombia and Venezuela in the1960s and 1970s (I lanson, 1986). In 'Nu

cii has slims n how a ministei of education a seatOn asei age (lilts-lout ministers since 1931) leads

tu discontinuities in policies and plans (Garcia,1987, p 10).

.ack cif continuits in education policy is anexpensise proposition for ministrtes wtth declin-ing budgets and rnay discourage the explorationand adoption of creative reforms to cope with theeffects of the achustment. .rhe crea.ion of theconditions that would alloss administrative con-unuits seems to depend on a political commit-ment from the state, as illustrated hy the Col-ombian experience with financial decen-tralization in the 1970s (Hanson, 1986). Thedesire of an incumbent president or party maypros ide the Impetus to start a reform effort, butmore important is the commitment of the politi-cal establishment to allow administrative conti-nuity once that president or party leaves office.

Within the ministry of education an emphasison plop amine and project allocation ss9uld bedesirable to facilitate plantung and evaluation.l'he scarce literature investigating the educationbudget process tn Latin America confirms that[-stout amme allocations are not used nen whenformally tequited (Mc(itnn et al., 1983, p. 263).

,

Educational management bymaximizing the use of information

Organizational change should be induced inmintstties ot education to des clop managerialexcellence. Me perennial problems of patron-age and corruption need utgent cot rective actionsince their cost to society will surely be larger inlimes of si_arcits. Fins type of inlet senuon will

obabls lace resistance given the size and com-plexus of the ministries and the weight of bu-teaucrato ti ad mons.

An option in developing a professional bu-t eaucrac s is to provide job security and adminis-tt3Ilve continuits that will allow the develop-ment ot 'ot gatuzational memots' Personnel

should of Louise depend on lel hnicalompetence and on having the skills to perfortn

ellectis els l'he climate cleated by the cuts cre-ates the need for skills to make pet suasis e claims

The impact of the debt crisis on education in Latin Aniet Ka. 63

iinplu ;limns for educational planning

for resources in an environment of increasedcompetition with other sectors (industry, agri-cultui c) within the cabinet. Garcia's (1986, p.16) depiction of the et:ucation ministry as a weakorganization with little ability to negotiate suc-cesfulls with other government institutions iscertainly applicable to other countries else-where. One of the calls of Lourie (1986, p. 13) tothe international community as a response to thefinancial crisis was to develop highly skilled per-sonnel in the ministries of education:

Lducational planners must learn to produce anddispose of the financial and economic tools neces-sat lot negotiations with overall planning, financ-

: ing and monetary decision-makers in order toprose - and not simply state - (1) that cuts in edu-cational outlay arc harmful 'tir the nation in thelong ierm; (2) that better management of availableresources (school locations, stalling recruitmentand in-service training) are conducive to savings.

A complementary option is to increase the ad-ministrative skills of educational administrators,so that they can do their job bettet . Alternatively,the paincipation of technically competent peo-ple in the system could be promoted. The type oftechnical skills that are called for to resist a 'cul-tore of cuts' may go beyond the traditional pro-tile of the educational planner or manager (I lal-lak, 1989). Skills in the traditional areas ofplanning need to be supplemented with skills innegotiation, communication and evaluation.The focus of:skill development should be to pro-duce planners and administrators who will beconcerned with implementation rather thanwith plans or theoretical exercises. I mplementa-non of educational change requires good plan-ning but it also demands attention to clients, im-plementors, tasks, politics and the process

through which decisions are made. Further-more, effective implementation requires contin-

. ued organizational intelligence in respect ofhanges under way as well as the institutional-

izanon of those changes (Warwick et al , 1989)I he othei options for reforin discussed in thispaper are geared to develop that kind of orga-

: nizational intelligence.A third option is to modernize information

systems. Timely and accurate information Bowsare necessary for policy analysis that reflects theeducation system's range of options and tracksimplementation of policy choices. Such systemscan benefit from computer hardware and soft-ware that enhance the capability of data-proc-essing and communications. But it is importantto recognize that the technology is onls part of asystem of which the human element is the prin-cipal component. Modern computer technologywill result in modern information systems only if .

the information so processed becomes reles antto the decision-making and implementationprocesses. This requires that the people at vari-ous levels in the system are both able and willingto interact with modern systems of informationprocessing and transmission. These systems canhelp process educational data into informationuseful for policy analysis and planning.' Sometypes of information that could be computerizedare: (a) educational costs and finances; (b) effi- :

ciency ratios (promotion, repetition, droppingout); and (c) studont-achievement data.

The importance of an up-to-date efficient sys-tem of educational statistics is evident. Such sta-tistics provide tilt indicators to monitor theworking of the education system and to assessthe impact of policy changes. Nowadays theavailability of low-cost computer equipmentmakes it easier to establish management infor-mation systems that close the gap between deci-sion-makers and automated data bases. Ibis, to-gether with the increase in the speed of

computer processing and the development of us-er-friendly educational-planning software,makes It easier to incorporate an accurate knowl-edge base in policy dialogue exploring educational scenarios.

Many statistical offices in education minis-tries are not familiar with technological devel-opments in this field. As a result, educationalmanagers and top decision-makers are hand-icapped bs having to tely on out-dated statistic sInforistaIlon on the output of the education sr.tem (levels of edits :glottal attainment of the population. litetan y) is frequently a decade old. l'hemost basic data on strident achievement, whir hwould allow monnoting the impact of the ad-

64 hernando

iustment or to assess the cost-ellet useness of dif-ferent policy options, are a rare commodity inmost ministries. A positive exception is the eflortundertaken in 1986 in Costa Rica to collect stu-dent-achievement data systematically.

The development of information systems isan area which could benefit from internationalassistance. I have proposed elsewhere that mon-

. itoring the impact of the adiustrnent is an area inwhich agencies such as UNESCO could contrib-ute by providing the kind of information thatwould help national policy-makers gain a betterunderstanding of this impact and use this in-formation to negotiate with their governments toresist this impact (Reimers, 19906, 1990d). Lott-ne and Reiff (1988, p. 34) have proposed the de-selopment of national data bases on basic educa-tion as part of an international strategs topromote education for all. An agencs such asUNESCO could develop an expel t ssstem thatwould have at least two components

First, a knowledge base referencing existingresearch on the impact of adjustment on educa-tion. At the recent congress organized by

:NESCO in Mexico City on the planning andmanagement of educational development, I dis-covered how much information escapes the con-sentional educational international or regionaldata bases. Given available technology in rela-tional data bases des eloping a topical knowledgebase is a low-cost propositton ssah great poten-tial to support an international network of re-searchers and reseal ch-users in this field

Second, a publication with selected indica-tors documenting the human costs of adjust-ment, along the lines of the World DevelopmcntReport or the State al the ttrlJ c Cluldren, withspecific indicators for all countries. A critical ap-proach would be to report these figures at a levelof disaggregation sensitive to the dispt oportate impact of the adjustment on certain social

. groups (rural-dwellers, the poor)An expert system of this kind to monitor the

inlpii t of adiustriwnt ssould sei ye not only thosein the international communits nue! ested in thesubject, but also national decision-makers inter-ested itt IClOStling a long-term fo( us in the implementation ol adiust mein programmes

Another Is pe of information use! ul tor deci-sion-making is the assessment of the implemen-tation of educational innovations in the past oistudies examining the effect of policy-relatedvariables on educational output such as learningor elliciencs Tates. Ibis type of informationbroadens the scope of policy options to be con-sidered and allows the system to [eat n from theexperience gained in the implementation ofthose innovations or reforms. in Latin Amei Icathen( is an excellent network for information anddocumentation on educational research (RE

j I )l..'C). This network, co-ordinated by the Cen-j tre for Research and Development of Education; (CIDE) in Santiago, includes twenty research

centres in Latin American countries and pub-lishes the Res limcnes anallticos en edueachin (Ab-stt acts of Educational Research). Ihis is a usefultool tor facilitating access to research and docu-mentation concerning educational innovationscarried iint in Latin America. Evaluations com-paring REM with international data bases(ERIC) conclude that REDUC is superior inseveral respects and more relevant for decision-making on educational policies in LatinAmerica (Reimers and Villegas, 1984). ftc tactthat national centres associated ssith thisregionai netssork already exist makes it ielativelyeasy to develop and strengthen the links betweenthe ministries of education and this live memorsof the educational experience of Latin Amei tea.

State-of-the-al t reviews of lesealch oneducatum in the region, such as the solume onprimars education prepared by Maio/ andcolleagues u no z, 1988), should becomeessential d iss ussion material in the des elopmentof poll( s ophow

Systematic use of innovationresearch, evaluation and planning

Anothei option foi adminisnanse des el,pmeni5smild be to incorporate innovation i('seal iii tit)Melnik cost ellecnve systems), evaluation and N.nonal planinng is rucial ingtedients of the de(

tinp.h.t tit the debt crisis ciii education in lawn Arnett( a 65

[mph-mons tot educ.1110nal planning

slicti fltakIng plOceSs 1 itfccttiiiiuteli support tt What tHtes of educational technologies oldeducation:I; teseatch activIties may have dimin- increase output with the same or a loss ei in

ished as a tesult of the adilistment discussed here. put?

A similar pattern is to be obseived in the growth Increasing ptivate contributions is an at ea ss here

of research publications in 1.atm America as in mans innovative options could be explored.the growth of education expenditure. The aver- Their impact should be assessed not onh inage number of articles summarized in the Ron- terms of the additional resources they bring in,MilleC Una/inc.°, en educaewn for each of the l.atin but also of their impact on external and Intel nal

American countries increased by 83 per cent be- lliciencs,. Some of the options that co 1 1 be ex.

tsseen 1976 and 1979, increased by 9 per cent be- plored are: student participation in school main-

tween 1979 and 1981 and decreased by 5 per cent tenance and cleaning, already common in Japan .

betsseen 1981 and 1984 (Visalberght, 1986, p. 248); community pauwi-

A recent studs on the use of research-based : pation in school building and improvement; pat -

limitation bs edu.ational decision-makers con- ticipation ot the school in the production Ofeludes that thew is a loose link between the two goods and services; direct and specific taxation of

(Cots alan, 19881 Ilie new scenario of reduced tis- industries which benefit from the naming re-. al tesout ces calls tot a radical change in the tradi- cehed by those they employ 6

nonal linkage (of L k theteof) between education- Another area it) great need of innovation is

al resew h and polics in 1 .atin America. that of organizational arrangements that willEducational decision-makers need information help establish the 'professional bureauctac).- and

from tellable and alid studies on the cost-etlec- decision-making system of edliCationists de-

nveness ot chtteient potential interventions to de- sci ibed above. Among the approaches to be

selop polil scenanos. Reseatch and policy analy- examined could be the role of participator),sis units should be set up as advisors bodies at the decision-making, or greatest is% o-way

highest les els til decision-making in the education commum cat ion between teachers and planners

ministries. fhis new ielationship also tequires a at the central level I argued above that the

shifi m ieseatt h tiadition and focus from topics of reform efforts to meet the crisis must be ss stenue

ol iplinals inteiest into ateas of di- not umdimensional. More efht tent

leo reles ant e polies l'he study of variables communication will help to preserve the quality

Mut h tan be influent ed Is policy should be the of education, particularly if innovative policies

primary focus ot thew tesearch units. Given that in the provision of education are to be

studies f ill sot 1.11 .eience lesearch utilization b. Implemented. The climate of budget constraint!.

tItat the quality ot the resealc h (the 'culture of cuts' described above) may be too

is an unponant dci emit) man! of its use (Weiss and receptive to innovations that will reduce unit198(it the tewatch produced ht those costs to the dettiment of the quality of the

units should be ot the hilthest guiltily education plovided. Adequate feedback

lucre ate mans policy questions and issues t hannels (hon) teachers to evaluators and

lot :Om Ii solutions have to be msented Among planners, for instance) may facilitate col rection

them are cif nmovations with significant detrimental

N.\ hal fot ncs cci ominiouts mobiluation are fea- effects on quality. An example ot this tsp.- of

-Able alld loin ii cncl III ot dei to im tease pi 1- participatory approach to educational planning

sate ii kon 11,1111111% IC/ ethic atton, Is the Los Santos experiment in Costa Rica the

Who (an t onit chute what and hos, ciii those planners go to the communtnes and listen toIi chi iled then need_ insolvinv them In the destnn 01 the

\\ ham fot ins of educational adminisn anon III- I. wit( ulum Preliminary tenons ol this

t lease m'thi ticS ' expertment suggest that it has reduced di op-mit

ccii tIn c osi tis (mess of education pc and tepetition rates (Pinto, 1989).

sision us ,,teni lie int leased, Although the constraints esulting hum the

66 I ernamlo Reim< ri

adjustment are essentially financial, this does not I many repeaters and drop-outs, and even formean that their solution is solely of a question of many who graduate less than well equipped forfiscal reform. Coombs and I lallak (1987, p. 6) productive jobs and fulfilling lives, should be anhave emphasized the importance of maintaining incentive to explore alternatives to traditional3 systemic approach in designing changes to ways of teaching and organizing the schoolingcope with reduced government finance for experience. Different curricula and approacheseducation, to teaching, different schedules, part-ume

education and work-study combinations areinnovations that should he explored, particularlyto reach those who have been least served bytraditional education.

Fo obtain a full and accurate picture of the realitythey ate concerned with, educational cost analystsmust view ari education system as a system, that is,as a dynamic, organic whole composed of manyinterdependent parts (subsystems). They must alsobe constantly awate that any significant change inone part of the system, for example, a change in an impact in the economic, political and socialthe proportions of its inputs or the intensity of their spheres The impact on each one will in turnuse, or a change in its technology, organization, or feed back into the others. In this sense, themanagement, is likely to have substantial negative effect on education discussed in thisiepercussions on other parts of the system, and article is likely to have a consequent negativealmost certainly on its future costs and efficiency.

effect on medium- and long-term economic,Ifs the same token, if any important component ofthe system is miss

a

ing, the performance of the polnical and social. development.1 he challenge for those concerned with%%stem s a whole is bound to suffer.

achieving a better future for the people of LatinDie option of reducing unit costs by increasing America is how to mitigate the negative short-the intensity of use of facilities or teachers (larger term effects of the debt crisis. A major area ofschools, increased pupil/teacher ratios) or using action is certainly the solution of the debtteaching technologies to minimize labour costs problem itself, but it may be a long time beforeshould be evaluated in terms not only of their significant improvements are apparent in thiscost-reducing potential but also of the function area. Direct action is also needed to prcriectof schooling. If such a function is something sectors such as education horn the adjustmentdiflet ent than providing a space for children for a process.certain number of years it may be important to Quick-tix solutions of making budget cutsevaluate the impact of the proposed changes on where it is easiest, as has been done in mostthe performance of the school in regard to that coEntries examined here, will result in reducedfunction. I iusen (1982, p. 51), for instance, has efliciencs and increased inequities in educationbeen very critical of the use of teaching provision. The debt crisis calls urgently formachines or increases in school size to reduce major policy ininaus es to pi eserve thecosts, on the grounds that those innovations contributions to economic, political and socialreduce the inter-person: I contacts essential to development of education. Managementthe process of social education. reforms ale among the options offering a long-

Of course, the conservative alternative is term solution to the problem of hoix to use theequalls harmful given the new economic diminished resources more efficiently.realities. Assuming that 'the old tones were thy 1"he major challenge for the I .atin Americanbest times in terms of educational quality would governments is to promote partnership andbe %slung. The MaIlls quo in ethic animal iesponsibilns bens een dilfetent social groups toter hnologies has no special virtue apait hom the make the necessais pohcs changes politicallstar t that its limitations are knossn. Rut the fact feasiblethat the apparent success in high gross '

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Education, workand employment

in developed countries:situation

and future challengesHenry M. Levin and Russell W. Rumberger

Virtually all the advanced industrializedcountries are in the process of examining theireducation systems to see if they will meet thechallenges of the coming decades. In manycases there is at least a hint of alarm because offuture economic unccrtaintics caused by suchchanges as a fully integrated European Com-munity and the rapid rise in economic powerof such newly industrialized entities as Brazil,the Republic of Korea, Taiwan, Singapore andHong Kong. In many markets for sophisticatedtechnological products, japan has replaced theUnited States and Western Europe as a leadingproducer, and emerging economic powers likethe Republic of Korea and Brazil show everyindication of undermining even Japan. At thcsame time, North American and WesternEuropean nations have every intention ofwinning back markets to maintain traditionallyhigh standards of employment and income.

Fleury M. Les in United States). Professor of Edu-cation and Economics, Stanford University.

Russcll W. Rumhcrgcr (United Stares). AssociateProfecsor of Education, University of California,Santa Barbara.

In almost every case, education is consideredto bc a key to maintaining or regaining econ-omic progress and competitiveness. The devel-oped countries cannot compete with the devel-oping ones on the basis of wages withoutcreating drastic reductions in income andworking conditions. Therefore, it is argued thatthey must aim for much higher worker pro-ductivity that will mcrit higher wages whileensuring competitive prices and products. Sucha strategy assumes a need for greater techno-logical investment, streamlined organizationalstructures, and a focus on products whichrequire a flexible and highly trained workforce.A crucial part of this strategy is the formationof a supportive educational strategy both in theformal education system and in job training byenterprises.

Of particular concern is the view that edu-cation must adapt to the use of ncw technologies.With the advent of technologies based uponmicroprocessors, ncw communications tech-nologies, robotics, and biotechnology, it isargued that the labour force must adapt to newworkplace demands. All these technologiesmake possible thc emergence of new productsand expansion of new occupations, while ere-

Pr.pn, Vol. XIX, No a, los

70 Henry M. Levin and Russell W. Rurnberger

ating changes in working methods in many of themore traditional occupations. Some features ofthe ncw technologies arc so automatcd that itis possible to shift such production techniqueseasily to less-educated work-forces in indus-trializing countries where lower wages and lessdemanding working conditions prevail. Indeed,the multinational enterprises of thc industri-alized societies arc constantly choosing betweenindustrialized and industrializing nations interms of where to make productive invest-ments. And such enterprises continually weighwhether the education of their labour forces inthe industrialized nations justifies thc higherwages received by their workers.

This article considers some major issues thatthe industrialized countries face in terms ofeducational planning and decision-making in aworld of economic uncertainty and technicalchange. Most of thc specific analysis will referto the situation of the United States, but manyof thc concerns apply more generally to all ofthe developed countries. In order to place ouranalysis in context, we present some basic dataon educational and occupational distributions ofthe rnajor industrialized countries with attentionto cmnloyment and wage issues. This infor-mation provides a foundation for thc ensuingdiscussion and analysis. The sccond part of thearticle addresses issucs that arisc on the demand-side of labour markets that must be consideredin educationzl planning. The third sectiondiscusses the determinants of the supply ofeducated labour, and thc fourth scction dealswith some educational consequences of thcprevious analysis. The final section suggestssome potential directions for educationalplanning and policy among thc developedcountries.

International comparisons^

Although we speak of the industrializedcountries as if they were homogeneous, theyare anything but monolithic. Since we providesomc detail on the situation of the UnitedStates, it is important to place the American

experience in thc overall context of the indus-trialized world. The United States is simiLt toother industrialized countries in many respects.yet important differences cxist as well. Thissection briefly describes those similarities anddifferences.

EMPLOYME!:T AND UNEMPLOYMENT

One important difference between industrializedcountries concerns job creation. Since 1970, theUnited States, along with Canada and Australia,has produced new jobs at two to three times theaverage rate for all industrialized countries(Table 1). During the 197os, for example, theUnited States created 20 million new jobs, a26 per cent increase from 1970 compared to anaverage increase of ii per cent for all indus-trialized countries. Similarly, in the I98os, theUnited States has added 13 million new jobs,a 13 per cent increase from 1980 compared to6 per cent for all industrialized countries.

These figures on employment levels refer toofficial government estimates based on nationalemployment surveys of individuals and businessestablishments. They tend to exclude indi-viduals who operate in what has been called the'underground economy': sub rosa employmentagreements that avoid tax and social-securitypayments or more permanent labour contracts,illegal activities (drug and arms trafficking),bartering and other activities that are notsystematically monitored by government agen-cies (Feige, 1988; Tanzi, 1982). In general,countries that impose rigid conditions onemployment contracts with respect to changesor termination will have a larger number ofpersons in unconventional employment rela-tionships including 'underground' arrangementswhich arc not included in the data. Thc resultis that diffircnces in underground activitybetween nations tan Has compari ,ns ofemployment groik th taws.

Unemployment rates also differ markedlybetween the industrialized countries. In 1970,the unmpluyinent rate in thc United Stateswas much higher than in other industrialized

Education, work and employment in developed countries: situation and future challenges 7 1

countries, 4.9 per cent compared to an averagerate of 2.6 per cent for all industrializedcountries. Sincc 1970, the average unemploy-ment rate for all industrialized countries hasincreased, reaching 5.2 per cent in 1980 and7.4 per cent in 1987. But an important shift hastaken place between the United States andother industrialized countries, especially thosein Europe. Unemployment rates in the largestEuropean industrialized countries (France,Federal Republic of Germany, Italy and theUnited Kingdom) have surged dramatically inthe 1930s. In contrast, the unemployment ratein the United States has fallen below the averagefor all industrialized countries, though it remainssubstantially higher than those of Japan andSweden, countries that have had historicallylow rates.

TYPES OF JOBS

All industriaiized countries have experiencedsimilar shifts in the types of jobs produced intheir economics. One major shift has been thegrowth of jobs in the service sector and adecline in jobs in the manufacturing sector.Manufac.uring employment declined by anaverage of 3 per cent in the major industrializedcountries in the 19705. The Unitea States,Canada, and Italy actually increased manufac-turing employment during this period, whileall remaining countries experienced declines.This trend has continucd during the 198os,with all industrialized countrics except Japanshowing continuing declines in manufacturingemployment.

In contrast, employment in the servicessector, which includes retail and wholesale trade,financial services, government, health andbusiness services, has surged. Employment inthe service sector in thc major industrializedcountries increased by an average of 25 percent in thc 19705 and by an average of to percent in the 19805. Since the types of jobs foundin the service sector generally differ from thetypes of jobs found in manufacturing, employ-ment shifts among industrial sectors have

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important implications for cducation andtraining policies, as the discussion belowpoints out.

But, what is happening to the quality of jobsthat are being created in the industrializednations? Are the new jobs similar in wages andskill requirements to existing jobs in theseeconomies? The American case, which hasgenerated intense debate, will bc discussed insome detail below. Thc limited availability ofcomparable data makes it difficult to draw anyfirm conclusions about differences betweenindustrialized countries in the oliqlity of jobsbeing created. In general, Western Europeannations have not increased employment asrapidly as thc United States, but earningslevels have been maintained relative to theUnitcd States where rapid job growth has beenassociated with an absolute decline in averagereal wages (Freeman, 1980 and a proliferationof low wage jobs (Bluestone and Harrison, 1988).Recent figures on part-time employment suggestsimilar trends among industrialized countries:there has been some increase in the proportionof part-time workers, while the proportion ofinvoluntary part-time workers appears to havedeclined in recent ycars (Ginnekin, 1986; Moy,1988). Yet for the United States at least,involuntary part-time employment has grownmuch fastei: than full-time employment overthc period 1979-87 (Levitan and Conway,1988).

One should be cautious in drawing straight-forward inferences from these comparisons.Some have argued that the explosion inemployment in the United States is attributableto its flexible labour markets with fcw encum-brances on the conditions and duration ofemployment contracts (Coe, 1985). In supportof this interpretation is the fact that real wageshave fallen relative to those in Western Europeand Japan. But, it is clear that the expansion inemploymert in the United States has also beenfuelled by record deficits in the federal budgetand in the balance of payments, factors that arcunrelated to labour-market flexibility and thatmay have particularly pernicious long-termconsequences.

L

7 2 Ihnry ill. Leon! and Russell W. Rurnberger

Even though employment as a percentage ofpopulation and hours of work increased in thcUnited States at a faster rate than in WesternEurope, the annual increase in gross domesticproduct was about the same. This means thatAmericans had to increase employment more togain only the same increase in living standards oftheir European counterparts, and many of thenew American workers were additional familymembers who were induced to enter the labourmarket to augment the low incomes of heads ofhousehold. Finally, the enormous expansion ofemployment in the United States has beenaccompanied by greater inequality in familyincome even after adjusting for changes indemographic factors, such as smaller familysize and thc growth of households headed bywomen (U.S. Congressional Budget Office,1988; Thurow, 1987). Thus, we must becautious in inferring the causes of rapid employ-ment expansion in the United States and inassuming that such expansion had only positiveconsequences and was the result of labourmarket flexibility.

LABOUR SUPPLY

Of course, both levels of employment andunemployment depend upon labour supply aswell as demand. Issues of hbour supply concernthe quantity and quality of the labour forceseeking employment. Here again there areimportant similarities and diflerences amongadvanced industrialized countries.

The number of persons in thc labour force isa function of the working-age population andlabour-force participation rates. Among indus-trialized countries, population growth rateshave been quite variable, with the United States,Canada and Australia having much higherpopulation growth rates than Japan and theindustrialized nations of Europe. For example,the I 8-to-64-year-old population increased by14 per cent between 1975 and 1985 inthe United States, 18 per cent in Canada,9 per cent in the Federal Republic of Germany,and 5 per cent in the United Kingdom

(Ginneken, 1986). Trends in labour-forceparticipation rates have been similar amongindustrialized countries: participation ratcs havegenerally declined for males and increasedfor females, though substantial differences re-main in female participation rates. Of particularimportance to thc incrcasing labour supply inthe United States is the high level of immi-gration from Asia and Latin America.

The education levels of workers vary con-siderably between industrialized countries. Inthe United States and Canada, more than onc-third of all persons in the labour force havecompleted at least one year of post-secondaryeducation. In other countries, thc percentagesarc much lower: France 8 per cent, the FederalRepublic of Germany 14 per cent, and Japan18 per cent. In contrast, a much larger per-centage of labour-force participants havecompleted only primary schooling in Franceand Japan than in the United States, Canada,or the Federal Republic of Germany. Yet invirtually all industrialized countries, enrolmentsin post-secondary education continue to ex-pand, which will lead to further increases in theeducation level of workers.

Demand for educated workers

It is widely seen that the demand for educatedworkers is rising and will continue to rise in allthe industrialized societies. This view is usuallypremissed on the dramatic shift from manu-facturing to services that has characterized theindustrialized econol ..'es as well as the increas-ing reliance on such technologies as micro-processors, robots, biotechnology, and newcommunications technologies. In this section,we discuss the demand Le educated workersby focusing on sonie of its major determinants.

he changes in demand for educated labourdepend upon changes in the level and compo-sition of demand for goods and services,changes in the relative cost of educated labour,and changes in technology and organizationthat affect the relative productivity of educated

Education, work and employment in developed countrics: situation and future challenges

labour in comparison with less-educated labourand/or capital (Welch, two).

DEMAND FOR GOODS AND SERVICES

The production of some goods and servicesrequires more educated labour than the pro-duction of othcrs. As thc demand for goods andservices moves from traditional agriculturalcommodities and mass-mallufactured productstowards the services and sophisticatA andcustomized products, there will be a higherdcmand for educated labour, particularly labourwith university training. At the extreme,research and development and professionalservices require workers with substantial edu-cation, usually postgraduate training. At thc op-posite extreme, traditional agriculture and low-level manufacturing require largely unskilledlabour. In general, the demand for goods andservices has become more education-intensivein terms of production inputs, though there hasalso been an expansion of low-level serviceoccupations, such as waiters and shop assist-ants, a matter that is discussed below.

A related issue is that of the competitiveposition of a country in world tradc and itssales and purchascs in international markets.Some of the demand for a country's goods andservices will bc satisfied through imports. Thequestion of thc level and composition of importsand exports depends crucially on their pricesrelative to those of similar domestically pro-duced goods. Since prices in international tradedepend upnn both national productivity andexchange rates, both can influence thc patternsof trade with respect to overall levels and theeducation-intensiveness of thcir compositionamong different goods and services. In general,the industrialized countries' exports tend to bcmore education-intensive than their imports.Bin, as technology in micro-electronics andrelated industries makes it easier to employ less-educated workers, technology transfer enablesan increasing shift of formerly education-intensive production to thc less-developedcountries. Such shifts are Lurrently taking place.

73

In general, new technologies arc crcating newinternational structures of production whoseimplications for the employment of educatedworkers cannot be fully forecast in a rapidlyevolving situation (O'Connor, 1987).

COST OF EDUCATED LABoUR

A second influence on the demand for educatedlabour is its cost relative to that of other pro-ductive inputs such as other types of labour andcapital. In the United States real labour costshave fallen over timc, with greater declinesamong workers with less education than forcollege or university graduates (Berlin andSum, 1988, p. 9). There is no correspondingevidence of a decline in capital cost. Indeed,labour costs have not kept pace with riscs inlabour productivity, and labour compensationhas fallen as a proportion of national income.The relative and absolute decline in real labourcosts has induced employers to substitute labourfor capital in production, partially explainingthe rapid rise in employment.

CHANGES IN PRODUCTIVITYOF EDUCATED LABOUR

A third influence is the effect of changes intechnology and organization of the work-placeon the relative productivity of different typesof labour. Although most discussions of thenew technologies presume that their sophisti-cation requires a demand for more education,this is only truc if such technologies arcembodied in forms of capital that are a comp-lement to education. Surely, many applicationsof technology require better educated andtrained workers. However, technology can alsobe used as a haws for capital investment thatis a substitute for education. The sophisticationof microprocessm s can he used to reduce thceducational requirements for jobs by substitut-ing the measurement, manipulative and ana-lytical capacities of hardware and software for

LI

7 4 Henry M. Levin and Russell P7. Rumberger

these human qualities. This issue is addressedbc low.

A related development is the shift from tra-ditional organizations with a detailed divisionof labour to onc that has less hierarchy and moreworker participation in decision-making in orderto increase productivity. This type of shift tendsto increase thc skill and educational require-ments of workers, even in the absence oftechnological change, but it has particularlyimportant implications in conjunction with theapplication of new technologies (Levin andRumbergcr, 1987). The participative work or-ganization is becoming more prominent in allof the industrialized countrics in automobileand electronics manufacturing and in otherproducts and services. Instead of just followinga repetitive routine, workers arc expected tomakc decisions about product quality, sched-uling of production, training and job rotation,and to address problems that arise in pro-duction. Especially important is the ability tousc information in an information-rich andcomputer-mediated environment to addressproduction needs (Zubolf, 1988). These tasksrequire basic skills in numeracy, literacy andreasoning, as well as the technical knowledge,communication skills and problem-solving skillsthat are associated with relatively morc edu-cation.

PROJECTION OF FUTURE JOBSAND EDUCATION 11. NEEDS

The factors discuss.:,1 above (technology, inter-national competitiveness and work organization)ali Influence the kinds of jobs being produced inadvanced economies and therefore have im-portant implications for education and training.While it is impossible to predict precisely thcextent of these changes and t heir specific impacton education and skill requirements of jobs, itis possible to examine past trends and currentforecasts to get sonie idea of what jobs ma, bclike in the near future. Wc will examine thesedevelopments drawing on a variety of data andliterature for the United States.

For thc aggregate economy, changes in theskill requirements of jobs stem from two factors:(a) changes in the composition of jobs in theeconomy, and (b) changes in the skill require-ments of individual occupations. Changes in thecomposition of jobs in the economy, such asemployment growth that favours high-skill jobsover low-skill jobs, can increase aggregate skillrequirements in the economy even if the skillrequirements of individual occupations do notchange. Similarly, changes in the skill require-ments of individual occupations, such as in-creased skill requirements stemming from theincreased use of new technologies, can raiseaggrcgatc skill levels even whcrc there ate nochanges in the composition of jobs in the econ-omy. The issue of whether skill requirements ofjobs are increasing or decreasing has generateda great deal of debate in thc United Statcs asin other industrialized countrics. In thc Amer-ican case, the debate has been fuelled by con-flicting empirical evidence. What does the evi-dence say?

CHANGES IN THE COMPOSITIONOF EMPLOYMENT

Most of the evidence on changcs in the compo-sition of jobs in the United States comes fromofficial employment forecasts of the UnitedStates Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Everytwo years, the BLS develops detailed projectionsof future economic activity, industrial growth,and employment within industries and oc-cupations based on an elaborate econometricmodel (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1987).While such foreaists are always subject tosome error, reviews of past forecasts showthey are reasonably accurate in predicting over-all trends and relative growth rates among majorindustries and job groups (Goldstein, 1983;U.S Governn,ent Accounting Office, t985;Fullerton, 1988). The latest projections coverthe period :986z000. Thus they provide aglimpse of the future job market in the UnitedStates over the next decade cr so.

Employment forecasts for the American

10

Educatior, work and employment in developed countries: situation and future challenges 7 5

TABLE 1. Employ:neat, employment growth and required education for the fastest-growing occupationsin the United States, 1986-2000 (numbers in thousands)

EmploymentJob grov.ill984.2009

Per-ventageof

Requirededucation

106 2 ,0 Number total (years;'

Fastest relative growth(percentage increase)

Paralegal personnel 6 t 125 64 103.7 0.3 13-15

Medical assistants 132 251 119 90.4 0.6 13-15

Physical therapists 61 1 i5 53 87.5 0.2 16

Physical and correctisctherapy assistants 36 65 29 81.6 0.1

Data-processing equipmentrepairers 69 125 56 80.4 0.3 13-15

Home health aides t 38 249 I I I 80.1 0.5 12

Podiatrists 13 23 10 77.2 0.0 17 i

Computer systems analysts 33 r 582 251 75.6 1.2 r6

Medical-records technicians 40 70 30 75.0 0.1 13-15

Employment interviewers,employment service 75 129 54 71.2 0.3 13-15

TOTAL 956 1 734 778 81.4 3.6

Fastest absolute growth(number of jobs)

Salespersons, retail 3 579 4 "86- 1 201 33 5 5 6 12

Waiters and waitresses 1 702 2 454 752 44 2 3-5 12

Registered nurses 1 406 2 018 612 43.6 2.9 13-15

Janitors and cleaners 2 676 3 221C 604 2.8 12

General managers andtop executives 2 383 2 965 582 24 4 2 7 13-I5

Cashiers 2 165 2 740 575 26 5 2 7 12

Truck-drivers 2 211 2 716 525 13 8 2.5 12

General oltice clerks 2 361 2 824 462 19 6 2 2 12

Food-counter workers I 500 1 949 449 24 9 2.1 12

Nursing aides andorderlies 224 1 658 433 4 4 0 12_35

TOTAL 21 202 27 404 6 202 29 2 29 0

rota] employment 111 623 133 030 21 407 Ill 2 100.0 12

1 "1 the or, iris 1 erapl.oc.toorker, in that 1 Mush loitO

5051.e1 SilsesI,. arid Lukasiconz, ,28-. fable 1, 1.iliulations bayed it he tot...I wren! ion Stri cv, U S Bureau of

Ihe Census

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76 Henry M. Levin and Russell W. Rumberger

labour market have been used to argue thatnew jobs will require higher skill levels thancurrent jobs (Johnston and Packer, 1987, p. 97).Indeed, recent BLS projections show that thefasteq growing jobs in the American economyarc concentrated in health and technical fieldsand require above-average education levels, asshown in the top half of Table 1. But suchfigures are based upon the percentage growthof occupations not their absolu le growth. Theyarc misleading indicators of absolute growth injob categories because the faF test growing jobsarc typically in new fields thai employ relativelyfew people compared to old :r, more traditionalfields.

These differences are s'iown in Table 1,where the ten fastest grow ng jobs based onprojected percentage growth ,ates between 1986and 2000 arc compared to tle tcn jobs that willgenerate the most ncw pisitions during thatperiod. As thc figures illustrate, thc fastestgrowing jobs arc concentrated in the healthand technical fields which require higher edu-cation levels than most jobs. Yet the occu-pations that are expected to generate the mostnew jobs (such as sales workers, waiters andjanitors) generally require lower educationlevels. M.orcover, the first group of occupationsis only expected to generate about 4 per centof all new jobs, whereas the second group isexpected to generate almost 30 per cent of allncw jobs. In fact, 30 occupations, out of the480 that the BLS forecasts, are expected togenerate 50 per cent of all new jobs in theUnited States economy between 1986 and 2000(Silvestri and Lukasiewicz, 1987).

CHANGES IN riti, SKILLREQUIREMFNIS OF JOBS

Changes in the companion ol jobs in the econ-omy can be forecast with much greater confi-dence than changes in the skill requirementsfor individual jobs. One reason is that there areso many different jobs in industrialized econ-omies that vary widely in the tasks that are

performed and in thc dicers on them oftechnological and organizational change.

It is commonly observed that the rising useof computers and other new technologies inmany occupations must be raising the skillrequirements of those occupations (Botkin et al.,1984, p. 80). But this assertion docs not takeaccount of thc fact that most persons who usecomputers require no special computer skills.For example, warehouse clerks and supermarketcheckout staff typically use a computer read-outdevice to read bar-codes on products as theyare purchased, sold, shipped and received. Butthe usc of this device requires no knowledge ofcomputers. Word-processing operators and of-fice workers need only learn how to operatc anew piece of office equipment, as they have donein the past, not how to program or understandcomputers. This training can bc measured inhours or days, not weeks, months or years.

A recent study of a national sample of almost3,000 small businesses in the Unitcd Statesfound that the average duration of training fora wide range of computer applications in officesby those without computer skills was only aboutthirty hours (Levin and Rumberger, 1986). Thesame study found that interest and enthusiasm,followed by reading and comprehension skills,were far more important for learning to usecomputers than extensive technical training(Levin and Rumberger, 1986). In general, themany workers in the United States who usecomputers in their jobs utilize standard com-puter packages that require very little previouseducation or training (Goldstein and Fraser,1985).

Reviews of past studies on the impact oftechnologies on skill requirements reach theconclusion that past technologies have tcndcdto raise the skill requirements of some jobs,while lowering those of others, with a nct resultthat aggregate skill requirements have notchanged much Spenner, 1985, t986; Rumbelger, 198 t, 1987a; Flynn, t 988). After reviewingthe evidence on the impact of technology onskill requirements, the National Academy ofSciences concluded in a recent report (Cyertand Mowery, 1987, p. to3) that

Education, work and employment in developed countries, situation and future challenges 77

the empirical evidence of technology's effects onskills is too fragmentary and mixed to supportconfident predictions of aggregate skill impacts.Despite this uncertainty, however, the evidencesuggests that the skill requirements for entry intofuture jobs will not be radically upgraded from thoseof current jobs.

Of course, the futurc may not look likc the past.One major difference concerns thc type oftechnologies and thcir capabilities. Whereasmany past technologies enabled machines toreduce the physical requirements of work,present and future machines arc more capableof displacing the mental requirements of work(Rumberger, 1987a). As the Nobel prizewinnerWassily Leontief (1983, pp. 3-4) has pointedout:Computers and robots replace humans in the exerciseof mental functions in the same way as mechanicalpower replaced them in thc performance of physicaltasks. As time gocs on, morc and more complexmental functions will he performed by machines.Not unlike large bulldozers assigncd to carthmovingjobs that could not possibly have been carried outby even the strongest laborers or draft animals,powerful computers are now performing mentaloperations that could not possibly bc accomplishedby human minds. Any workcr who now performshis task by following specific instructions can, inprinciple, be replaced by a machine. This meansthat the role of humans as thc most important factorof production is bo,:od to diminishin thc samcway that thc role of horscs in agricultural productionwas first diminished and then eliminated by thcintroduction of tractors.

In total, some forces (such as employmentshifts) appear to be raising thc aggregate skillrequirements of jobs, while other forces (suchas the deployment of new, advanced tech-nologies) may be helping to lower skill require-ments, at least of some jobs. Thus the evidencesuggests that the les els of skills required in thejob market are unlikely to change appreciablyin the neat fume. What is more likely tochange are the types of skills required, as newtechnologies and new forms of work organ-ization demand different kinds of skills, such ascotnmunication and reasoning skills (Levin.I987b).

The supply of educated labour

Projections of lob characteristics and skill re-quirements depend upon assumptions regardingboth the demand for and supply of educatedlabour. The previous section focused onfactors that determine the future demand foreducated labour in thc industrialized countries.The supply of educated labour is influenced bya number of factors: (a) changes in thc size ofthe population; (b) changes in the socialcomposition of the population in terms of age,gender and ethnicity that often imply differencesin experience and preparation for jobs; (c) chan-ges in labour-force participation rates of variousgroups; and (d) changes in thc education andtraining of the various social groups. Drawingon American data we can illustrate the im-portance of these factors in shaping thc supplyof educated labour. We shall examine recentchanges in the size and composition of thelabour force in the United States over the lastfifteen years, from 1972 to 1986, and futureprospects based on government projections forthe per iod from 1986 tO 2000.

--- --_-_-_---- --

I ALIOUR FORCE CHANGES

The labour force m the United States increasedby over 30 million or 30 per cent between 1972and 1986. This growth resulted from increasesin the civilian population as well as an increasein the labour-force participation rate of women.The population (16 years old and over) in-creased by 36.5 million or 25 per cent. svIsilethr: labour-force participation rate of the popu-lation increased from 60 to 65 per cent, with ;

women increasing their participation rate from '

44 to 5s per cent and men decreasing theirsfrom 79 to 76 per cent (Fullerton, 1987, p. at).

rd mg to rec e nt government proiecnons,the American labour force will continue to grmyin the None, but at a slower pace. The labour ;

force is expected to grow by 21 million orpei cent between 1986 and 2000 because of

slowei population gross-di and a slower growth


in the labour-force participation rate. The popu-lation (16 years old and over) of thc Unitcd Statesis expected to increase by 24 million or 13 percent from 1986 to zoo° (Fullerton, 1987, p. at).The labour-force participation rate is expectedto increase over this period from 65 to 68 percent, with women's participation rate increasingfrom 55 to 62 per ccnt and men's decreasingfrom 76 to 75 per cent. The age compositionof the labour force is also expected to change.Thc number of younger and older workerswill continue to decline in the future as it hasin the recent past, with virtually all labour-force growth coming from increases in theprime-age population.

The most dramatic change in the labourforce is reflected in its altering racial and ethniccomposition. The racial and ethnic minoritypopulations in the United States are increasingat a faster rate than the white population bccauscof (a) increased immigration of predominantlyminority populations and (b) higher fertilityrates of minority females, particularly His-panics. Although :mmigration contributcdonly 17 per ccnt of the population increasebetween 1972 and 1979, it contributed 25 percent for the 1979-86 period and is expected tocontribute more than 30 per cent over thc 19862000 period (Fullerton, 1987, p. 21).

Between 1979 and 1986, blacks, Asians, andHispanics represented 45 per cent of thc in-crease in the labour force (Fullerton, 1987).Between 1986 and 2000, this proportion is

expected to increase to 57 per cent. In otherwords, the majority of new entrants into thelabour force over the next decade and a halfarc expected to be members of racial and ethnicminorities Population projections beyond theyear zoo° as well as the large concentration ofminority students in schoois suggest that theproportion of minorities in the labour forccwill continue to increase well into the nexte 0111 ry

EDUCATIONAL PREPARATION

The reason that these demographic changes inthe labour force are so important is that theycan be indicative of the educational preparationof future workers. For example, black andHispanic workers, on average, have lower edu-cation levels than whites, so an increase in theproportion of black and Hispanic workers willtend to lower the overall education level of thclabour force in the absence of significantchanges in the educational preparation of thesegroups.

To illustrate, fewer than 50 per ccnt of allHispanics of 25 years and over have completedmore than a high-school education, comparedto 75 per cent for whites. Blacks, too, havegreater high-school drop-out rates than whites.Conversely, zo per cent of whites have com-pleted four or more years of college, comparedwith to per cent or less for blacks and Hispanics.Therefore, the increasing proportion of blackand Hispanic workers means that an increasingnumber of workers in the labour force could beinadequately prepared for the kinds of jobsthat are coming en to thc market.

Thc educational attainment of minoritiesshould improve in the futurc, since educationlevels of younger minority workers arc gener-ally much higher than older workers. Forexample, only zo per cent of blacks, 25 to29 years old, have dropped out of high schoolcompared to 40 per cent for all black workers.Similarly, youngcr Hispanic workers havecompleted higher levels of schooling thanHispanic workers overall. Consequently, theeducational preparation of the future work-forceshould improve substantially as older, less-educated workers are replaced by younger,better-educated ones.

At thc same time, there arc other forces thatcould contribute to lower levels of educationalpreparation of the future labour force. Theincreasing numbers of American families livingin poverty and the increasing number of female-headed households could increase the numberof high-school drop-outs and thus lower the

Education, work and employment in developed countries: situation and future challenges

educational preparation of future workers(Levin, 1986; Pallas ct al., 1988). Ominously,minority participation and completion rates inhighcr education have subsided in recent years,partly because of cuts in government support.A continuation of this trend will curtail thegrowth of education 'evels among minoritypopulations. That is, not only are high-schooldrop-out rates for blacks and Hispanics higherthan for whitcs, but a smaller proportion of highschool graduates from these groups are enrollingin higher education, and the proportion isactually declining over time (U.S. Departmentof Education, 1988, p. 174).

Educational consequences

In the last two sections we have tried to capturesome of the dynamics of both the demand forand supply of cducatcd labour. There are anumber of overall conclusions that we coulddraw from that analysis. First, the movementtowards the application of new technologies isnot necessaray associated with rapid edu-cational upgrading of jobs. Such upgradingdepends upon whether the technologies areused as a substitute for, or a complement to,higher level skills, and concomitant changes inthe organization of thc work-place, particularlythe move crc .n traditional work hierarchies toworker participation in decisions. Moreover,the supply of educated labour depends not onlyupon expansion of educational opportunities,but the incentives and other conditions thatinduce different groups in thc population toincrease their educational attainments.

In this section we draw out some specificeducational consequences of this analysis. First,we explore the educational levels associatedwith the projected changes in jobs in the UnitcdStates economy between 1986 and 2000. Second,we investigate two aspects of th ,. relationshipbetween workers and jobs, undereducation andovereducation. Third, we address issues ofgeneral and specific skill requirements for theworkplace of thc future.

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79

ESTIMATES OF EDUCATIONALREQUIREMENTS IN TliE YEAR 2000

Given the shifts in occupations that arc pro-jected between 1986 and 2000 in the UnitedStatcs by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, onecan make comparisons of educational require-ments for jobs between the two periods. Inorder to do this, wc evaluated the distributionof education embodied in the employed labourforce for each of almost 500 occupations. Table 2shows the numbers of existing jobs in each ofthe major occupational categories in 1986 andthe distribution of education among thosc whowcrc holding thc jobs. II should be kept in mindthat these broad occupational categories rep-resent summaries of several hundred detailedoccupational classifications. We refer to theseeducation i distributions as the 'required' yearsof education for the broad occupational cat-egory. 7he total refers to the educational re-quiremeLts for all jobs in the economy at thattime.

In order to estimate comparable educationalrequirements for the year z000, wc uscd theprojected changes in the job distribution thatwere forecast for that yeat. We assumed thatthe educational distribution for specific occu-pations would be about the same, consistentwith our earlier discussion of the literaturewhich suggeFted that there is no particular trcndin tcrms of rising or declining skill requirementswithin occupations. The lower half of Table 2shows the projected educational requirementsfor major occupational groups and for the totaleconomy for the year woo. Perhaps the mostnotable pattern in the table is the relative lackof change. Although the new jobs added to thceconomy over this period will require highereducational levels than current jobs (Johnstonand Packer, 1987), overall educational requitements for jobs in the yeai zoo° ate likely 19 bequite similar to those at present, a conclusionthat correspond% closely to the judgements ofthe Panel on Technology and Employment ofthe National Research Council (Cyert andMowery, 1987, p. 103).

C.

80 Henry M Levin and Russell W Rumberger

TABLE 2 Employment and required education of lobs in the United Statesby occupation group; 1086 and protected to 2000 (numbers in thousands)

Employment Required education in years(percentage distribution)

Occupational group Number o 11 12 13-'5 16 17

Existing jobs, 1986Managerial to 583 9.5 5 27 23 29 16

Professional 13 538 12.1 2 9 16 29 44

Technicians and related support 3 726 3.3 3 32 37 10 8

Sales 12 6o6 11.3 16 40 23 t6 5

Administrative support 1985t 17.8 8 54 27 9 2

Private household 781 0.9 6 x 30 7 1 1

Protective service 2 055 1.8 13 43 31 to 3

Other service 14 500 13.0 35 44 17 3 t

Farming, forestry, fishing 3 556 3.2 41 41 11 5 2

Precision production,craft, repair 13 924 12.5 23 53 18 5

Machine operators,assemblers, inspectors 7 665 6.9 33 50 12 3

Trensportation, materialh.aadling 4 789 4.3 20 48 29 1 2

Handlers, helpers, labourers 4 273 3.8 41 45 12 2 0

TOTAL 111 623 100.0 tti 40 21 12 9

Projected jobs, 2000Managerial 13 616 10.2 5 26 24 29 16

Professional 17 [92 12.9 2 9 17 20 43

Technicians and related support 5 151 3.9 3 32 37 10 9

Sales 16 334 12.3 16 40 23 t6 5

Administrative support 22 109 16.6 8 54 27 9 2

Private household 955 0.7 60 31 7 1 I

Protective service 2 700 2.0 14 43 31 10

Other service 10 262 14.4 35 44 17 3 I

Farming, forestry, fishing 3 393 2.6 41 40 12 5 2

Precision production,craft, repair 15 590 11.7 23 53 t 8 5

Machine operators,assemblers, inspectors 6 713 5.2 33 50 12 3

Transportation, materialhandling 5 287 4.0 20 48 29 I

Handlers, helpers, labourers 4 522 3 4 40 45 12 2 1

TOTAL 133 030 100.0 17 139 21 13 to

Soiovet: Silvesur and 1.ukastes414,, 1981, I shit t. Tabulation, based on the Mardi tylt6 Current Population Survey, ti.S. Bureau41 the Census

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1. t)

Education, work and employment in developed countries situation and future challenges

ARE AVERAGES MISLEADING?

Presumably, we could examine these edu-cational requirements and compare them withthe expected distribution of education in thcUnited States in order to determine whetherpresent educational policies arc adequate tomeet occupational needs. We must be verycautious in doing this for both the obviousreason that the projections are open to somemeasure of crror and the less-obvious reasonthat employers can adjust their use of educatedlabour. A shortage of educated labour will bereflected in a high market cost which will induceemployers to substitute capiral and other inputsfor educated labour. They may also expandproduction in countries with more favourablelabour supplies for domestic production. A sur-plus of educatxl labour will induce lower costsand thc opposite effects. A further concern thatis not usually discussed is that an overall sra-tistical balance in the aggregate between edu-cational requirements of jobs and educationalattainments of workers may mask a seriousunderlying problem of both under- and over-education.

UNDEREDUCATION

Undereducation refers to the situation in whichmembers of the labour forcc do not have theeducational experience and skills to qualify evenfor entry-level jobs or to benefit from trainingthat will provide upward mobility. The UnitedStates is now facing a r'sing demography ofstudents who arc considered to be educationallyat risk. This tcrm is used to refer to studentswho by virtue of a lack of resources in theirhome or community arc unlikely to succeed inschool as it is currently constituted.

Such students arc heavily concentrated amongimmigrants, racial minorities, low-income andsingle-parent families, and those with low edu-cation. It has been estimated that at the presenttime about one-third of all students in elemen-tau and secondary school arc at risk, and the

81

number is rising because of the high levels ofimmigration and high birth-rates of at-riskpopulations as reflected in the previous sectionof this article (I.evin, 1986). A large proportionof students from these groups do not completesecondary school (Rumberget, 1987c), a pro-portion that may be as high as 50 per cent.Even those that do complete secondary schoolshow very low achievement scores, equal, onaverage, to students with four years' less formalschooling. This suggests that even the amountof education completed among these groupswill be misleadingly high.

As jobs have shifted from menial and physicaltasks to those in the services, the appropriatenessof skills that are learned in school has becomea concern, even for lower-level service jobs suchas sales persons, waiters, cashiers, office clerks,and so on. These jobs require good communi-cation skills, reasoning, numeracy, and otherqualifications that have been set out by em-ployers as well as proper work values and atti-tudes which have not always been inculcated bythe schools and family (National Academy ofSciences, 1984). In addition, upward mobilitydepends crucially on the ability to learn newskills, which depends, in turn, on the edu-cational foundation at labour market entry.Without these threshold skills, workers fromthese backgrounds are unlikely to experiencesuccess in the labour market (Murnane, 1988).Furthermore, given the dramatic rises, bothproportionately and absolutely, in thc size ofat-risk populations, employers may face a seriousand increasing challenge in attracting an appro-priate labour force.

This prospect has already alarmed die busi-ness community in the United States as well asgovernment agencies (Committee for EconomicDevelopment, 1987; U.S. Department of I .aboret al., 1988). Although the schools have triedto address the needs of at-risk populations forat least two decades, the efforts have met withonly meagre success (Levin, 1986). The gravityof thc problem is increasing because of the mass-ive risc in the numbers of at-risk students inschool and who will ultimately come on to thelabour market. In our view, the response must

82 Henry M. Levin and Russell W. Rusnberger

be substantial and fundamental, moving awayfrom remediation as a strategy and in the direc-tion of acceleration of learning (Levin, 1987a).This will not only require a far greater nationalinvestment in the education of at-risk students,but it will require a fundamental restructuringof schools and educational activities.

OVEREDUCATION

At the same time that the supply of lesser-educated workers and especially those float at-risk backgrounds may bc inadequate to meetthe skill requirements of even the least skilledjobs, there may also be an excess supply of most-educated workers, particularly college gradu-ates. This phenomenon has been referred to asovereducation, underemployment or surplusschooling, and has been the subject of con-siderable research in both the United States andother industrialized countries (Freeman, 1976;Clogg, 1979; Rurnberger, 1981; Hartog andOosterbeek, 1988).

The phenomenon of overeducation is basedon the fact that the supply of college graduatesis increasing faster than the supply of jobs re-quiring a college cd.....,:ation. In the United States,for example, enrolments in higher educationincreased threefold between 1960 and 1980,producing a similar increase in the number ofworkers with a college education (Rumberger,1984). During the same period, the numberof jobs requiring a college education, particu-larly professional and technical jobs, onlyincreased twofold (Rumberger, 1984). As aresult, an incrcasing number of college gradu-ates were forced to take jobs where a collegeeducation was not required. Especially affectedwere female college graduates. For example, agreater proportion of young female collegegraduates were employed in lower-skilled cleri-cal jobs in 1980 than in 1.;6c) (Rumberger, 1984).

Although the size of the American traditionalcollege-age population is expected to decreaseover the next decade or so government forecastsindicate the number of college graduates willremain fairly constant as more and more older

students return to college to pursuc their de-grees. Official government forecasts indicatethat the supply of college graduates availablewill exceed the number of jobs requiring a col-lege education by about too,000 per year, or by1.5 million over the next fifteen years (Sargent,1988). Such figures could understate the extentof the problem since almost half of all recentcollege graduates report that the jobs they ob-tained after completing college did not requirea college degree (Braddock and Hecker, 1988).

Overeducation is considered a problem, inpart, because it suggests that scarce governmentresources are allotted towards a system of highereducation that is producing graduates in excessof labour-market needs. While such an argu-ment may imply that overeducation, at worst,generates opportunity costs, the evidencesuggcsts more serious consequences. Over-educated workers may be less productivebecause they are dissatisfied with their jobsand exert less effort than they would in jobsmore commcnsurate with their education andtrairdng (Rumberger, 1981; Tsang and Levin,1985). As a result, individuals suffer fromreduced earnings and the economy suffers fromreduced economic output (Rumberger, 1987b;Hartog and Oosterbeek, 1988). A recent studyestimated that each year of overeducationamong thc work-force of American telephonecompanies was associated with a net loss inoutput of about $3,800 million in 1982 (Tsang,1987, p. 248). In this case, the negative effecton productivity of overeducation relative to theexisting needs of the telecommunications indus-try was shown to outweigh the positive effectof the additional human capital employed. Thisexample suggests that the individual and socialcosts of overcducation can be substantial.

One strategy for addressing the underutil-ization of educated workers is to cut socialinvestment in post-sccondary education. Whilesuch a strategy has been argued by sonic(Robinson, 1983), others have pointed out thathigher education yields a wide range of im-portant social bcnefits that justifies widespreadsocial investment (Bowen, 1980).

Another approach for addressing the under-


utilization of educated workers is to establishstrategies for raising productivity that drawmore fully on worker capabilities. Two suchstrategies are the moves towards flexible andcustomized production and towards workerparticipation.

Customized production

It is widely agreed that most advanced indus-trialized countries will not have a competitiveadvantage in producing standardized productswith very long production runs. Such productsinclude basic steel and metals, chemicals,electronic components, many household goods,lower-end automobiles and trucks, and othergoods that can be produced in a relativelyuniform way for very long periods, typicallyyears or decades. Newly industrialized countriessuch as Brazil, the Republic of Korea, Taiwan,and others, have adequate labour forces and thetechnical capabilities to producc these goodscheaper than the more advanced industrializedcountries. Higher labour costs, work-placcsafety provisions, and environmental concernsin the latter mitigate against long-term com-petitive advantages in these products.

The comparative advantage of the moreadvanced industrialized countries will be theirhighly educated work-forces and quick adap-tation of advanced technologies which willprovide the potential flexibility to address thecustomized needs of different markets. Rathcrthan producing a few products with long pro-duction runs, firms would have the capabilityto meet customers' needs for a large variety ofcustomized products with shorter productionruns and high adaptability to thc requirementsof different clienteles (Piorc and Sabel, 1934;Reich. 1985). The availability of such cus-tomized products and services will, in them-selves, spur thc productivity of other firms inthe economies. Thc very high educational at-tainments of their labour forces will create thebasis for adaptability to design and produce arange of customized products and services.Such an economic role will require a flexiblework-force with high levels of general skills

83

rather than a repertoire of standardized capa-bilities that can be applied only to a fixedwork-place regime.

Worker participation

A form of change that has been taking placeconcurrently in the advanced industrializedcountries is that of worker participation. Asubstantial empirical literature has found a posi-tive relation between the existence and extentof worker participation and worker productivity(Einhorn and Logue, 1982; Faxen, 1978; Gyl-lenharnmer, 1977; Jones and Svejnar, 1982;Kelly, 1982). This phenomenon provides greaterresponsibility and decision-making for workersin such areas as production, training, qualitycontrol, pessonnel selection, and so on. Oftenworkers arc organized into teams or semi-autonomous work-groups responsible for pro-ducing sub-assemblies (Susman, 1976). Sched-uling, recruiting, product quality, selection ofequipment, work rotation, and product im-provement arc all delegated heavily to work-groups.

These strategies have important implicationsfor productivity, with many examples of dra-matic improvements. For example, Saab con-verted its automobile door assembly from aconventional assembly line to a team approach(Logue, 1981). Annual worker turnover declinedfrom 5o to r 4 per cent, and quality-control prob-lems diminished as did the need for quality-control inspectors. Annual savings were ninetimes the annual costs of the change. A majorAmerican manufacturer of integrated circuitsorganized onc of its plants according to workteams that made decisions by consensus onwork processes (Gustayson and Taylor, 1982).Yields were raised by 25 per cent above thoseof comparable, but traditional, facilities, andemployee turnover kll.

In the United States a failing GeneralMotors automobile plant was closed becauseof labour problems, low productivity and poorproduct quality. It was reopened as a jointventure with the Japanese company Toyota toproduce a Toyota model to be marketed under

84 Henry M. Levin and Russell W. Rwnberger

the Chevrolet insignia. Production was reor-ganized using work-groups with considerableshop-floor autonomy, substantial job training,job guarantees, and a just-in-time invmtorysystem. Labour productivity in the plant rose by50 per ccnt in comparison with its earlierGeneral Motors counterpart, and productivitywas comparable to its Japanese counterpart,despite the fact that 8o per cent of the work-force had been re-recruited from the laid-offGeneral Motors workers (Brown and Reich,1988; Krafcik, 1986).

Such changes require a reorganization of thework-place with less hierarchy and supervisionand a greater scope of discretion for workcrs.Workcrs need to be able to solve problems bothindividually and in groups and to communicatein team meetings and other situations. Theyalso nccd to be able to interpret available infor-mation and to provide leadership and co-ordination.

NEW COMPETENCIES

The emerging literature on changes in workprocesses for both customized production andfor worker participation suggests a new sct ofworker competencies. Our detailed review ofcase-studies in thc literature as well as pre-liminary observations at work-sites under aproject supported by thc Spencer Foundationon 'Educational Requirements for Ncw Tech-nologies and Wor% Organization' have ident-ified, tentatively, the following as competenciesthat workers will need to function effectively inthese newer work settings and that can bedeveloped in schools:Initiative. The drive and creative ability to

think and perform independently. This qua-lification suggests greater school focus onindependent endeavours for students in com-parison with the present emphasis on school-and teacher-directed activity.

Go-operation. Constructive, goal-directed in-teraction with others. This qualification arguesfor increased emphasis on co-operative learn-ing where rewards are provided for co-

operative process as well as for the outcomesof that process.

Working in groups. Interaction in work-groupsdirected towards both short-term goals ofefficient task or activity accomplishment andthc long-term goal of group maintenance.This dimension can best be achieved byschools that organize learning tasks intogroup endeavoi- rathcr than the extremeemphasis o individualism and individualcompetition hat characterize existing schools.

Peer training. Informal and formal coaching,advising ant training peers. The requirementfor participa4ng in this prc cess in the work-place seems to be experience it: peer tutoringin the schools.

Evaluation. Appraisal, assessment and certifi-cation of the quality of a product or service.This qualification suggests that students begiven far more experience in grading andevaluating their own work and that of studentcolleagues.

Communication. The appropriate uses of spoken,written and kinetic communication as wellas good listening, reading comprehensionand interpretive skills for receiving messages.These skills need to be fully developed inschools in a work-place context as well asin the cultural context.

Reasoning. Evaluation and generation of logicalarguments including both inductive anddeductive approaches. This requirement con-trasts with thc heavy emphasis on memor-ization and rote learning in existing schools.

Problem-solving. Identification of problems, gen-eration of alternative solutions and theirconsequences, selection of an alternative andimplementation of a solution. The inculcationof this qualification requires experience insolving problem% that are situated in a morenatural, as differentiated from textbook,situationwith both uncertainty and ambi-guity of information. Textbook approachesare usually characterized by precise infor-mation and a single correct answer ratherthan multiple possibilities.

Decision-making. Employing the elements ofproblem-solving on an on-going basis

t; 9

Education, work and employment in deseloped countries situavon and futurs challenges 85

in the workplace. This dimension requirescontinued practice in problem-solving forchoosing among alternatives.

Obtaining and using iqormation. Decidingwhich information is relevant, knowingwhere to obtain it, obtaining it and putting itto use. This qualification requires experiencein selecting the types of information that areneeded for problem-solving and decision-making, obtaining it and using it properly.It can be readily initiated in the schoolsituation.

Planning. Establishing goals as well as schedul-ing and prioritizing work activities. Thisdimension has clear school counterparts inchoosing activities and objectives and insetting out activities to meet those goals overa specific time horizon.

Learning skills. Cognitive and affective skillsthat facilitate thc acquisition of new know-ledge as needed. These qualifications requirean orientation on how to embrace newlearning situations as well as the inculcationof styles of learning that work effectively formastering new knowledge.

Multicultural skills. Understanding how to workwith persons from other cultures in terms oflanguage, communication styles, and differ-ent values. Thc American labour fotee isbecoming heavily multicultural with its largecomponent of entrants from minority racialand ethnic groups. Study of foreign languagesand cultures as well as experience in human-relations activities can be undertaken withinthe school setting to satisfy this dimension.

Most of these competencies arc not thc standardones stressed by elementary and secondaryschools in the United States. Although studentswith university degrees are likely to have moreeducational experiences in these areas, even inthese Cases there is little guarantee that workcrswill be fully capable. We must also keep in mindthat all of these competencies are ones that maybe required in addition to the standard cognitiveand techniml skills that we expect of our workers.That is, if firms continue to develop strategiesbased upon customized production and work-place participation, there will be an increased

demand for these typzs of competencies. Suchdemands will also tend to utilize more fully thetalents of educated workers, but in many casesthey may exceed the capabilities of suchworkers. TIrse requirements also seem to beones that respond to the need:, of small busi-nesses for initiative, creativity, problem-solving,and so on, which is an important concern sincesmall businesses have been extremely importantsources of job growth in the United States(U.S. Small Business Administration, 1984).

What is most important is that it ts not thelevel of education that is challenged, but thetype of education that workers will need. In thefinal section we suggest some implications foreducational planning.

Implicationsfor educational planning

If the analysis that wc have presented is perti-nent not only for the United States but for otheradvanced industrialized nations, there are somegeneral implications for educational planning.The most important findings for the UnitedStates arc thc following.

First, on the average it does not appear thatthe educational attainments of the work-forcewill be too low in terms of the levels of edu-cational credentials that are needed to takcadvantage of changes in the economy. Indeed,there is only a very modest trend towardsupgrading of thc occupational structure in thedirection of higher educational requirements, achange that should not outstrip the tendencytowards more education in the labour force.

Second, underneath the aggregate data thereis considerable cause for concern with the twinproblems of significant segments of the popu-lation being undereducated and overeducatedfor available work opportunities. Pet...onc fromeducationally at-risk group, such as thosedrawn from the poor, immigrants, certain racialgroups and one-parent families will not achieveeither the quality or amount of educationaloutcome that will prepare them for entry-levelemployment and upward mobility. At the


other end of the spectrum, there arc likely to beserious problems of ovcreducation in that manyprospective workers will find that their edu-cational attainments exceed thosc required bytheir jobs.

Third, a successful response to the challengeof undereducation will demand a major effortto upgrade the quality of education for at-riskand disadvantaged groups to bring thcm intothe educational and economic mainstream. Thiseffort will require not only more educationalinvestment, but more imaginative approachesto curricula and instruct;9n as well as anintegration of schooling with that of othercommunity services to help the disadvantaged(Levin, 1987a). It is probably the major edu-cational challenge facing the country.

Fourth, a successful response to the challengeof overeducation can bc built on firms' self-interest to increase productivity through cus-tomized production and worker participation.Both of these suggest a focus on a different kindof worker, one who is not only prepared interms of cognitive knowledge, but who also hasthe abilities to take advantage of a work-placerequiring greater participation.

Finally, the major effort of schools must beto address not only what must be learned buthow it will be learned. For example, studentsmay need much more experience in groupsettings through co-operative learning and co-operative problem-solving to prepare them forchanging work-places. Peer tutoring may beextremely functional in school as a basis forworkers' training other workers in thc work-place. Problem-solving as opposed to mem-orization should become more prominent inschool as it becomes more important in thework-place. And as work-places change overthe four decades or so of a working life, workersmust have the grounding to learn new tasks andnew ways of doing work in response to changesin technology, work organization, and newproducts. Thus, schooling must prepare workersto adapt to change rather than to merely learnwhat is necessary for working in a stableenvironment.

Many of these issues have already been dis-

vik

cussed in Carnov and Levin (1985), and moredetailed analyses arc forthcoming on the basisof the present studies of work-places and schoolsby Levin and Rumberger (1986). Educationalplanning must be informed by the majorqualitative changes taking place in the work-place and thcir educational consequences forthe schools. Research on these changes andtheir implications and thc translation of thatresearch into planning and practice mustremain a high priority in industrialized societies.

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anage entand administration

of education systems:major issues and trendsk

Benno Sander

The first concern of this article is to establishguiding principles and criteria for the study ofeducational administration in different econ-omic, political and cultural contexts. Thisconcern is linked to a defined intellectual pos-ition, which implies a concrete commitment tothe promotion of a free and just human life inschool and society at large. It is on t'.e basis ofthis commitment to freedom and justice ineducation and society that this article adopts theconcept of thc quality of collective human lifeas the key criterion to guide the examination ofthe theoretical foundations and the praxeologicalorientations adopted in educational admin-istration.

Based on this guiding principle, this articleexamines the theoretical perspectives andpraxeological oricntations of contemporary edu-cational administration, with special referenceto Latin America. It refers to the historical

Benno Sander (Brazil). Resident Representative ofthe Organization of American States in Argentina.President Ad Honorem of the Inter-American Societyfor !Educational Admirustration. Professor of Educationat the University of Brasilia, and at the UniversidadeFederal Fluminense, Niterdi, Rio de Janeiro (on leave).risiting Professor of the Latin American School ofSocial Sciences ( FLACSO ), Buenos Aires, Argentinu.

evolution of educational administrative theoryand prariice, the conceptualization of tra-ditionai and new perspectives, cross-culturalco-operation, and collective participation ineducational administration.

A multidimensional paradigmof educadonal administration

HISTORICAL BACKCROUND

Professional literature on administrative theoryin the present century presents a number ofclassifications of conceptual and analytical con-tributions to public administration and edu-cational management.

The traditional historical classification tries togroup administrative theory into three generalmanagement schools of thought: (a) the classicalschool conceived at the beginning of thiscentury at the time of the consolidation of theIndustrial Revolution; (b) the psychosocialschool developed during the Great Depressionin the late 1920s; and (c) the contemporary

The opinions expressed in this article are those of theauthor and do not necessarily represent the views ofthe Organization of American States and other I nut -tunons with which the author is asmciated.

Preipecr2, Vol. XIX, No. 2, 509

IGU

9 0 Benno Sander

school, developed after the Second World War,with a number of different lines of thought. Insystems terms, the evolution of twentieth-century administrative theory is analysed interms of closed systems (19oo-6o) and opensystems (1960-80), each with rational modelsand natural models.? In philosophical terms,administrative theory follows three contendingscholarly traditions which reflect thiee corre-sponding episternologics: positivism, hermen-eutics, and critical theory.'

It is also possible to conceive a new classifi-cation of administration in terms of fourcriterion- based models based on efficiency,effectiveness, responsiveness and relevance.

Efficiency

As a management model, efficiency-basedadministration is conceptually derived fromthe classi(2I school of administration and isanalytically induced from the practice of schoolexecutives who behave according to the tenetsof general, scientific and bureaucratic manage-ment. Thc classical thesis was expounded at thebeginning of this century at the time of theconsolidation of the Industrial Revolution.Three major movements were largely respon-sible for classical theory: scientific management,'general management,* and bureaucratic manage-ment. The protagonists of the classical schoolconceived of the organization as a closed,mechanical and rational system, in which man-agement was founded upon the criterion ofeconomic efficiency.

Effectiveness

As a management model, effectiveness-basedadministration is conceptually derived from thepsychosocial school of administration and isanalytically induced from the evaluation of thepractical experience of school executives whoadopt the principles of the behavioural ap-proach to administration. In the history ofadministrative thought, thc psychosocial antith-esis to the classical school was developed fromthe time of the Great Depression towards the

end of the 1920s. The movements responsiblefor this development were thosc of thc em-phasis on human relations' and the focus onadministrative behaviour.' The protagonists ofthe psychosocial school conteive of thc organ-ization as a partially open, organic and naturalsystem, in which management is concerned withthe functional intcgration of its componentelements in light of institutional effectiveness.After the Second World War, effectiveness alsobecame a fundamental criterion of the neo-classicists, who conceived management byobjectives.'

Responsiveness

As a management model, responsiveness-basedadministration is conceptually derived from anarray of contemporary management thcoricsand is analytically induced from a variety ofdifferent practical experiences in public andeducational administration during the last threedecades. Its major theoretical contributionscome from development administration," or-ganizational development," administrative ecol-ogy," institutional development," and con-tingency theory." The protagonists of thesecontending contemporaty movements conceiveof the organization as an open and adaptivesystem, in which administrative mediationemphasizes the situational variables of theexternal environment in light of politicalresponsiveness.

Relevance

As a management model, relevance-basedadministration is conceptually derived fromrecent and current interactionist formulationsfounded upon phenornenology, existentialism,the dialectical method, critical theory and thchuman action approach." The adherents ofthese conceptual and analytical formulationsconceive the organization a,. a holistic andinteractional system, in which managementemphasizes the principles of consciousness,critical human action, contradiction and totalityin light of cultural relevance.

Management and adminiscration of education systems. maior issues and trends 91

TOWARDS A NEW PARADIGM

Although the four specific models of edu-cational administration, as set forth above,correspond to four historically distinct periods,thcy often converge in a practical sense. InLatin America, for example, specialized litera-ture describes thc currcnt existence of edu-cational systcms and institutions of a businessnature in which administration is governed byeconomic efficiency as a predominant criterionwith other criteria complementing the primaryone. There are other education systems andinstitutions in which administration is guidedprincipally by pedagogical effectiveness in theattainment of instructional objectives. Othereducation systems and institutions arc moreconcerned with their political role in the largercommunity and, for this reason, their admin-istration is primarily based upon the criterion ofpolitical responsiveness. Yet other educationsystems and institutions arc concerned fui da-mentally with the human being as an individualand social actor. For this reason, these lattersystems and institutions adopt cultural relevanceas the predominant criterion of their admin-istration.

The four specific models can be synthesizedinto a global paradigm, which is here definedas the multidimensional paradigm of edu-cational adrninistration." Such a global para-digm would be composed of four interactingdimensions: economic, pedagogical, politi<ml,and cultur. 1. To each of these dimensionscorresponds a respective predominant criterionof administrative performance: efficiency, effec-tiveness, responsiveness, and relevance.

The conceptualization of the multidimen-sional paradigm of educational administrationis, furthermore, based on three fundamentalassumptions. The first is that educationalphenomena and administrative facts arc inter-related aspects of a global reality. The secondassumption is that in the education system therearc intrinsic dimensions of a cultural andpedagogical nature that exist alongside extrinsicdimensions of a political and economic nature.The third assumption is that the humau beingas an individual and social actor involvedpolitically in society constitutes the raison d'êtreof the education system. It is this anthro-sociopolitical concept of the human being thatdefines the naturc and utilization of thc multi-dimensional paradigm of educational admin-istration as heuristic. These conccpts, as shown

Intrinsicdimension

Substantivedimension

Instrumentaldimension

Extrinsicdimension

Cultural(Relevance)

1

Polilical(Responsiveness)

"-Educationaladministration

Pedagogical(Effectiveness)

Economic(ElfcienCy)

I Fin i. A multidimensional paradigm of educational administration.

Benno Sander

in Figure 1, are reflected in a multicentricsystem in which two substantive dimensionsand two instrumental dimensions interact withtwo intrinsic dimensions and two extrinsicdimensions.

Pconotm,- dimenston

The economic dimension of the educationsystem involves financial and material resources,structures, bureaucratic norms, and mechan-isms of co-ordination and communication. Inthis dimension, educational administration isconcerned with: (a) the distribution and controlof resources; (b) the organization of the insti-tution in structural terms; (c) the definition ofroles and responsibilities; (d) the distribution ofwork; ,e) the determination of how the work isto be carried Out and by what type of incum-bents; and t,f) the e.tablishment of norms ofaction The defining criterion of the economicdimension is efficiency in thc utilization of thefinancial and material resources, and the techno-logical instruments under the rule of economic

, Pedagopcal dimension

The pedagogical dimension of educationaladministration refers to the educational prin-ciples, scenarios, and techniques that are

intrinsically committed ,o thc effective attain-ITICIlt of the objectives of the education system.In recent decades, the pedagogical dimension ofeducational administration has been subjectedto a pro.,:ess of atrophy as a consequence of thegeneralized emphasis on considering the edu-cation system in terms of economic and techno-logical development. As a reaction to thissituation, in Wine academic environments thereha% been increased conccrn with administrationas a pedagogical act. The concern of thedeknders of the pedagogical dimension is thatof ant ibut mg to administration the responsi-bility for conceiving of spaces, methods andtechniques that are capable of preserving theintrinsic educational objectives of the schoolsystem in its efforts to fulfil adequately its

economic, cultural, and political role in society.Thc major criterion of the pedagogical dimen-sion is thc effectiveness in the attaininent ofeducational Icsults.

Political dimension

The political dimension involves the strategiesof concrete action of the participants in theeducation system and its community. Theimportance of the political dimension is rootedin the specific responsibilities of the educationsystem with respect to society. Its importancealso resides in the fact that thc education systemevolves in the context of varied conditioningcircumstances of the environment and is in-fluenced by powerful external variables. Ifeducational administrators arc not capable ofadequately balancing the powerful relationshipof the cultural and pedagogical elements withthc external environment they run the risk ofclosing the cducation system in upon itself,with loss of political power in thc community.Within this dimension, those in educationaladministration seek responsiveness, a criterionthat is essentially political, and according towhich the education system is called upon tomeet thc social nccds and demands of societyat large."

Cultural dimension

The cultural dimension covers the philosophical,anthropological, biological, psychological, andsociological values and characteristics of theparticipants in the educational system and so-ciety in general. Although the cultural dimen-sion includes many aspects and levels, its basiccharacteristic is its global perspective. The roleof the educational administrator is one of coor-dinating the action and interaction of the per-son:, and groups who participate directly orinditectly in the educational process of the com-munity. In thc cultural dimension, relevance isthe basic criterion that guides administrativeaction. Therefore, administration will be rel-evant to the extent that it fosters the conditionsthat make it possible to further the quality of

Management and administration of education s5stems. major issues and trends 93

collective human life in the educational systemand society in general." The basic condition tofurther a meaningful and qualitative form ofhuman life in education and society is that ofparticipation. Therefore, relevance and partici-pation in educational administration arc closelylinked together.

The multidimensional paradigm is based onthe identification of those diversified dimensionsor spaces that make fulfilment of the humanbeing possible, both as an individual and socialactor. In the terms of thc multidimensional para-digm, educational administrators arc guided bysubstantive and ethical concepts of general val-idity such as freedom and equity that, in turn,create thc organizational framework for collec-tive participation in the furthering of a quali-tative form of collective human life in thc schooland society in general.

ISSUES AND IMPLICATIONSOF THE PARADIGM

The examination of the historical evolution ofadministrative theories adopted in educationand the conceptualization of the multidimen-sional paradigm of educational administrationraises important issucs and reveals a number ofimplications for educational policy and prac-tice. This is particularly evident in developingcountries. Taking thc experience of Latin Amer-ica as a case in point, it is possible to account forsome important aspects, such as: (a) governmentand educational administration; (b) changes ineducational policies and administrative criteria;(c) centralization versus decentralization; and(d) the training of educational administrators.

Governmentand educational administration

Educational administration in Latin America isinserted in the context of public administrationand regional scientific development. This as-sumption is a natural corollary of the phenom-enon of interdependence between education andsociety. In this way, many aspects of educational

practice and school management can only beunderstood when examined in the evolutionarycontext of the government sector and society atlarge." This is particularly valid in societieswhere the state plays a central role in the fieldof education, as is the case in Latin Amcrica.This means that it is possible to establish a closeparallel between thc development of public ad-ministration and educational administration inLatin America, as well as in other developingareas and in industrialized nations. In thc caseof the industrialized countrics, whatever theeducational role played by the state, whcn theyturn to export their models of educational or-ganization and administration to the developingworld through technical assistance they usethc mediation of central government. In LatinAmerica, for example, the general theoreticalperspectives of public administration, importedfrom overseas without sufficient relation tothe historical process of local development, havea significant impact on educational adminis-tration. In thc 1960s, this fact was particularlyevident in the specific field of educational plan-ning, which was strongly influenced by thetheoretical perspectives adopted in governmentplanning and by the overall oricntation of econ-omic development planning.

The fact is that cconomic efficiency and thebureaucratic rationalism of the classical schoolof administration were widely taught and adop-ted as universal dogmas and recipes in LatinAmerican public and educational administra-tion. The same is valid for the behaviouraloricntation of the human-relations movementand the neoclassical trend of management byobjectives. Finally, the developmental orien-tation adopted in comparative public admi-nistration towards the end of the 19505 and19Gos in the broader context of political theoryinvaded the schools of administration and edu-cation in Latin America. Welfare economics andgovernment planning were accompanied by theeconomics of education and educational plan-ning concerned with the preparation of humanresources for cconomic development. In thiscontext, thc state played a central role duringthe post-war developmental period, as the major

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94 Benno Sand.,

investor in education in an attempt to respondto social needs and political aspirations of LatinAmerican mations.

Changes in educational policiesand administrative criteria

The historical account of organizational and ad-ministrative theories adopted in Latin Americaneducation reveals constant changes in edu-cational policies and administrative criteria.Latin America initially subscribed to a juridicalapproach that was essentially normative innature and closely tied to the tradition of Romanadministrative law that characterized publicand educational administration during the col-onial era." Following that era, the four histori-cal models of educational administratian wereadopted during the course of the present century,as set forth earlier in this article.

The cult of efficiency, linked to the economicrationalism prevailing at the beginning of thetwentieth century, was accompanied by edu-cational policies that emphasized the techno-cratic and organizational aspects of educationalsystems with little attention to their human andpolitical aspects. In other words, economicrationalism was accompanied by pedagogicalpragmatism and administrative efficiency. In thespecific field of educational planning, the cultof efficiency underlies the traditional techno-rational model conceived in the 196os, in whichplanning took the form of a normative orrational process and a technocratic exercise. Asa reaction to economic efficiency, pedagogicaleffectiveness, associated with thc behaviouraltheories developed at the time of the GreatDepression, came forward as a criterion ofadministrative performance in education. Edu-cational policies emphasized the human side ofthe education system. In an attempt to overcomethe limitations of economic efliciency and peda-gogical effectiveness in education, political re-Tonsiveness was developed in light of the post-war international reconstruction effort. In thiscontext, educational policy was primarily con-cerned with the attainment of social dcmandsand political aspirations. The result was an

unprecedented expansion of education systemsin Latin America and in other parts of the world.Post-war educational expansion was halted bythe economic crisis that affected the world atthe end of the 1970s and was further aggravatedin the 198os. Educational policy and adminis-tration were submitted to a critical examinationworldwide. Social scientists became more andmore concerned with thc design of significantand qualitative forms of human life in educationand society. Cultural relevance has become thenthe dominant criterion of educational policy-making and administrative performance. In asimilar way, educational planners try to over-come the traditional technocratic model and toconceive a more strategic paradigm of edu-cational planning" in light of political respon-siveness and cultural relevance.

Centralization versus decentralization

The political history of Latin America shows aconstant tension between centralization anddecentralization in the management of edu-cation and society in general. The fact is thatthere have becn continual attempts and a num-ber of forms of administrative decentralization(deconcentration, debureaucratization, region-alization, municipalization, delegation, nu-clearization, privatization) as alternatives to thepolitical and administrative centralism thatcharacterized socicty and education in LatinAmerica during thc 500 ycars of its existence.Nevertheless, centralization, which dates backto the establishment of the independent statesof Latin America, and the construction of theirnational identity, remains a common politicalfeature in the whole hemisphere. Education,which was used by the state as a p9werfulinstrument to achieve independence and topromote national development, as ell as todeprive the Church of its historical influencein public affairs, followed the samc centralizingmodel."

For practical purposes, this article examineswhether a centralized or a decentralized edu-cation system is ntiiit efficient, effective, respon-sive and relevant io promote equity and freedom

Management and administration of education systems: major issues and trends 9 5

of access to economic and educational oppor-tunities, in light of the concept of the quality ofcollective human life. Studies carried out byuniversities and by intergovernmental agenciesreveal that most Latin American governmentshave adopted different forms of decentraliz-ation in education." Examples of experiencesinclude:Argentina as a case of multiple administration

of its education system.Brazil as a tentative of administrative decen-

tralization by school levels, with a progressiveassignment of intermediate education to theprovinces and basic education to the munici-palities.

Chile as a case of educational regionalizationcombined with central planning and con-trol.

Colombia as an example of functional and geo-graphic decentralization of educational ad-ministration.

Costa Rica as an example of regionalizationand deconcentration of the education systembased on regional education departments.

Mexico as a case of administrative reform andagilización.

Panama as an example of decentralizationthrough the strengthening of educationaladministration in the provinces.

Peru as a case of nuclearization and progressivegeographic decentralization of the Ministryof Education.

Venezuela as a case of educational regional-ization as a basis for administrative decen-tralization.

We could inquire about the reasons behindthese and other recent attempts at educationaldecentralization in Latin Amcrica. Thosc whofavour decentralization argue that it facilitatesthe interaction between education and society,upgrading significantly the degree of respon-siveness and relevance of the education systemfor its participants and the community at large.Decentralization would also move the partici-pants of local communities to search for edu-cational solutions to their problems within theirlimits, instead of adopting universal solutions(in)applicable to all situations of a country.

The defenders of decentralization also arguethat a decentralized education systcm would beeconomically more efficient and pedagogicallymore effective than a centralized system.

These arguments, however, arc under severescrutiny in view of thc critical assessment ofthe realities of Latin America and its historicalconditioning forces. Thcrc is little evidencethat government policies on educational decen-tralization work effectively. Some critics arguethat in many cases there is evidence to thecontrary.

In economic terms, systematic studies arc stillneeded to establish whether or not there is anempirical correlation between efficiency and de-centralization. In pedagogical terms, there is aneed to show how a decentralized educationsystem is more effective in countries wherc thepolitical culture values administrative central-ism. Considering that the concept of effective-ness is rooted in neoclassical cconomic thought,a decentralized education system could tend tofavour private education. Critical analysts arguethat this oricntation is in conflict with theimperative of providing equal opportunities offree public education to the poor. In politicaltcrms, it is necessary to show how educationaldecentralintion can be more responsive to socialdemands and political aspirations in countrieswith an economic structure and a political or-ganization that do not give adequate fiscalautonomy to provinces and municipalities. Inthis way, the adoption of a decentralized edu-cation system in countries marked by a cen-tralized cconomic structure and political organ-ization colild run thc risk of creating abandonedschool systems in the marginal urban com-munities and poor rural municipalities. In cul-tural terms, there arc doubts whcthcr a decen-tralized education system cats bc more relevantto its participants and the community at largethan a centralized system if adequate economicand political conditions do not exist.

Ir. fact, Latin American countries face asignificant deterioration of their economic situ-ation accompanied by constant tensions withthc industrialized nations. In addition, the ex-ternal economic strangling and the impoverish-

96 Benno Sander

ment of national economics in Latin Americagenerate increasing internal conflicts which aremediated by central governments. This meansthat internal centralization is reinforced bypowerful external forccs. This centralizing trcndhas obvious implications for educational policy-making and planning. In addition, educationalpolicies and plans are often prepared by pro-fessionals linked to the central power structurcand usually committed to urban values. On theothcr hand, bearing in mind thc difficult econ-omic situation throughout Latin America, de-centralization can seriously jeopardize equityand increase regional inequalities because of theunequal access to financ:al resources and edu-cational services.

Thc debate over centralization versus decen-tralization in educational organization and ad-ministration reveals that there are no patformulas and easy solutions." Nevertheless,two suggestions seem to be forthcoming.

First, it is necessary to separate educationalpolicy and administrative practice. In order topreserve national identity, it would seem thatgeneral educational policy should be nationalin nature. In this way, a national unitary cur-riculum should be designed in order to preservenational cultural identity, to strengthen its ca-pacity to pursue scientific advancement, and toprovide equal opportunities concerning accessto scicntific and technological development. Tosuch national curriculum dcsign, local contentsshould be added in order to preserve the culturalheterogeneity of the country and to attain con-crete social needs and political demands. As foreducational planning, this orientation lays thegrounds for the development of micro-planningwithin the context of national educational de-velopthent planning. Again, it is suggested thatgenetal national policy guidelines should not bedecentralized, in ordcr to avoid the risk ofcontributing to the weakening of our sense ofnational destiny and of thc presence of modernscience in all parts of .the country. For theimplementation of national educational policies,administrative practice ;:ould bc more or lessdecentralized. That is to say that, in each case,we should adopt the most efficient, effective,

responsive and relevant administrative strategyto attain the cnds and objectives established inthe national educational policy, and, at the sametime, to preserve the cultural heterogeneity ofthe country and to fulfil actual local needs.

Second, it is important to clarify conceptsand practices so that centralization is not necess-arily associated with authoritarianism, and de-centralization not necessarily confused withdemocracy and participation. In effect, in thcsame way that authoritarianism can coexist withdecentralization, democracy and participationcan exist in a centralized system. The differencelics in thc forms of participation and thcpractice of democracy. To sum up, it is necess-ary to look, above all else, to the basis of thenational policy of education. Then it is necess-ary to examine participatory democracy as aform of administrative mediation to attain edu-cational advancement, in the conviction that aparticipatory form of educational administrationis more important than centralizing or decen-tralizing the system, because a decentralizedsystem need not always necessarily ensure par-ticipation, and a centralized system need notalways necessarily deny it.

The training of educational administrators

In colonial Latin America, there was littleconcern over educational administration andhte preparation of educational administrators.In fact, theory-building and knowledge devcl-opment in Latin American educational admin-istration only began in this century, mainlyafter 1930. Most publications of the colonialperiod were general descriptive studies and re-ports with a normative and juridical approachto educational administration. Usually edu-cational administrators wcre teachers who hadbeen temporarily released from their teachingresponsibilities. This fact explains why the defi-nition of the profile of thc educational admin-istrator always included teacher training andexperience as the fundamental requirement.

Changes in the traditional profile of the edu-cational administrator were introduced as aresult of the expansion and increasing corn-

Management and administration of education system-is. n,ior issues and trends

plexity of education systems in Latin America.The redefinition of the profile of the educationaladministrator was accompanied by the introduc-tion of systematic training policies and practices.The preparation of educational administratorsin Latin America has been a government con-cern for thc last five decades. Up to the SecondWorld War, the preparation of educational ad-ministrators was part of the general programmesin teacher-training colleges and university fac-ulties of humanities and sciences. Educationaladministration was just one subject of a com-prehensive programme of study. The contentof educational administration was influencedby the juridical and namative tradition thatcharacterized organizational studies and govern-ment administration.

Following the Sccond World War, particu-larly since 1960, schools of education wcrcestablished in Latin American universities,and professional training programmes for edu-cational administrators were introduced atthe undergraduate level. These training pro-grammes emphasized the study of educationaladministration within the classical and behav-ioural management traditions. During thisperiod, a number of non-degree tailor-madeseminars and courses in educational adminis-tration iand aftcr 1958 in educational planning)were carried out by national governments anduniversities in co-operation with internationalagencies, particularly Uncsco and the Organ-ization of American Statcs. These were thefirst training experiences in educational admin-istration and planning at the graduate level inLatin America. It was at this time that theInternational Institute for Educational Plan-ning (IIEP) was established in Paris, becoming,since 1963, a research and training centre ofexcellence for educational leaders of thc de-vcloping world.

Systematic graduate education, which startedaround 1970, represents a new change in LatinAmerican university education and educationaladministration. At that time, the Regional Edu-cational Development Program of thc Organ-ization of American Statcs, established in 1968,had a decisive influence in thc development of

97

systematic graduate programmes in educationalplanning, supervision and administration atleading universities in Brazil, Chile, Colombia,Panama and Pcru. Since thc beginning ofthe 1970s, graduate cducation has been playinga decisive role in changing the traditional nor-mative character of Latin American universityteaching to a more analytical approach basedon increasing research activities. Given theirnewness, graduate programmes in educationaladministration in Latin Amcrica have not yetbeen consolidated in many countries. The pros-pects, though, arc promising in a good manynations. There is increasing entry of pro-fessic-r.als from other fields of study, particu-larly from the social sciences, into graduateprogrammes of educational administration. Thisinterdisciplinary encounter enhances an unpre-cedented theoretical and methodological devel-opment in training programmes and researchprojects.

Policy and practice in the training of edu-cational administrators in Latin America followthe general historical development of the socialsciences. From the initial normative orientation,training programmes moved to a behaviouralcontent, until reaching a morc sociological ap-proach to educational administration. Thismeans that in the current training programmesof educational administrators there arc initialindications tending to give precedence to theconcepts of cultural relevance and political re-sponsiveness over those of economic efficiencyand behavioural eflectiveness.

Educational administrationin a cross-cultural perspective

Thc search for new superseding perspectivesin educational administration is evident in van-guard intellectual circles of both industrializedsocieties and developing nations. In this context,there have been recent promising national andinternational efforts facing thc challenge ofcross-cultural co-operation in education andeducational administration. A number of theseefforts, developed by individual scholars and

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98 Benno Sander

universities, arc undertaken through inter-governmental agencies, such as Unesco/IIEP,the Regional Educational Development Pro-gram of thc Organization of AmericanStates, and the Latin American Faculty ofSocial Sciences (FLACSO).

Cross-cultural cooperation is also fostered bynational and international scientific and pro-fessional societies, such as: (a) thc InternationalIntervisitation Programme in Educational Ad-ministration (IIP), which has met every fouryears since 1966; (b) the University Councilfor Educational Administration (UCEA) in theUnited States; (c) the Brazilian National As-sociation of Professionals in Educational Ad-ministration (ANPAE), founded in 1961; (d) theCommonwealth Council for Educational Ad-ministration (CCEA); (e) the European Forumfor Educational Administration, created in 1977;(f) the Caribbean Society for the Study ofEducational Administration (CARSEA); and(g) the Inter-American Society for EducationalAdministration (ISEA), established in 1979.Their international conferences, research proj-ects and publications have been growing asforms of a constructive debate in the field ofeducational administration across cultures."

The cross-cultural perspective of educationand educational administration, especially thestudy of the transferability of educationalmodels and administrative paradigms acrosscultures, has particular appeal in the countriesof the developing world. In the last decadesthere has been a strong movement in thedeveloping countries towards thc conceptual-ization of cducation and educational adminis-tration from the angle of thc developing world.This creative sociological perspective is orig-inally rooted in the 'theory of dependence',"which is primarily concerned with the structuralrelations that explain the inequalities betweenand within nations. A good example is foundin Latin America, where committed scholarsarc involved in the construction of new concep-tual and analytical perspectives of education andeducational administration which arc politicallyresponsive and culturally relevant. A numbcrof recent publications on education and cdu-

cational administration in Latin America withinthe new vanguard pedagogical tradition havebrought an intense debate to the field." In thcspecific field of educational administration, thenew publications in the conflict tradition ad-dress critical-dialectical approaches," structuralanalysis," self-management paradigms" andphenomenological perspectives." Although theindividual contributions of the protagonists ofthe new orientation arc different, all of themshare a critique of the dominant consensustradition of educational administration. Anothercommon characteristic of the new LatinAmerican theoretical efforts in educationaladminiecration is their explicit epistemologicalorientation. However, going beyond thc evalu-ation of the limits of the foundations of pastand current dominant administrative theories,the most .creative aspect of the studies is theconstructive search for conceptual and analyti-cal perspectives to guide educational adminis-tration. Their common concern is the concep-tualization of educational organintion andadministrative perspectives that are culturallyrelevant and politically responsive to thc de-mands and needs of Latin American society.

The upcoming cross-cultural perspective ineducation and educational administration is alsoreflected in meetings and studies carricd out inindustrialized nations that address the phenom-enon of international interdependence in soci-ology and education. A good example was theFifth World Congress on Comparative Edu-cation held in Paris in 1984, where MichelDebeauvais emphasized educational interdepen-dence and linked its relevance 'to the fact thatinternational exchanges in the field of educationhave never bcen so intense and diverse.'" Inthe specific field of educational administrationin the United States, the phenomenon washighlighted by Patrick Lynch in his state-of-thc-art address on 'Dependency Theory andEducational Administration'," delivered in NewYork at thc 1982 Annual Meeting of theAmerican Educational Research Association.Promising research and training developmentswithin the conflict tradition are also takingplace in Australia, the Unitcd Kingdom and

Management and administration of education systems maior issues and trends

Canada. The Australian experience in the con-flict tradition follows the initiative of RichardBates's pioneering work on 'a critical practiceof educational administration'." In thc UnitedKingdom the new critical-emancipatory re-search and training efforts in educational ad-ministration keep affinity with the work of thenew sociologists and critical thinkers of edu-cation." The Canadian upsurge results partlyfrom the pioneering critical work of ThomasGreenfield" and as a superseding challengefaced by Canadian scholars involved in de-veloping countries.3'

Recent studies on comparative administrationcarried out in the industrialized world stemfrom general development theories coupledwith comparative anthropological investigationsand organizational studies across cultures. DenisGoulet'° in the United States and ClaudeDeblois" in Canada conceive similar 'lib-eration' approaches to development. Theirwritings override the dominant perspective ofthe traditional sociology of development andstand out as important sources for specificstudies on organizational life and administrativepractice. In a similar way as the dependencyscholars in Latin America found, the liberationscholars suggest that organization and admin-istrative theories conceived by and for indus-trialized countries are not transferable andapplicable to developing areas, due to the in-trinsic economic and cultural differences.

These and other similar contributions haveimportant implications for research, training,and cross-cultural technical co-operation ineducational administration. In a cross-culturalperspective, research and training contents andmethodologies in educational administrationcall for constant re-evaluations and reconstruc-tions. The question of the transferability ofdominant educational administrative modelsand practices demands meaningful answers. Asculture provides the context in which edu-cation is practised, cultural relevance is themajor guiding criterion to assess the ap-plicability of organization and administrativetheories, as well as planning practices, in thefield of education. Such a cultural orientation

99

implies a reconceptualization of national andinternational technical co-operation in the field.Thomas Wiggins's call for a 'transactional'approach to technical co-operation, as op-posed to the traditional 'assistance-intervention'framework," demonstrates an accepted con-cern in a number of vanguard intellectualcircles throughout the world.

To sum up, the search for new educationaladministrative theories is a challenge to intel-lectuals in both developing and industrializedcountries of East and West. In this worldwideintellectual challenge there is a place for bothnational constructive efforts and internationalcross-cultural co-operation. In both cascs, cul-tural relevance and political responsiveness tosocial and educational needs and demands arebasic criteria to guide inquiry and practice ineducational administration. Thc underlyingassumption of this orientation is that it caneffectively contribute to the furthering of asubstantive quality of collective human life ineducation and society in both particular nationalsettings and in the international context. Thisbrings us to the concept of collective partici-pation as the political strategy to accomplish asubstantive quality of collective human life insociety, and to further scientific and technologi-cal development in education and educationaladministration.

Towards collective participationin educational administration

My basic assumption is that participation is theright and dury of every member of a democraticsociety. This suggests that participation anddemocracy arc two closely linked concepts. Itis in the context of this as ociation that it ispossible to examine the historical role of edu-cation and scientific knowledge in general. Itis widely accepted that the function of edu-cation is the Lonstruction and distribution ofknowledge. The construction of knowledgeimplies freedom, consciousi,ess and collectiveparticipation. The distribution of knowledgeimplies an ethical commitment to equity and

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100 Benno Sander

social justice so that the knowledge thus con-structed can be of concrete benefit to theparticipants of the education system and societyin general. It is bearing this in mind thateducational institutions arc social instances inwhich it is possible to construct democracy as apolitical form to foster a substantive quality ofcollective human life. It is also in this way thatthe adoption of a participatory form of edu-cational administration is a concrete way ofcontributing to the construction of democracyin education and society. However, democracyis not the goal of educational and socialpractice in general. Democracy is the type ofpolitical mediation used to attain a substantivequality of collective human life as the ethicalgoal of both cducation and society. Therefore,participation in education, particularly in edu-cational administration, is, above all else, apolitical process, as it is in the governing ofsociety.

There are many specific forms of participationin educational administration, just as thereexist many forms of participation in the govern-ing of society." This article argues for collectivepanicipation in educational administration.Such a perspective is advanced in thc convictionthat collective participation can constitute apowerful antidote to the institutionalized autho-ritarianism of the formal bureaucracy and to thedogmatic action of minority groups.

Thc conceptualization of educational admin-istration as a process of collective participation"makes selective use of, and has an affinity with,the contributions of contemporary critical actiontheorists in sociology and the philosophy ofscience," organizational theory" and edu-cation." In the specific field of educationaladministration, Neidson Rodrigucs's concept of'collegiate action'," Lynn Davies's gender-inclusive model of 'holistic managemene" andour 'multidimensional paradigm of educationaladministration" arc examples of new partici-patory management perspectives and deserve anadditional reference.

Rodrigues has recently proposed a new formof articulafion between pedagogical practice andeducational administration based on his concept

of 'collegiate action'. Trying to override thetraditional centralized and bureaucratic man-agement practices, he proposes a form of edu-cational administration in which thc 'collegiate'is thc driving force of co-operative collectiveaction in thc school. He considers the collegiate,in which all the participar.ts of the school arcrepresented, as the instrument of a democraticform of decision-making. In his view, though,the collegiate is not only an administrativeinstrument, but a central pedagogical andpolitical instance in the school. The socialorganization of thc educational work based onthc concept of collegiate act ion rejects individu-alism and unharnessed and self-centred compe-tition, favouring co-operative collective actiontowards the furthering of a substantive qualityof human life in the school and in society.

Davies's conceptualization of 'holistic man-agement' gives special attention to an edu-cational administrative model that is gender-inclusive and culturally relevant. Her critique oftraditional educational administrative thcoryand practice has an affinity with the criticalthinkers of cducation and educational admin-istration. In the construction of her superseding'holistic management' model she includes boththe 'whole staff' and the 'whole person'. As faras thc preparation of educational administratorsis concerned, hcr contention is that manage-ment training should be opened up to allteachers. This orientation would facilitate col-lective participation in educational adminis-tration. It would also facilitate the democraticalternance and rotation of educational admin-istrators.

Critical human action, political participationand cultural relevance arc kcy concepts of thcmultidimensional paradigm of educational ad-ministration examined earlier. Participation, asa form of collective critical human action, is thepolitical stratcgy for thc attainment of a cul-turally relevant management practice as con-ceived in the multidimensional paradigm ofeducational administration. In adopting cul-tural relevance as the fundamental criterion,educational administration is appraised in term%of thc meanings and consequences of activities

Management and administration of education systems major issues and trends 10 1

for the improvement of the substantive qualityof collective human life in the education systemand society at large. The perception and in-terpretation of these meanings and consequencesare only possible through an administrativetheory conceived on the basis of real experience.This theoretical conceptualization is directlyfounded upon the participative posture of thoscresponsible for the management of the edu-cation system. The more participatory theadministrative proccss, the greater its chancesof being relevant to individuals and groups andthe greater its possibilities of explaining andfurthering the substantive quality of collectivehuman life. It is in the context of this partici-patory perspective, grounded in collective criti-cal human action, that educational adminis-tration can perform a role of democraticmediation that secks to reach a solid allianceof individual freedom and social equity in theeducational system, aiming to develop a formof human experience with cultural and politicalcontent.

The cultural and political contcnt occupies aprominent position in the debate over onc of themost important and controversial issues ineducational administration, that of the prep-aration and selection of educational adminis-trators for the various educational levels. Thefact is that participation in the preparation andselection of educational administrators takesplace in many different forms. What is certainis that, in this regard, there arc no pat formulasor universally applicable systems of partici-pation in educational administration, just as isthc case in the forms of government adopted indifferent societies, and there is no reason whythcrc should be. Much to the contrary, it is ourcontention that participation in educationaladministration is a culturally specific strategy.Therefore, each educational system shoulddetermine and adopt its own specific paradigmof participation in order to be culturally relevantfor its participants and, at the same time,politically 1.esponsive to thc aspirations andneeds of the population as a whole.

Again, participation in the preparation andselection of educational administrators is a

crucial issue that has yet to be method-ologically defined. The correct definition ofthis issue brings us to the concept of educationas a particular practice of politics, the latterdefined as the global practice of collectivehuman life. As a corollary of the relationshipbetween education and politics, educationaladministration is a pedagogical as well as apolitical act. If education is conceived as aparticular practice of politics, then there exists,in educational administration, a superordinationof the political over the pedagogical. In otherwords, educational administrators at the dif-ferent levels and modalities of education are,above all, politicians and, as such, shouldperform their functions with legitimacy andsocial responsibility. However, educational ad-ministrators should be technicmlly prepared ifthey are to perform their professional role withpolitical responsiveness and cultural relevance.The lack of technical competence among edu-cational administrators can seriously jeopardizetheir political and cultural role, while compro-mising the interests and aspirations of edu-cators, students, administrative support per-sonnel, and the community. All technicalactivity that affects the interests of the par-ticipants in the education system implies pol-itical and cultural responsibilities. Therefore,the technical preparation of educational ad-ministrators is important, since it is expected toprovide them with efficient and effective in-struments for the performance of their pro-fessional 'role with political responsiveness andcultural relevance.

Bearing in mind the association of thepedagogical and political aspects of educationaladministration in its cultural milieu, it is

imperative to conceive of a formula capable ofcombining the technical prcparation of edu-cational administrators with the process oftheir selection by the participants of the edu-cational institution and community represen-tatives. In this respect, the conceptualization ofeducational administration as a process ofcollective participation represents an initialattempt to combinc free election as a politicaland cultural strategy, and formal training as a

10 2 Benno Sander

technical requirement. The latter should besubordinated to the formcr, based on the'assumption that the technical critcria of adrnin-istrative efficiency and effectiveness are regu-lated by responsiveness and relevance as pol-itical and cultural critcria. The recommendationthat educational management training should beextended to all faculty members and all pro-spective teachers is particularly important. Theimportance of opening management training toall staff members is based on the assumptionthat such an orientation would enhance col-lective critical participation in thc managementof education, whatever the methodology eventu-ally adopted in the selection of educationaladministrators.

Thc perspective of educational administrationas a process of collective participation is not apoint of arrival, but rather a point of departure,among many others, on a long journey. It is notthe cnd of the task, but rather a beginning ofthe immense task of scicntific construction in thefield of education.

This article is a particular act of participationin a morc ample process of collective construc-tion of knowledge in education and educationaladministration. It is developed on the basis ofan intellectual commitment to the participantsin education systems, together with thc largercommunity engaged in thc construction offorms of educational planning and adminis-tration that respond to thc cultural aspirationsand political demands of socicty. Therefore, itis part of a process of collective participation inthc fulfilment of a real intellectual commitment.Democratic mediation is adopted as the politicalstrategy, in the conviction that democracy canprovide the basic ingredients to link freedom andequity in educational administration, aimed atthe construction of an education system Ind asociety founded upon the concept of the substan-tive quality of collective human life.

Notes

1. Fur an earlier discussion and application of theconcept of the quality of human life, see BennoSander, Consenso e conflito: Perspectivas analtticas napedagogia e na administracjo da educacdo, São Paulo;Niterói, Editora Pioneira/Universidade Federal Flu-minense, 1984; see also Pedro Demo, Avallacdoqualitativa, Sao Paulo, Editors Conez, 1987; JuanCarlos Tedesco, El desaf io educative: Calidad ydemocracia, Buenos Aires, Grupo Editor Latinoame-ricano, 1987.

2. See W. R. Scott, 'Developments in OrganizationTheory, 1960-1980', American Behavioral Scientist,Vol. 24, 1981, PP. 407-22, Organizations: Rational,Natural, and Open Systems, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,Prentice-Hall, 1981.

3. Jack A. Culbertson, 'Three Epistemologies and theStudy of Educational Administration', UCEA Review,Vol. XXII, No. t, Winter 1981, pp. 1-6.

4. Frederick W. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Manage-ment, New York, Harper & Row, 1911.

5. Henry Fayol, Administration industrielle et genérale,Paris, Dunod, 1916.

6. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and EconomicOrganization, New York, The Free l'ress, 1964.

7. Elton Mayo, The Human Problems of an IndustrialCivilization, New York, Macmillan, t 933; F. J. Roeth-lisberger and W. J. Dickson"ifanagentent and theWorker, Cat.ibridge, Mass., Harvard University Press,1939.

8. Chester I. Barnard, The Functions of the Executive,Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1938;Herbert A. Simon, Administrative Behavior, NewYork, Macmillan, x945.

9. Peter F. Drucker, Practice of Management, New York,Harper & Row, 1954; G. S. Odiorne, Management byObjectives, New York, Pittnan, 1965; J. W. Humble,Management by Objectives, London, Industrial Edu-cation and Research Foundation, 1967.

to. Ferrel Heady, Public Administration: A ComparativePerspective, Ncw York, Marcel Dekker, 1979; JohnD. Montgomery and William J. Siffin (eds.), Ap-proaches to Development: Politics, Administration andChange, New York, McGraw-Ihill, t 966; FredW. Riggs (ed.), Frontiers of Development Admin-istration, Durham, N.C., Duke University l'ress, 1970.Warren G. Bennis, Changing Organizations, NewYork, McGraw-Hill, 1966; Chris Argyris, Manage-ment and Organizational Development, New Ynrk,McGraw-Hill, 1971.

t 2. Fred W. Riggs, Administration in Developing CountriesThe Theory of Prismai: Society, Boston, HoughtonMifflin, 1964.

t 3. M. J. Esman and 14. C. Illaise, Institution BuildingResearch: The Guiding Concepts, Pittsburgh, The

Management and administration of education systems major issues and trends 103

University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Publicand International Affairs, 1966.

14. P. R. Lawrence and J. W. Lorsch, Organizations andEnvironment, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard GraduateSchool of Business Administration, 1967.

15. Statements on these efforts can be found in thefollowing publications: T. B. Greenfield, `Theoryabout Organizations', in M. Hughes (ed.), Adminis-tering Education: International Challenge, London,Athlone Press, 1975; G. Burrell and G. Morgan,Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysts,London, Heinemann, 1980; R. J. Bates, 'Towards aCritical Practice of Educational Administration',Studies in Educational Administration, CCEA, No. 27,September 1982, pp. t-i 5; Alberto Guerreiro Ramos,.4 nova ciIncia das organizardes, Rio de Janeiro,Fundacao Getidio Vargas, 1981; J. K. Benson, 'Or-ganizations: A Dialectical View', Administrative ScienceQuarterly, VOI. 22, No. 1, March 1977, pp. 1-21;M. Crozier and E. Friedberg, L'acteur et le systeme:les contraintes de l'action collective, Paris, Editions duSend, 1977; Alain Touraine, Sociologic de Paction,Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1965; J. Culbertson, 'ThreeEpistemologies and the Study of Educational Admin-istration', UCEA Review, Vol. 22, No. t, 1981.

PP. 1-6.

16. For the original conceptualization of the IT ultichmen-sional paradigm of educational adminivration seeBenno Sander, Administracdo da educaedo Brasil:Evolucdo do conhecimento, Fortaleza, Edieoes Uni-versidade Federal do Ceara, 1982; 'Administracio daeducaello no Brasil: E hora da relevancia', EducacdoBran leira (Brasilia), Vol. IV, No. 9, t982, pp. 8-27;'Administracion de la educación en America Latina:El concepto de relevancia cultural', La Educaciein(Washington, D.C., Organization of American States),No. 94,1984, PP. 49-69. For an expansion of the orig-inal ideas, see Benno Sander and Thomas Wiggins,'Cultural Context of Administrative l'heory: In Con-sideration of a Multidimensional Paradigm', Edu-cational Administration Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 1,

Winter 1985, pp. 95-117. For an empirical testing ofthe multidimensional paradigm, see Ana ElizabethL. A. dos Santos, '0 processo decisbrio no MEC: Umlogo de for:gas na administracao da educacao', Brasilia,University of Brasilia, 1984 (M.A. thesis).

17. This dimension is emphasized, for example, byJ. H. M. Brito, 'Administracio universitaria. Alterna-tiva empresarial cu acadtmica', Inforrnattvo ANIME,No. 3, 198o, pp. 5-8.

18. The pedagogical dimension is emphasized in rhephenomenological work of A. M. Rezende, J. C. SantosFilho and L. R. Carvalho, 'Adirunistracao universi-tam corno ato pedagógico', liducaido e Sociedide,No. 1, VOI. 2, t979, pp. 25-35.

19. The political dimension is particularly important forMiguel Gonzalez Arroyo, 'Administracao da edusa-clio, poder c participaclo', Edutatdo e Sociedade,

No. 2, Jan., 1979, PP. 34-6; Lauro Carlos Wittmann,'Administraello da educacao hoje: Ambiguidades desua producio histOrica', lim Aberto (Brasilia, Minis-

da Educacio), Vol. 6, No. 36, 1987, pp. 5-7.zo. See Sander and Wiggins, op. cit.21. Sander, Administracdo da Educacdo..., op. cit.22. Ibid., pp.23. Noel McGinn and Luis Porter Galater, 'An Intro-

duction to Strategic Planning in Education', Cam-bridge, Mass., Harvard University, Graduate Schoolof Education, 1983 (mimeo); 'Modelos de planificaciOneducativa para las comunidades marginales', LaEducacidn (Washington, D.C., OAS), No. 94/95,1984,PP. 34-72.

24. For an analysis of the origin and nature of politicaland educational centralization in Latin America, seeCarlos E. Olivcra, The Administration of EducationalDevelopment in Latin America, Paris, Uneseo/Inter-national Institute for Educational Planning, 1979,pp. 22-31.

25. For conceptual formulations and case-srudies, seeCarlos Malpica and Shapour Rassekh (eds.), Edu-cational Administration and Multilevel Plan Implemen-tation: Experiences from Developing Countries, Paris,International Institute for Educational Planning, 1983(Selected IIEP Seminar Papers); Olivera, op.. cit.;Octavio Arizmench Posada, Francisco Cespedes andVicente Umbelino de Souza, `La administraciOn dela educachin en America Latina: Estudio sobre(Aron y descentralizaciOn adrninistrativa', Seminariosobre administracicin de la educatiOn en America Latina,Washington, D.C., OAS, 19731 PP. 143-259; Organ-ization of American States, Seminario-Taller Latino-americano de regionalization educativa, Concepcion,Chile, Universidad de Concepciem, Centro de Admi-nistraciOn Educacional, 1983; Norberto FernandezLamarra, Regionalizacidn, descentralizaciOn y nuclea-rizacidn de la educatión, Buenos Aires, Consejo Federalde Inversiones, 1987; Noel McGinn, 'Un proyecto deinvestigación y acción para la descentralizacion desisternas educacionales', La EdutacuM, Washington,D.C., OAS, Vol. XXXI, No. tot, 1987, pp. 165-80:Silvia N. de Senen Gonzalez, 'Reflexiones sobre laspo:ibilidades y perspectivas de la regionalizaci6neducativa', La Educacitin (Washington, D.C., OAS),Vol. XXXI, No. lot, pp. 135-54. For a discussionand case studie on educational regionalization inLatin America tee La Educacidn (Washington, D.C.,OAS), Vol. XXVI, Nos. 87 and 88,1982.

26. A recent interesting debate over centralization anddecentralization in educational administration wascarried out at a specialized meeting sponsored by theOrganization of American States in Washington, D.C.,in *987, and published in l.a Educacidn (Washington,1) C.), Vol. XXXI, No. 101, 1987.

27. See Carlos Malpica, 'Programa% internacionales deformacibn pars la administracilm de la educacibn',Studio Paedagogica (Salamanca, Universidad de Sala-

104 Benno Sander

mann), No. 15/16, 198$, pp. 75-81; MerediddHughes (ed.), Administering Education: InternationalChallenge, London, Athlone Press, 1975; RobinH. Farquhar and Ian E. Housego, Canadian andComparative Educational Administration, Vancouver,University of British Columbia, 1980. For a renewedeffort in educational administration in the Americas,under the joint sponsorship of ISEA, ANPAE andUCEA, see 'The First Inter-American Congresson Educational Administration', UCEA Review,Vol. XXI, No. z, Spring 1980, with articles by JackCulbertson, Benno Sander, Patrick Lynch, ThomasWiggins, Ivan Barrientos Monzein and LorenzoGuadamuz Sandoval. For a recent effort in theCaribbean, under the auspices of CARSEA andCCEA, see David M.arshall and Earle Newton (eds.),The Professional Preparation and Development of Edu-cational Administrators in Developing Areas: TheCaribbean, North Bay, Ontario, Nipissing UniversityCollege, 1986.

28. For an overview of the concept of dependence andits utilization as an analytical category in education,see the Open File on 'Dependence and Interdepen-dence in Education', in Prospects, Vol. XV, No. 2,1985, pp. 189-271 with articles by Michel Debeauvais,Benno Sander, Jacques Velloso, Max A. Eckstein andHarold J. Noah, Carlos E. Oliveira, E. AyotundeYoloye, Ruth Ilayhoe, and Patricia Broadfoot.

29. See, for example, Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of theOppressed, New York, Seabury Press, 1974; JuanCarlos Tedesco, El desaflo educativo: calidad y demo-cracies, Buenos Aires, Grupo Editor Latinoamericano,1987; Gtuomar Namo de Mello, Magisterio deL. grow da competencies ticnica ao compromusopolitico, Sao Paulo, Editora Cortez, 1982; GermanW. Rama, 'Educaciön, Imagenes y Esti los de Desa-rroLlo', Desarrollo y educacion en America Latina y ciCaribe, Buenos Aires, Unesco/CEPAL/UNDP, 1977;Cecilia Braslavsky, desaflo fundamental de laeducación Latinoamericana durante los proximos25 Construir su destino',Lo Educacidn (Washing-ton, OAS), Vol. No. sot, pp. 67-82; GregonoWeinberg, 'Moe elos ecLicativos en el desarrollo his-t6rico de America Latit.a', Desarrollo y educacidn enAmerica Latina y el Caribe, op. cit.; Demo, op. at ;Moacir Gadotti, Educacdo e poder: Introducdopedagogia do conflito, Sio Paulo, Cortez Editors, 1981;Dermeval Saviani, Educacdo: Do senso comumconsciincia filosafica, Sao Paulo, Editora Cortez, 1982.

30. Carlos Roberto Jamil Cory, Educacdo e contradicdo.Elementos metodoldgicos para uma teoria critica dofenômeno educativo, Sao Paulo, Cortez Editors, 1985;Maria de Fatima Costa Felix, Administracdo escolarUrn problema educatwo ou empresartal, Sao Paulo.Cortez Editors, 1984; Ackia Zerteida kuenkt Sung,'A teoril da administrack educacional. Ciemia eideologia', Cadernos de Pesquisa (Silo l'aulo, FundacloCarlos Chagas), No. 48, February 1984, pp 39-46;

31

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

Lauro Carlos Wittmann, 'Administracilo e planeja-mento da educack: Aro politico-pedagogico', RevivesBranleira de Administracdo da Educapio(l'orto Alegre),Vol. 1, No. 2,1983, pp. 10-22; 1/110/ llcnrique ra10,Administracdo escolar: Introducdo crimes, Sao Paulo,Editora Cortez, 1986; Sander, Consenso e confliw,op. cit.Mauricio Tragtenberg, Burocracia e ideologia, SaoPaulo, Mica, 1974; Adrninistracdo, poder e ideologies,Sao Paulo, Echtora Moraes, 1980; Miguel GonzalezArroyo, 'A administracao da educack e urn problemapolitico', Retnsta 13rasileira de Adminiaraedo da Edu-cacdo (Porto Alegre, ANPAE:, Vol. I, No. t, 1983,pp. 122-9, 'Administracao da educack, poder eparticipação', Educaccio e sociedade, Sao Paulo, CortezEditora, No. 2, 1979, PP. 36-46.Fernando Prestes Motta, Burocracio e autogestdo, SaoPaulo, Editora Brasiliense, 1981.Antonio Muria Rezende et al., 'Administraelo daeducacão como ato pedagogico', Educacdo Brasoleira,Vol. I, No. 12, 1978, pp. 15-58.Michel Debeauvais, 'Dependence and Interdepen-dence in Education: Introductory Note to the CongressTheme', Paper presented at thc Fifth World Congresson Comparative Education, Pans, July 1984.Patrick D. Lynch, 'Dependency Theory and Edu-cational Administration', New York, Am:man Edu-cational Research Association, State of the ArtAddress, Division A, 1982.Richard J. Bates, 'Towards a Critical Practice ofEducational Administration', Studies in EducationalAdministration (CCEA), No 27, September 1982,PP. 1-15.Lynn Davies, 'Towards a Gender-Inclusive Theoryof Educational Administration', Birmingham, Univer-sity of Birmingham, 1985 (mimeo).Thomas B. Greenfield, 'Theory About Organizations:A New Perspective and its Implications for Schools',in Meredidd Hughes (ed.), Administering Education:In:..-..wtional Challenge, London, Athlone Press, 1975,pp. 75-99, 'Organization Theory as Ideology', Cur-riculum Inquiry, Vol. IX, No. 2, 1979, pp. 97-102,'Research in Educational Administration in the UnitedStates and Canada: An Overview and Critique',Educational Administration, Vol. VIII, No. I, 1980,PP. 207-45.David G. Marshall, 'Educational Adnunistration inDeveloping Areas: A Role for Canadian Scholars',Comparative and International Education Review,Vol. 13, No. I, 1984, tv- 19-17; David G. tstarshalland Earle Newton, The Professional l'reparation ofSchool Admimstrators 5 Developing Countries: SomeCritical Imes for Decision-Malting, Fdmonton, Uni-versity of Alberta, Faculty of Edmation, 1983 (CIEDOccasional Paper No. 31, The Professional Preparationand Development of Educational Adimmitraror, on De-veloping Areas: The Caribbean, North Bay, Ontario,Nipissing University College, 1986.

Management and administration of education systcms maior issues and trends 105

40. Denis Goulet, 'Three Rationalities in DevelopmentDecision-Making', World Development, February,1986.

41. Claude Deblois, 'An Emergent Model of Or 6aniz-anon', Edmonton, University of Alberta, 1976 (Doc-toral dissertation), 'Challenge to AdministrativeTheory', Canadian Administrator, Vol. 18, No. 8,1978.

42. Thomas Wiggins, 'Emergent Shafts in AdministrativeTraining Models in the Americas', Keynote addressdelivered to the First Inter-American Congress onEducational Administration, Brasilia, Inter-AmericanSociety for Educational Administration, Decem-ber 1979.

43. The extensive literature on participation in the socialsciences sho,s that thc concept is used in a numberof areas, such as rcscarch, planning, evaluation andadministration. See, for example, Carlos RodriguesBrandio (ed.), Pesquisa participante, Sio Paulo, Edi-tors Brasiliense, 1981; Pedro Demo, Investigacionparticipanw: Msto y realidad, Buenos Aires, Kapelusx,1985,`Planelamento participativo', Forum Educacional,Rio de Janeiro, FGV, 1985; Roy Carr-Hill, Partici-patory Planning in Education: Testing Seine Concepts,Paris, Unesco, Division of Educational Policy andPlanning, 1980; J. Wertheim and M. Argumedo (eds.),Educacdo e participacdo, Rio de Janeiro, Phi 1013031mo/

IICAJSEPSIMEC, 1985.44. For an earlier debate, see Sander, Consenso e confisto,

op. 61., PP. 139-52.45. Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative

Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization ofSociety, Boston, Beacon, 1981; see especially pp. Itet seq. for his conceptualization of the critical con-struct of 'purposive rational action'. See also Goulet,op. cit.

46. Touraine, op. cit.; David Silverman, The Theory ofOrganizations: A Sociological Framework, New York,Basic Books, 1970; Ramos, op. cit.; Michel Crazierand Erhard Friedberg, Le systime et l'acteur: Lestontraintes de racoon collective, Paris, Editions duScuil, r977.

47. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York,Seabury Press, 1974; Henry A. Giroux, 'Theories ofReproduction and Resistance in the New Sociologyof Education', Ilarvard Educational Review, Vol. 53,No. 3, 1983, pp. 257-93.

48. Neidson Rodrigues, Por uma nova escola: trawl-tdrio e o permanente na educciedo,Sio Paulo, CortezEditora, 1985.

49. Davies, op. cit.So. Sander, 'Administraclo da educaciin op.

Sander and Wiggins, op. cit.

1 r.-L. 6.

Managing schools foreducational quality

and equity:finding the proper mix

to make it workJacques Hallak

The right structure does not guarantee results. But the wrong structure aborts results and smothers even

the best directed efforts.

Introduction_

In the 1960s and 1970s, centralized adminis-tration was generally regarded as reasonablyeffective in supporting the fantastic expansionof education systems in many developing coun-tries. Existing education administrative systemsproved capable of training and recruiting a grow-ing number of teachers, of building and equip-ping facilities, and of monitoring the distribu-

Jacques I lallak (France) liar been Director of the Inter-national Institute for Educational Planning (UNESCO)mice October 1988. He is author or co-author of numerousb,ok, and article, on educational coos and finance, hu-man re sour ,e det,elopment, planmng the location a/schools,

and Mulct for educational change and development. Hsilatest publication, Investing in the Future: Setting Edu-Lational Priorities an the Developing World, was pub-tithed windy by DEP/UNESCO and Pergamon Pro, in199(1

Peter Drucker, 1964

tion of financial and didactic materials and re-sources.

With the growth in the size of education sys-tems, coupled with the financial constraints ofthe 1980s and their consequences on educationsystems, existing administrative and managerialsectorsmostly centralizedseemed to havereached their limits and were suffering frominadequate organizational structures, an inca-pacity to operate large-scale education systemsand, from poor communication channels, tomonitor what was happening in the classrooms.

In this connection, we should recall that thestyle of educational administration generally re-flects, and is intricately linked to, the wider sys-tem of public administration, thus complicatingattempts to reform the education system.

The nature of education is, moreover, suchthat it is provided by a multitude of small, dis-persed and disparate units. In virtu,illy all coun-tries, schools must respond to diverse interestsand goals which are often in conflict. Parents'

r

108 facques Hallak

associations, teachers' unions and locally electedschool boards often have a powerful influenceboth on the objectives that the schools are ex-pected to attain and on the resources availableto schools. Local level priorities often do notcoincide with those of the central level. Hori-zontal and vertical communication channels be-tween the various agencies providing educationalservices are often blocked.

Responsibility and authority are often notaccompanicd by adequate resources. In addi-tion, schools have frequently to contend withthe pressures generated by the competitive ex-aminations that guard the gates to the variousstages of the education system.

Reforming such a complex system represents

ing more effective and rational linkages betweenthe various administrative levels.

Central and intermediatelevels of administration:

trends and issues

Although it is not easy to generalize on an in-ternational scale about trends in educationadministration, the predominant pattern is thatof rather centralized systems: very ineffectiveentities at both the central and intermediatelevels, with some examples of minor devolu-

a major challenge for most governments. As an tion of authority and responsibilities to inter-example, primary education throughout the mediate, local and school levels for curricula,world has organizational structures which are. staffing and budget management. Apart from afundamentally similar: at the base are groups of few exceptions, the major constraints or prob-schools organized in geo-political districts. Al- lems relate to inadequate organizational struc-most all schools are managed by a headmasteror principal. In many countries, individualschools or groups of schools are overseen byschool boards or parent/teacher associations,some of which have considerable influence. Anintermediate administrative organization, thedistrict-level, provides some level of supervi-sion and technical support. At the top of thestructure is a national ministry or departmentof education, responsible for the planning andadministration of the education system as awhole, with one department holding principalresponsibility, for example, for primary school-ing. In larger countries, tlis structure extendsover four levels with th e addition of a stateeducation agency tu provincial ministry, be-tween the district and the national ministry.Although this three- or four-tier structure ba-sically describes all education systems, there isactually great diversity among them because of

tures, lack of adequate managerial capacity andineffective information systems.

In addressing the issue of improvement ofmanagement, we should basically take into con-sideration these dimensions which constituteconstraints to managerial and institutional ef-fectiveness.

The most central notion is that of an effectiveorganizational structure. We do not need to goback to the long-standing debate on centraliza-tion versus decentralization. Centralized systemshave proved most effective in countries charac-terized by a politically and economically stableenvironment, strong administrative systems,good infrastructure, comparatively well-edu-cated and compensated teachers, and a relativelyhomogenous context for schooling. For example,this has been the case in the Republic of Koreaand Japan.

However, in countries with long distancesthe variety of patterns in the distribution of between individual schools and the centre, greatdecision-making authority.

Improving school management for quality andequity means improving management at each ofthese levels, from the highest hierarchical levelin the system down to the school, and establish-

ethnic and linguistic diversity, and relativelypoorly developed transportation and communi-cation systems, rigid centralization blocks re-sources and information flows and leads to theinefficient and ineffective operation of the sys-

Managing schools for educational quality and equity: 109finding the proper mix to make it work

tern. In such circumstances, education systemsare likely to be more efficient and effective ifcertain functions are devolved to the lower lev-els. Given the very wide variety of administrativetraditions in different societies, it is not possibleto prescribe what these functions and responsi-bilities should be. The challenge is to definecriteria for devolving functions and responsibili-ties while maintaining an overall effective orga-nizational structure.

In this regard, I should like to make a distinc-tion between (i) the central-level, (ii) the inter-mediate-level and (iii) the local- or school-level.

The central level. Administrative weaknessesgenerally arise when managers do not have suf-ficient authority and/or resources to do their jobeffectively, when communication channels areblocked, when roles and responsibilities areunclear or when managers' time is either con-sumed with routine tasks or with addressing, onan ad hoc basis, requests by the political struc-ture. For those who are acquainted with thesubject, the usual picture in many developingcountries is all too familiar: a small group offirst-class managers, who have little power andhave continuously to change their programmeof work without clear notions of the agenda tobe implemented and the resources to be mobi-lized for that purpose; there is little or no ac-countability nor incentives for them to remain intheir posts or to undertake major programmes toimprove administration and management. Thissmall group is surrounded by some 'old-timers',waiting for retirement and blocking any possi-bility for upward mobility, and by large numbersof mediocre, untrained colleagues who haveescaped from the teaching profession and whomay have been excellent teachers but prove to bepoor administrators.

The intermediate level. Offices tend to be evenmoreinadequately staffed (which can mean over-or under-staffed), poorly financed and accept-ing the limitations in their authority to act. Theirprincipal responsibilityat least according tothe rules and regulationsis to provide profes-sional assistance and technical support toschools, teachers and principals. The typical

district office operates however solely as a 'mail-box', transmitting guidelines, decisions and rulesfrom the central offices down to the lower layersof the administrative machinery. There are, ofcourse, more favourable circumstances, wherethe intermediate structure operates as aninspectorate, serving as a link in the top-downadministrative control of schools, although ne-glecting its role as a source of professional sup-port. Even under such favourable circumstances,however, there are no incentives to encouragethe intermediate levels to report mismanage-ment, violation of rules, or, on the other hand,the good performance of institutions, requiringrewards or encouragement. Nor are there incen-tives for the intermediate levels to promote, atthe lower levels of the system, initiatives, inno-vative attitudes or educational experiments witha risk element.

At the local or school level. The mismatch be-tween authority and responsibility is particu-larly acute. Principals are largely excluded fromdecisions that affect their ability to improve stu-dent achievement. Curricula are designed cen-trally, often with little attention to the diversityof schools and students' interests. Teachers arcvery often appointed, assigned and evaluatedcentrally, leaving principals with little controlover the choice or discipline of teachers.

The failure of teacher employment policies totake into account regional and local needs, sub-ject-matter and grade-level needs underminessignificantly the ability of principals to build andmaintain an effective school environment. Fewprincipals have the authority or the resources toorganize staff development programmes aimedat the problems and challenges faced by theteachers in their schools. At best, they may haveaccess to more general programmes created na-tionally. The lack of full authority at the schoollevel is most prevalent in highly centralized sys-tems but even in more decentralized ones, au-thority is not always delegated below the inter-mediate levels.

Given the importance of learning as a jointeffort outcome of the school and the commu-nity, school manager need to be able to mobi-

110 Jacques Hallak

lize and use local resources for school improve-ment especially in situations where central levelresources are scarce. However, school leadersare severely constrained in their ability to dothis. When central administrative rules and regu-lations require that funds raised be submitted tothe central ministry, this restricts the purposesfor which they had been intended.

At the same time, in the absence of testingand monitoring systems which make it possibleto assess performance, schools are largely heldaccountable to rules that govern 0 - use of basicinputs (enrolment allocations, student/teacherratios, schedules and time allocations, reportingrequirements). Such rules are and may be nec-essary, but obviously they do little to create in-centives for schools to focus on interventionsthat lead to improved student achievement.

The case for school-basedmanagement

Given the severe difficulties faced by educationaladministrationsoften attributed to the inher-ent weaknesses of centralized structureseffortshave been made to find alternative approachesfor the administration and management of edu-cation. Such approaches have been inspired andhave inspircd the principle of devolution of au-thority to lower levels in matters of governance,financial control, content, methods, norms andstandards. However, given the difficulties facingsome decentralized systems, such as in the UnitedKingdom and the United States, which also sufferfrom inefficiency in management, low quality ofeducation, and enormous disparities, more radi-cal alternative approaches to administration andmanagement of education were proposed in the1980s. One suggestion was to entrust manage-rial responsibility to the schools. The argumentsfor school-based management have been basi-cally determined by three sets of ideas.

One set of ideas stems from the fact that ef-fective management is needed at the level whereteaching and learning take place--in the school,in the classroombecause quality education

requires effective school management. The Thaiprogramme of clustering schools for greatercollaboration and co-operation in order to im-prove the quality of education is a good illustra-tion of school-centred administrative practice.

A second set of ideas is connected with theimage concerning the role of the State as a poormanager and provider of services when com-pared to the private sector. Phrases like 'open,deregulated school market', 'emphasis on pa-rental choice' and 'school competitions' havebecome commonplace in many countries ofEurope and North America where it is fashion-able to attack the monopoly of public .(govern-ment) school services.

A third set of ideas is very much linked to theso-called 'expanded vision' which is shared by alarge number of partners of the educationalprofession and which was adopted by the WorldConference onEducation forAll, held in Jomtien,Thailand. This vision has five dimensions:

the universalizing of access to education andthe promotion of educational equity;a focus on learning acquisition;the broadening of the means and scope ofbasic education;the enhancing of the environment for learn-ing;the strengthening of partnership in the plan-ning and implementation of education.

The latter dimension, the strengthening of part-nership, is considered to bc fundamental becauseof the proven incapacity of central administra-tive services (money and control) to implementlocally, at the school level, centrally designedreforms and innovations. Even if that were notthe case, i.e. even if reforms designed centrallycould be implemented, these may prove to beirrelevant to local needs. Hence, the need fordevolution of authority from central to locallevels, down to other actors of the educationsystem.

When the three groups of ideas are combinedand the benefits set out, the pressures for localmanagement of schools become irresistible. Thetype of benefits expected are:

greater flexibility in utilizing funds;

Managing schools for educational quality and equity: 1 1 1

finding th: proper mix to make it work

increased involvement of various actors indecision-making;removal of centralized bureaucratic control;increased capacity for innovation, creativityand experimentation,potential for economies;ability to reallocate resources to meet schoolobjectives;greater autonomy in decision-making.

Such expectations may be summarized in threeclusters:

increased efficiency;increased quality;more democratic and equitable responsibilityin the management of schools.

School-based management:major principles,

assumptions, conditions

It is difficult to find a consensus view on whatis meant by school-based management. TheAustralian Thesaurus of Education Descriptorsprovides a reasonable basis: 'an administrativesystem in which an individual school exercisesautonomous decision-making on budgets, cur-riculum and personnel within policy guidelinesset by its governing board'.

The main ideas describing what school-basedmanagement really is can be summarized in tenpoints:

1. School-based management may be de-fined as a change in the distribution of the powerstructure (decentralization). The school becomesthe principal entity of any change in the educa-tion system. It is the epicentre for the implemen-tation of educational reforms.

2. The possibility for the school to operateon a relatively autonomous basis and to solve itsown problems requires the co-operation of thedifferent actors and the sharing of responsibili-ties among all those who participate in the life ofthe school.

3. The professionals at the school have in-creased responsibility and accountability vis-A-

BEST COPY AVAILADLi

vis the hierarchical structure because thc newsystem implies a systematic use of both intr naland external evaluation and assessment, as wellas reports on the results of self-evaluation.

4. New structures of participation (forums,councils) are established to enable the inter-change and participation of various actors in therunning of the school. The actors are the head-master, the teachers, the parents, the local com-munities and sometimes the students, as well asrepresentatives of private enterprise from thelocality or the region. The participation of teach-ers is probably the most significant form of changein the distribution of decision-making power inthe education system. Teachers are supposed toinspire the necessary reforms which will improveresource allocation. Given the fact that teachersimplement most decisions, their role is veryimportant for the success of any reform, becausethey are able to propose, support or block anyimprovement. If the personnel of the school hasnot been involved in the design of the projectsof improvement, they will not feel committed topromoting and supporting them.

5. Structures for management assistance andsupport have to be established. Such structuresinclude a special budget, the preparation of teach-ers so that they are capable of participating inthe management of the school, and increasedallocation of time for group work. The delega-tion and distribution of responsibility in theschool for budget, personnel management andcurriculum matters are prerequisites for effec-tive school-based management.

6. The success or failure of any improve-ment depends very much on the conditions pre-vailing in each school engaged in the very com-plicated and difficult task of improving its op-erations and not only on the national policy,global plans of reform or general decisions, aswas previously the case. No effective change cantake place if it does not take into considerationthe specific conditions existing in each school.

7. The improvement of the organizationalcapacity of each school requires both a clearcommunication line among the actors and im-proved group work. The circulation of inforrna-

112 Jacques Hallak

tion is a necessary condition to solving prob-lems; this also requires that decisions be takencollectively. It is therefore essential that the larg-est number of actors be involved from the out-set, that a priority be established as to what arethe most important tasks, and so on. This re-quires, in the first phase, a good diagnosis ofhow the school operates.

8. Any school reform should be conceivedglobally and not piecemeal; it has also to involvethe institution as a whole and consider all itsobjectives and its functions. Moreover the schoolshould have the capacity to innovate built intoits design and organization.

9. The environment of the school should bea favourable one and this requires transparency,simplicity and the possibility to implement anyproposed change.

10. School-based review (i.e. evaluation) byand for the major actors of the school is consid-ered as a necessary condition for improving theoperation of the school. It is a very importantstep in the introduction of any school-based man-agement reform.

In summary, the main characteristics ofschool-based management which assumes heavydevolution of authority and governance to theschools, can be described in three words: au-tonomy, participation and self-monitoring. Promot-ers of school-based management assume that:(i) these characteristicsa utonomy, participation,and self-monitoringare compatible with cachother; and (ii) that there are mechanisms forreconciling them with the needs and constraintsof operating an overall education system in acoherent fashion. In the last sections of this pa-per, I shall address these assumptions.

Learning from experience

Autonomy, participation and self-monitoringare intimately interlinked features of school-based management. Autonomyan issue ofgovernancesupposes co-operation betweenactors, the key to participation, and adequatemanagement structures (budget, personnel,

curricula), a pre-requisite for self-monitoring.Participationalso an issue of governancerequires a clear perception of the tasks of theinstitution in which autonomy is exercised, andadequate communication channels and infor-mation systems among the actors involved,which is a central aspect of self-monitoring.Finally, self-monitoring cannot be an end initself but serves to support the capacity of theschool to operate autonomously and providethe required feedback of information to allowmeaningful participation.

Although this set of arrangements is concep-tually reasonable, experience shows, however,that a number of problems and tensions appear,when applying the school-based managementapproach with a view to improving efficiencyand equity of schools. These relate to the diffi-culty of reconciling autonomy, participation andself-monitoring.

Firstly, it should be borne in mind that theschool is a human organization. This humandimension is very important for an understand-ing of the quality of schooling and the quality oflearning which is given in the school. As au-tonomy and participation imply, in essence,changes in governance and in the distribution ofpower among the main actors of the educationsystem, they are bound to generate conflict andcompetition. A few examples illustrate this ar-gument:

Decentralization has often suffered from pres-sures and obstacles from the central office,resulting in disorganization of the system;hence, in the name of participation, centraladministration has been able to restore au-thority and control over the schools.Autonomy has sometimes generated conflictbetweeh two concepts of management: (i)management by the community and (ii) man-agement by the government. A typical case inpoint is the management of school buildings.In some countries, school buildings are fi-nanced mostly by contributions from the lo-cal community. Who should decide ultimatelyon the norms and characteristics of the futureschool? Is the community ready to invest in a

Managing schools for educational quality and equity: 113

finding the proper mix to make it work

project which would not remain under its con-trol?As we all know, most reforms of educationadministration systems refer to participationbut rarely to autonomy. Even in the mostadvanced systems of devolution, the Stateprovides very little autonomy to schools in thethree key areas of governance: (i) budget, (ii)staff and (iii) curriculum.

Secondly, because schools are human organiza-tions, human resource conditionsincludingcapacity for management, collaborating in de-cision-making and sharing and using informa-tionare determinant factors for successfulschool-based management. Unfortunately, inmany countries the conditions of human re-sources are poor and inadequate. In this re-gard, the active participation of the differentactors in the process should not be neglected.This concerns the principals or headmasters,the teachers, the parents, the pupils and thecommunity surrounding the school.

More specifically, the role of the principal orheadmaster should not be minimized. The prin-cipal is the focus of authority in the school andthe crucial link with the outside world. Thesuccess of a participatory project depends verymuch on the attitude of the principal, his readi-ness to implement a reform, his managerial ca-pacity and his ability to mobilize other actorswithin the school (teachers, parents, etc.). Thequality of education will therefore depend onthe nature of the leadership given by the head-master, in other words, his ability to control,direct and guide teachers. Studies have shownthat there is a strong correlation between schoolswith the highest performance and the quality ofthe headmaster. For instance, a study from theRepublic of Korea shows that, when headmas-ters feel they have too much respopsibility andvery little autonomy, and that they are spendingtoo much timc in meetings and not enough onacademic business, the implications for theschools are very negative.

Another study on Hong Kong shows thatheadmasters consider that a major obstacle toin-service training is the increase in the workload

of teachers. The same study shows that the at-titude of headrnasters who stick to a centralizedpolicy of management without encouragingparticipation of teachers generates a sense ofrejection on the part of the teachers, loweringmotivation and creating a lack of interest andinvolvement in improving the school.

The participation of teachcrs in school man-agement has, however, both positive and nega-tive attitudes. On the one hand, the teacher canhelp the headmaster in his task of directing theschool, designing the programme of studies andin decision-making. Participation of teachers andthe exchange of information between teachersand the headmaster as well as among teachershave helped improve the quality of teaching.This idea was developed by UNESCO in itsregional programme for Asia and the Pacific. Onthe other hand, increased participation by teach-ers may be detrimental to the quality of teachingbecause the time devoted to academic activitiesmay be reduced.

It is also fair to say that, in many developingcountries today, most teachers are underpaidand have to work under very adverse economicand professional conditions. In these circum-stances, it is important to note that many ofthem are not motivated and a high rate of absen-teeism is a typical pattern in many countries.The question which one can then ask is do teach-ers really want to have more responsibilities whensimply carrying out their own traditional tasksposes problems. Some countries try to addressthis issue by establishing incentive systems. Thisis the case in Thailand.

The participation of parents in the life of theschool is dependent on many factors: the levelof education or training of the parents, espe-cially of the mother, the kind of commitmentthey feel towards the school and the possibilitiesthey have of participating in the life of the school.The case of Eseuela Nueva in Colombia showshow parents can be integrated into thc life of theschool and be involved in the process of children'seducation and training. According to severalevaluations, the Escucla Nueva approach hasmany advantages. Firstly, it has enabled the

114 Jacques Hallak

teaching content to be enriched. Secondly, par-ents feel more concerned about the develop-ment of the school and that of their children.Thirdly, the institution becomes a place for anexchange and discussion of educational mattersbetween the various actors of the system.

Another study on Indonesia shows that thesocial and economic conditions of the parentshave a great influence upon the level and type ofassistance given to the school. The same studyshows that, .1though parents arc not alwaysavailable to participate in the social life of theschool, they are ready to contribute financiallyto the school. In this connection, the experienceof many countries shows that the 'easiest' way ofmaking parents participate in the life of the schoolis to get them to participate financially.

The role of the pupils has to be defined be-cause they are the fundamental actors of theeducational process. The experience of EscuelaNueva shows that, when more advanced stu-dents help the teacher in his task, they can workin groups which helps develop a sense of respon-sibility; they thus become partners in the wholeteaching/learning process of the school. Thismotivates both the children who are active learn-ers and those who are active teachers, thus in-creasing thc rate of school success. In some cases,especially in one-teacher schools, the participa-tion of pupils has reduced the disparity in per-formance between children.

An interesting example in a very specific caseis the programme `MINDSACROSS' in Ugandawhich was introduced for textbooks and in whichchildren are involved in the preparation of schooltextbooks.

Finally, the community is another factor inimproving quality, by strengthening the link-ages between the school and the social, eco-nomic and cultural milieu of the children. Therelationship between the school and the com-munity will depend very much on the type ofsocial relationships prevailing in the countryconcerned. In a closed and hierarchically seg-mented society, it will be very difficult to estab-lish participatory relationships between theschool and the community. Relations will be

1 r-.C.,a)

'closed' and not very proactive, since the com-munity would either identify with the schoolwhich becomes its school, or it considers that thisschool belongs to the government and thus gen-erates the same 'respect', 'fear' and 'expecta-tions' felt vis-à-vis all exogenous institutions.On the other hand, in more open societies, in-teraction between the schools and the commu-nity is easier and more likely to produce highlybeneficial results for the school.

Incidentally, what has just been said aboutthe interaction between the community and theschool, can be generalized to apply to the othermajor actors of the education system. The basicquestion can be formulated in both a negativeand positive way. To take the negative formula-tion first:

Is school-based management and its assump-tion about autonomy, participation and self-monitoring, applicable in societies which arehighly segmented, lacking a tradition of partici-pation in public life, with or without high po-litical instability and where a large proportionof the population suffers from illiteracy, mar-ginality, poverty and hence are prevented frombeing involved in civil life and more specificallyin the business of the school?

In a more positive tone:In increasingly complex societies, is there not aserious danger of keeping education under thesole control of the 'technicians' in education? Isnot one of the important challenges for the pro-

fession the search for the most propitious climatefor participation and involvement of the major-ity of thc population in educational matters?

Admittedly, without reference to values, cul-tures, traditions and to the systems for regulat-ing societies, it is very difficult to see how it willbe possible to address the issue of participationin the lifc of the school through changes inmanagement, whether these be decentraliza-tion, establishment of adequate organizationalstructures, information systems, trainin ofmanagers, etc. School-based manageme, mayproduce greater quality and efficiency edu-cation but for such an approach to work effec-tively, it needs to be designed bearing in mind


finding the proper mix to make it work

the specific conditions of the societies in whichit is to be applied.

Moving towards a hybridadministrative system

The school-bascd management approach has,however, to be reconciled with the need tooperate the national education system coher-ently. Focussing on improving the school as anorganization does not mean mandating centralpolicies and programmes that try to put pres-sure on or intimidate schools to improve. Nordoes it mean eliminating all rules and regula-tions, leaving schools adrift in a sea of autonomy.

The challenge is to find a balance betweenthese two extremes, to carefully delineate anddistribute authority and responsibility through-out the system, maximizing the use of humanand financial resources at each level with theultimate goal of improving student achievement.

In a recently published book, I have argued forthe need to move towards a hybrid system of ad-ministration and management with a clearly de-fined division of labour between the various levels.

I have suggested that the responsibilities ofthe ministries and local education authorities bemore clearly defined. The definition of educa-tional objectives addressing policy issues, estab-lishing norms and standards of quality, and regu-lating the overall education system could beentrusted to this central administration. At thelocal level or school level, actual implementa-tion and management activities should be en-trusted to the actors involved (users and con-sumers of education, and in particular the head-masters and the teachers). The intermediate levelwould be responsible for support and backstop-ping activities, communication channels, feed-back and staffing.

Having already discussed the conditions foradopting a school-based man agement approach,allow me to comment on the central and inter-mediate levels.

At the central-level, the functions of settingeducational policies, regulations and quality

control, as well as the provision of financial re-sources, require special organizational structures,and, in many cases, radical reforms of existingcumbersome administrative machineries, a cleardefinition of tasks, adequate staffing policiesincluding training, appropriate information sys-tems for monitoring policies and proper evalu-ation of achievements. Urgent attention shouldbe given to investment in these priority areas.

At the intermediate level, perhaps the mostimportant challenge before us is to reconcile thedual responsibility of the organizational structurewhich is both administrative and professional.While intermediate structures tend to be predomi-nantly staffed with ex-teachers, i.e. professionals,they also tend to devote more energy to admin-istrative support. Proper incentives should bedesigned so as to encourage staff at the inter-mediate level to discharge their professional re-sponsibilities efficiently. At the same time, an-other challenge is to transform the intermediatelevel into becoming, from the administrative andprofessional point of view, a two-way communi-cation channel between the centres and the schoolsand which has to be both top-down and bottom-up. Without the latter, neither the centre nor theschools can manage effectively.

Finally, responsibility at the intermediate levelhas to be proactive in the sense that it shouldresist the traditional tendency to behave as aone-way passive transmission channel from thecentre to the schools.

This again will require a clear definition oftasks, adequate staffing including training, reli-able information systems which are relevant atthe intermediate level and different reward struc-tures. Priority should be given to these areas ofconcern.

It is interesting to note that both centralizedsystems, such as the French, and decentralizedsystems, such as the British, have tried duringrecent years to move towards what might becalled hybrid administrative systems. For ex-ample, France adopted a law on decentraliza-tion about a decade ago and school-based man-agement experiments called projets scolaireswere started in the 1980s. For the time being, it

1,,

1 1 6 Jacques Hallak

seems that both systems are facing severe prob-lems and difficulties. The prerequisites for anadequate balance between centralization, decen-tralization and localization have not yet beencompletely met, neither in France nor in theUnited Kingdom, and it is certainly too early tojudge these experiments. In fact, the results andthe applicability of similar experiments in othercountries will depend on how well they areadapted to those countries.

What they do suggest however is that regula-tions must be clearly laid down, known andunderstood by all the actors involved. The gov-ernment and the schools must be familiar withand understand the allocation formula. Theremust be unambiguous demarcation as to whichactivities shall be under the responsibility of theschool, which shall remain with the central leveland which will have to be entrusted to the inter-mediate level of administration. The prioritiesset by the government must be known to all, andthe initiatives and freedom of action of princi-pals in the management of their schools must beplainly defined.

Some developing countries have tried to gobeyond the rhetoric of participatory planningand administration and have experimented withspecific new rules and regulations in areas suchas building and nutrition, splitting responsibil-ity among the central administration, the inter-mediate authorities and the schools, communi-ties and parents' associations. Partially imple-mented hybrid administration has been particu-larly effective in some cases.

Although it is too early to judge and make adefinitive statement, we would suggest that, allthings considered, hybrid systems which gradu-ally reallocate responsibilities among the centralsystems, the local administrations and the usersappear the most attractive on grounds of bothcost and efficiency, if they:

establish diversified information systemsadapted to the needs of all actors;clearly specify and diffuse the rules and regu-lations and the criteria for incentives;develop administrative and managerial capaci-ties through recruitment and training;

redirect resources which are adequate to fi-nance the above.

Most developing countries start out with a fairlycentralized administration and movement to-wards hybridization will be slow and difficult.No planner is eager to incur the displacementsor to enter into the long negotiations which arenecessary to adapt regulations and to redefineduties, ranks and power bases. Where elemen-tary and secondary teachers' unions exist, theseare forces to be considered and the support andenthusiasm of these essential elements in thebusiness of education must be enlisted if thesector is to run well.

At the tertiary level, there have always beeninstitutions which enjoy wide and solid autonomyand they have experienced very little interfer-ence in their routine management. Today, how-ever, many of them also suffer more or less se-rious problems of inefficiency. New sensitivityto economic cycles has madc them particularlyvulnerable. Uncontrolled expansion in fat ycarsis followed by drastic adjustment in facilities,staff and management of student flows in:leanycars. Thus some kind of hybridization intro-duced gradually is seen as a valid possibility atall levels of the sector.

Concluding remarks: a prologue

In the preceding paragraphs, I have amply sug-gested that there is no simple answer to thequestion of improving school management. Ifthe system of centralized structures has failedto serve the evolving needs of expanding edu-cation systems, they did help in the early daysof quantitative educational expansion and theyarc still essential in determining policies, re-ducing disparities and in quality control. Ifject.ntralized structures arc attractive, espe-cially when decentralization leads to devolu-t ion of authority to schools, the experiences ofschool-based management suggest: (i) the needfor human resource development; (ii) accept-ing co-ordination mechanisms at the centrallevel; and (iii) tensions and conflicts which can-


proper mix to make it work

not be addressed independently of the socialconditions of the countries concerned and with-out reference to the central and intermediateadministrative levels. There is therefore noquick solution, no simple formula suitable forall countries. Each society has to design its ownproper mix to make things work. The challengefor policy-makers is to strive, in a pragmaticway (trial and error), towards the establish-ment of such a mix. In doing so, they shouldnot overlook the final aim of such a change. Itis the improvement of quality and equity ineducation.

In this regard, we should remind ourselvesthat there is a profound difference in productionculture between the manufacturing industriesand the services; this stems from thc simple factthat thc former handles inanimate raw materialsand the latter human beings. In most services,the outcome is strongly dependent upon theactive participation of the client in the serviceprocess, whether thc client is a pupil, a patient,a passenger, or a customer. The client's experi-ence of the quality of the processes in which heor she is involved may be as important as thefinal product and also strongly influences thefinal product. This means that economic theo-ries and concepts of productivity and efficiencyas developed in relation to manufacturing in-dustry have little relevance and may be quitemisleading in service sectors. Moreover, unlikemanufacturing industries, services, includingeducation, often function at their best when theprocesses are open-ended and involve all actors.

I This means that when searching for the propermix, in 'dosing the hybrid structure', the shareof partnership and participation should keep itssignificance in all sectors.

Bibliography

HALLAx, J. 1990. Investing in the future: setting educa-tional priorities in the developing world. Paris,UNESCO/HEP, Pcrgamon Press.

LOCKHEED, M.E.; VERSPOOR, A.M.; et al. 1989. Im-proving primary education in developing countries: areview of policy options. Washington, The WorldBank.

MOEGIADI. 1991. Research report on community partici-pation in education at the primary school level in In-donesia. Paris, IIEP, (Internal document)

NAMADDU, K. 1991. Collaboration for educationalchange: improvement of basic education throughMINDSACROSS: a school literacy project in Uganda.Paris, IIEP. o.ternal document).

PAILko, M.B. 1991. 'School-based nianagement' et samuse en pratique dor: les pays en voie de developpement.Paris, IIEP, (Inteinal document).

SCHIFFELEEIN, E. 1990. Redefining basic education forLatin America - lessons to be drawn from thc Colom-bian Escudo Nueta. Paris, 11E13.

SiinEFFER,S. 1991. Collaborating for educational change:the role of parents and the community in school im-provement. Paris, NEP.

WHEELER, C.; CHUARATANAPHONG; PRAGOG KUNARAK.

1991. Improving basic education through collabora-tion and co-operation: school clusters in Thailand. Paris,IIEP.

T e role of the statein education*

Juan Carlos Tedesco

It is already becoming commonplace to speak about a crisis in theparadigms we use in our attempts to understand social reality.Dissatisfaction with the usual modes of thinking triggers a varietyof reactions. In some cases, fortunately few in number, the crisisprompts people to defend the old all-inclusive models, accentuatingtheir dogmatic character still further. More frequently, it fostersprcoccupation with particular and immediate concerns, as pride ofplace is given to a so-callcd pragmatism that isin appearanceonlyunconnected with trends and models of wider application.The following analysis is an attempt to bridge the gap between aspir-ations towards all-inclusive modelsnow outdated owing to theremarkable diversity of present-day socictyand pragmatic immedi-atism, which does not allow people to understand the logic behindsocial actions and, consequently, also precludes participation inrelated decision-making.

Reflections on the state are a good example of this theoreticaldebate. On the one hand, the 'worldwide standardization' of themodern state model charactcristic of the countries of Western Europegives encouragement to blueprints of a universal character. On theother hand, this trend contrasts with the (mormous socio-cultural andpolitical diversity occurring in Third World countries (Kazancigil,1985). This is not the place for a detailed analysis of the theoreticaland practical problems arising from the expansion of the modernstate. However, it should be borne in mind that the expansion of that

Juan Carlos Tedesco (Argentina). Director of Unesco's Regional Office for Educationin Latin America and the Caribbean (OREALC). Former professor at the Universnyof La Plata and the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, Argentina. His researchdeals with the sociology of education and thc development process. Author of Edu-cación y sociedad en Atgentina 0977, reprinted 7979, 79811, Conceptos dc soLio-logia de la educaciOn (1980, published in Portuguese in 1982 ) and El desafio cdu-cativo: calidad y dcrnocracia (106).

This article is taken from a paper presented at the workshop entitled 'Towards Strategi,Planning for Education' organized by thc International Institute for Educational Planning(a November to 2 December 1988) to mark its twenty-fifth anniversary.

Prorpecti, Vol. XIX, No. 4, i959

120 luau Carlos Tedesco

model, in the form to be found in societies where it evolved endogen-ously, provides a yardstick (with the promotion of development andmodernization theories as its most outstanding features) against whichperipheral societies measure themselves and, at the same time, as aProcrustean bed imposing structural conditions which distort andlimit the development of the model.

I therefore consider it important to include two caveats in thisintroduction. The first, obvious but none the less necessary, is theneed to avoid the risks of extrapolating from certain problems, ana-lytical categories and solution-oriented strategies which apply toccrtain well-defined contexts. Thc second and more specific caveatis that the following analysis should be placed in the context of thespecific situation of one region in the Third World (Latin America)which has been strongly affected by the expansion of the modernstate model.

Thc article is divided into three sections. The first attempts to sumup the main thinking on the state in dependent countries put forwardby some theorists in sociology and modern political science. It aimsto place the analysis of the state's role in education within the overallframework of the state and its relations with civil society and withsocial agents in general. The second section aims specifically atdescribing the state attitude to education over the past few years, inthe light of the impact of the economic and social crisis in LatinAmerican countries. The third section attempts to present some viewson future relations linking the state with education and society in thecontext of a development process that seeks to reach targets ofgrowth and equity. In that connection, some thoughts on futureprospccts for educational planning are also expressed.

The state and society

During thc last few years, criticism of the state, in both neo-libcralquarters and on the left, has become widespread. This criticismpredominated in theoretical and political discussions from the pointwhen the modcrn state in its contemporary version (i.e. the Keynesianstate, thc welfare statc or whatever the name given to the form takenby the post-war capitalist-dcmocratic states), began to show symp-toms of crisis which some people considered to be structural faults.

From the administrative point of view, these criticisms haveemphasized aspects such as inefficiency, the high cost of centralizedbureaucratic machinery, curbs on innovation and the relative failureto meet the objectives of equalizing benefits, among others.

ro


From thc political point of view, it is pointed out that it is becomingdifficult to maintain links between political representation through thepolitical parties and corporatc representation of organized interests,especially because of the growing predominance of the latter indecision-making.

Lastly, from the economic point of view, the chanccs of solvingemployment problems in a situation where it is increasingly difficultto maintain high growth rates are small. The basic contract betweenthe different social sectors, based on abundant resources and highgrowth rates, is growing increasingly weaker, and this is encouraginga tendency to focus on specific cases and to fragment negotiations ata local or regional level (Schmitter, 1986).

However, thcsc criticisms (and this crisis) have come along after along period during which there was a high level of consistency andlegitimacy as regards the promises made and the results deliveredin the deroocratic-capitalist state of the developed countries. As maybe scen from indicators of public and social expenditure as a per-centage of gross domcstic product (GDP) for European countries,the credibility and consistency of the capitalist democracy formulain the post-war years were based on the fact that it was quitepossible for the state to satisfy the demands of the different socialsectors. Available data indicate that, in spite of the economic crisisin the 1970s, expenditure on social welfare services in these countriescontinued to rise to percentages ranging from 20 t0 30 per cent ofGDP (Bor6n, 1986; Rassekh and Vaidcnau, 1987).

Likewise, it may also be argued that this state model workedsuccessfully because the different social echelons formed a close-knitfabric: social agents maintained contacts with political forces andwere involved in different forms of state participation.

In any case, the crisis of the welfare state is a home-grown productof developed capitalist democracies and comes at a time when asolution has already been found to a large range of problems such as:The social integration of the entire population or, in othcr words,

the formation of a body of citizens as a universal category.The upholding of a lawful institutional systcm, whose decision% are

accepted.The existence of an efficient administrative structure under the

responsibility of the state (French model) or composed of pro-fessional civil servants (Anglo-Saxon model) (Bailie and Birn-baum, 1982).

Smooth co-ordination and consensus do not preclude cordlict,,. Butthe existing level of legitimacy is high enough to absorb them andkeep society on the rails.

The problem of the state in dependent societies and, in particular,

r1 C.)

122 JuGn Carlos redesco

in Latin America, has been a recurrent theme of political science andsociology. It would be difficult to summarize all the available datahere, but it would be no exaggeration to say that a state-of-the-artstudy on this subject would show that, in fact, uncertainty and bewil-derment predominate over substamiated assertions.

In a recent analysis, Touraine (1987) proposes an interesting set ofhypotheses that may serve as a point of departure for relocating theproblem at a level more conducive to the analysis of some significantphenomena in the education sector.

To begin with, Touraine points out that the most importantcharacteristic of social development in dependent countries is thelack of co-ordination linking social agents, political forces and thestatc. Thc situation of dependence means that economic power islargely out of the nation's control and prevents consolidation of thesovereign state or the cohesion of social agents. As Touraine (1987,p. 25) claims:

One feature common to dependent and colonized societies is the lack ofco-ordination or partial disjunction of modernization, social struggles and thcrole of the state or, in more analytical terms, of economic systems in thccase of social struggles, political systems in the case of modernization,i.e. social and national integration, and ideological systems organized todefend national or territorial identity against foreign domination.

This disjunction is reflected in the fact that persons acting in thepolitical and cultural spheres arc overly independent of those in thesocial sphcre (defined by their position in the economic process), andaccounts for what Tokman (1985) terms the 'weakness of the humanfactor' which expresses itself, for example, in a belief in industrial-ization without an industrial bourgeoisie, revolutionary ideology inthe absence of revolutionary movements and, in general, a strongcapacity for expression together with a pronounced inability toproducc results.

Such detachment and excessive autonomy does not imply theexistence of clear and precise distinctions between social agents,representative political forces and the state. On the contrary, thc lowlevel of development and the lack of connections between agents leadsto a certain lack of differentiation and to the non-existence of purelysocial agents. To quote Tourainc (1987, p. 13):

The European democracies were strong in so far as they representedorganized social forces and classes, and, more specifically, a working classorganized into unions and a capitalist class organized into financial groupsand business associations. In Latin America, on thc other hand, it is easierfor a social group to gain entry into thc machincry of state than to form arepresentative party.

E-J


Instead of a sovereign national state resulting from a political systemrepresentative of the country's social forces, there is either a repressivesystem that prevents the formation of a system of political represen-tation or a wide-opcn political market that is not dominated by ahegemonic central body. In such a context, the alternatives are eithercorporatism within the state itself or subordination of social agents topolitical doctrines. Thc relative lack of hegemony that this situationreveals accounts for the constant changes and the easeat a purelypolitical or ideological levelwith which it is possible to switch fromone line of argument to another, and from one social theory toanother. One of the most visible characteristics of the political scenein Latin America is therefore the yawning gap between words andreality, between rule and practice, between the possibility of takinga decision and ability to put it into effect.

The prevalence of neo-liberal postulates during the past decadeand the economic crisis associated with high foreign debt havesharpened some of the features mentioned in the foregoing paragraphand triggered new phenomena. Thc state in dependent countries isknown to be constantly governed by the twofold logic of externaland internal relations. In the case of Latin America, the introductionof neo-libcral policies during the decade 1970-80 was, in some cases,associated with highly authoritarian internal political practices. Thisassociation led to a weakening of the nation-state and a strengtheningof the state as repressive machinery, which accentuatcd its lack oflegitimacy even more. The subsequent use in 'state management' ofthe debt and the consequences of adjustment policies (cuts in socialexpenditure, recession, rising unemployment, etc.) also contributedto provoking this phenomenon, which, in the final analysis, is basedon the state's substantial loss of autonomy in formulating andirnplememing economic and social policies (ECLAC, 1985; Gra-ciarena, 1984).

The loss of autonomy with regard to external factors went handin hand with a complex internal process whereby, in most cases,democratic liberal patterns were established (or re-established). Theweakness of these patterns and the difficulties encountered inconsolidating them arc evident. All indicators confirm, to a greateror lesser extent, the rise in social inequality and the inability of thestate to meet social demands. Societies are becoming more difficultto govern, and this state of affairs takcs on features that vary fromone country to another, ranging from open urban or rural guerrillawarfare and wildcat strikes to systematic protest actions organizedthrough trade unions or othcr mass organizations.

From our particular standpoint, the rise in inequality seems to bcassociated with an equally significant rise in 'state corporatism'.

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124 Juan Carlos 1,desco

The crisis has heightened political fragmentation and underscoredthe role of the representation of vested interests over and aboverepresentation by political parties, itself weak and disjointed.Ultimately, social inequality also expresses itself in differing capacitiesto organize and claim rights.

The obvious danger in this process is that the state may increaseinequality through the over-fepresentation of organized minoritiesand, in so doing, relinquish its role in counterbalancing andco-ordinating collective interests (Loaeza, 1988).

There are very wide differences between state 'corporatization' indeveloped capitalist countries and in dependent countries, for whilein the former the underlying social situation is one of relativehomogeneity, in which all sectors are integrated under conditionsthat enable them to play to the full their roles as creators of demandand consumers, in dependent countries a large scctor of the popu-lation is not integrated, fewer resources are availablz and there is anarrow margin of legitimacy and consensus within which politicalaction is possible.

The disarticulation characteristic of the development process independent countries partly explains the low level of efficiency thattypifies state management in those societies. But within that generalcontext, some particular aspects which have had a notable effecton forms of state management must be pointed out.

Some authors have developed the theory of 'disorderly expansion'(see Martins, 1984) of the state, which is said to be responsible forthe lack of a 'state system' and for the co-existence instead of a hostof patterns that vary according to the sector of state machinery underscrutiny (the economy, the legal system, education, etc.) or accordingto geographical situations or position in the hierarchy of bureaucracy.There is no comparable lack of system in the Anglo-Saxon model ofstatc organization, in which power is highly decentralized andordinary citizens arc substantially involved in decision-making. Onthe contrary, the different spheres of power are fragmented andsegmented, and, owing to the nullification of decisions by the generalfailure to put them into practice and other similar phenomena, thiscauscs much administrative paralysis, anachronism, rigidity, andfinally, inefficiency.

The economic crisis and recent policies have given rise to phenom-ena that may be 0:7 -2rbating those general features still further. Inthe first place, it is highly probable that as a result of falling salariesand the incentives offered by the state itself to reduce employmentin the public sector, thc most highly qualified human resources areleaving the civil service. In addition, equipment, facilities and allthose aspects on which the state's management capacity and the

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The rok of the state in education 125

quality of public service mst arc also deteriorating. One point to betaken into account is that qualitative changes occur whcn such cut-backs are- maintained over long periods of time. It is one thing toimpose low salary levels on the public sector for one year but quiteanother to do so over a long period of time. Similarly, there is adifference between reducing spending on equipment, maintenanceof buildings, etc., over a short period and over a long period. Theeffects arc not only greatcr but in some cases irreversible (Lagos,1987).

Secondly, mention should also be made of the attempts at statereform that have begun in several countries. These projects generallyform part of decentralization policies aimed at greater efficiency,procedural relevance and participation in decision-making. Theparticular case of education will be considered later; at this pointwc shall only refer to the small number of evaluations of the impactof those reforms, which cover a variety of situations. In some cases,decentralization policy is implemented under authoritarian politicalsystems in which it is consequently associated with thc possibility ofreinforcing regional differences and increasing social and politicalcontrol. In other cases, decentralization involves thc transfer ofpower and resources to local bodies under the heading of politicaldemocratization and broader grass-roots participation. Finally, thereare cases where decentralization is motivated by economic andbudgetary considerations, for which the problems and responsibilityfor solving them may be transferred but not the resources. In anyevent, these reforms startcd recently and in a context of greateconomic penury. This context may seriously affect the success of thereforms, owing both to the weakness of compensatory mechanismsfor transferring resources from richer to poorer areas and to theweakness of central government in carrying out the new tasksincumbent on it in a decentralized system.

The state, education and the economic crisis

In view of the subjects raised so far, the link between the state andeducation in dependent societies and its prospccts for the future maybe analysed against thc wider background of the state and society.

From the general theoretical point of view, and despite thcdiversity of national situations, it may bc said that the developmentof education in Latin America has had closer links with the politicaland ideological system than with the system of production. Asacknowledged in various research papers, education has expanded

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126 Juan Carlos Tedesco

more than other social services, and the people's educational aspir-ations also exceed both their individual means and the system'sability to satisfy them. The educational generation gap that occurredin most Latin American countries between 1950 and the present, forexample, is very significant. Even today, in a country like Argentina,where education expanded early and widely, one-third of the studentsentering university come from homes where the parents did notcomplete basic education. Different types of political and culturalfactors arc associated with this phenomenon (Rama, 1984), but in anyevent the state played an active role in meeting educational demands.That role is freely acknowledged to have been greatest in the generalprovision of basic education. However, the incorporation into theeducation system of social sectors traditionally excluded from it wasaccompanied by two important phenomena: the persistence of highexclusion rates owing to high failure rates in the early grades (inother words, failure in learning basic cultural codes) and the growinginternal tendency for education to separate into channels that variedconsiderably in quality, a tendency closely linked with thc distinctionbetween state and private schooling. The features and extent ofthis differentiation differ from one country to another, but there isevidence that even in countries where there is a strong tradition ofhigh-quality state education, internal differentiation and segmen-tation have increased considerably in recent years (Braslavsky, 1985).

In thc context of the present economic crisis, this traditionalsituation has undergone some important changes. I shall attempt todescribe them under four headings: scope of the education system,quality of education, resource allocation, and management capacity(Tedesco, 1987).

SCOPE OF THE EDUCATI0i4 SYSTEM

With regard to the scope of the education system, there are threesalient phenomena: (a) the growth of prc-scho education in whichthe state participates considerably; (b) the rise in academic failurerates at the level of basic education; and (c) a variety of situationsregarding enrolment at secondary and higher educational levels, witha trcnd towards the state playing a greater role in making provisionfor those levels.

These phenomena may be interpreted, succinctly, as follows.As far as low-income groups are concerned, the crisis has halted the

process of transition to secondary and higher education levels andworsened their chances of gaining access to basic education. Withregard to middle-income groups, the situation is less cicar-cut.

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The role of thc state in educauon

Generally speaking, there has been an increase in demands made onthe state, which has responded favourably. Pre-school secondary andhigher educational levels primarily benefit the middle and uppersocial strata. An increase in state responsibilities at these levelswould be designed to meet the requirements of middle-incomegroups who cannot, or can no longer, afford to pay for privateeducation. Unfortunately, the information available does not permitin-depth analysis of these problems. However, as a working hypothesis,it may be assumed that the increase in state responsibility for edu-cational services for the middle classes is connected with an increasein internal differentiation: the education provided by the state isacquiring more and more characteristics of mass education, whileprivate education becomes increasingly elitist.

QUALITY OF EDUCATION

With regard to quality, growing internal differentiation raiscs seriousdoubts about the state's ability to guarantee a minimum of qualitativehomogeneity implicit in the idea of national and cultural unity andidentity. Analysing this problem is an extremely complex task, bothby its nature and because of the lack of relevant information. However,there are two aspccts that I wish to highlight: failure in terms ofacademic performance, and the problem of cultural homogeneity in acontext of ever more rapid scientific and technological change.

The available figures clearly show that the level of efficiency ofeducation systems is low, and that over thc past few years, in someregions like Latin America, the situation has worsened (Unesco,1987). Academic failure, as everyone knows, occurs primarily duringthe early graecs of basic education and is therefore specificallyassociated with the learning of basic cultural codes. The relativeinability of the state to guarantee this minimum educational attain-ment is due to many cultural, political, economic and educationalfactors (Tedesco, 1983). But seen from our perspective, failure seemsobviously connected with the state's denial of a significant componentof the national culture.

Analyses on this subject have shown time and again that thc edu-cation system holds up the habits of the urban middle and upperclasses as the 'universal' cultural standard. This is obvious in thelanguage, values and guiding principles of socialization and, basically,the cognitive skills that arc a prerequisite for academic successwithin the system. Failure to perform on the part of pupils fromworking-class backgrounds would therefore appear to be not a failureto learn universal skills, but a failure to learn skills foreign to theirculture of origin.

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This problem is most manifest in the case of indigenous populationgroups: here the teacher-pupil relationship is distorted, since teacherand pupils use different linguistic codes.

However, now that major changes are occurring in the productionof knowledge, it is also necessary to examine the issue of qualityfrom the point of view of that which is not yet covered by the cur-riculum, but which is none the less an increasingly important aspectof contemporary culture. In other words, we should analyse the degreeand extent to which obsolescent curricula are used in educationsystems. The increasingly rapid renewal of scientific and technologicalknowledge is concomitant with the growth of respect for the culturalidentity of peoples, which helps to accentuate traditional levels ofcurricular obsolescence. The economic crisis adds two new factorsto this situation: on the onc hand, it widens the gap between thepressing nccd for a qualitative overhaul of school teaching methodsand the resources available for achieving it, and, on the other, it makesobsolescence more widespread by affecting segments of the cducationsystem that in the past had traditionally offered a relatively acceptablequality of education.

There is a need for in-depth studies on these points, but on thestrength of available data we may put forward the hypothesis thatthe gap between academic and 'social' culture is widening. In otherwords, the cultural content of the education system (particularly thatprovided by public establishments catering for lower-income groups)tends neither to reflect nor to reproduce any socially significantcultural habits: that is, neither popular culture nor modern scientificand technological culture.

RESOURCE ALLOCATION

As regards resource allocation, recent studics have revealed themagnitude of the impact of the crisis generally, and its consequenceson education policies in particular (Lewin, 1987). In addition to theoverall decline in spending on education, stress should also be laidon two aspects of significance in this analysis. First is the increase inthe percentage of the educational budget earmarked for salaries,which makes it difficult or impossible to improve the quality ofeducation, as r.o investments arc madc in materials, new technologies,maintenance of buildings, equipment, etc. Second is the trendtowards allocation of resources by level, which favours secondaryand highcr education to the detriment of basic education and adulteducation.

Both phenomena show that thc criteria used for resource allocation


do not reflect the objectives of economic streamlining or socialequity, but the ability of the different social sectors to express theirdemands. Teachers' unions and students at the secondary and higherlevels are social agents who are very good at organizing themselvesand influencing decision-makers in the area of resource allocation.

MANAGEMENT CAPACITY

A general reference was madc earlier to the management capacity ofthe state. On the basis of the available data, it is not possible todetermine whether or not the decline in management capacity in thespecific field of education is steeper than in the other areas of publicadministration and, in particular, in the remaining governmeatdepartments responsible for the social sectors. However, two salientfacts seem to indicate that this is the case. First, the education sectorhas lost influence in relation to the remainder of the state machinery,especially bodies that take decisions concerning resource allocation(Garcia, 1987). In that regard it has been argued that education isno longer an attractive field for public investment, either because ofits low efficiency, or the 'surplus' of education as expressed in highprofessional unemployment figures, or the low impact of edu-cational development on social democratization, etc.

It is doubtful whether these arguments are valid. However, thedecline in the sector's management capacity causcs a viciouscircle, for with lower funds and a weak administrative structure,internal problems will increase and thus further reduce the chancesof redressing the situation.

Secondly, it must be borne in mind that teachers constitute one ofthe majority groups in the public sector. The decline in teachers' payhas caused widespread protests which have brought educationalactivities to a standstill for long periods. The most serious cases havebeen in Argentina, Bolivia, Peru and Venezuela. The fact is thatin recent years educational activity has taken place in an atmosphereof staff demoralization, active resistance, absenteeism, etc., which hasprevented not only the introduction of innovations but also thenormal performance of regular duties.

Although thc private sector was also affected to some extent, thepublic sector was obviously harder hit, thereby compounding thedifference in quality between the two.

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130 Yuan Carlos Tedesco

Outlook for the future

Some aspects of the debate on the outlook for education and the roleof the state may be regarded as relatively outdated. First of all, it isrecognized that the basic problem is not one of determining whetherthe state should be more or less active. On the contrary, the problemis how to ensure that the objectives of democratization and main-taining high standards in education are effectively attained. It isonly with these objectives in mind that it is meaningful to comparethe role of the state with that of the private sector, the role of centralgovernment with that of local authorities, and so on. Similarly, it isalso unanimously agreed that the central planning/free marketalternatives are neither contradictory nor mutually exclusive mech-anisins. The net result of this period of criticism of the state has,without any doubt, been a clearer appreciation of all the problems ofinefficiency, cfientelism, bureaucratization, etc., in public-servicestructures. However, application of the neo-classical paradigm hasalso led to disappointment and scepticism because of its undemo-cratic effects and, in a few cases, because of its negligible impact onefficiency and quality. It therefore seems obvious that the debatetoday hinges on strategies for coping with the challenge of reconcilingefficiency and equity, traditionally viewed as quite separate objectiveswhich, consequently, cancel each other out. Just as it can no longer beclaimed that the state is always inefficient and that only marketmechanisms guarantee optimum results, it cannot be maintainedthat homogeneous public policies are alone capable of ensuring a fairdistribution of goods and services.

Secondly, reference must be made to the problem of internaldifferentiation within the state apparatus itself, in view of thcgrowing importance of local and regional bodies on the one handand certain sectors of activity on the other. This differentiation makesit possible, at certain points, to arrive at partial agreements concerningspecific problem areas or regions even when no agreement can bereached at national level or in general.

Thirdly, it must be borne in mind that the debate on the role of thestate in Third World countries is taking place in a context with twooutstanding characteristics: on the one hand, their capacity for actionis being weakened not only as a result of social demands for greaterparticipation and democratization of organizational structures, butalso because of the economic and financial crisis which is funda-mentally affecting state action in the social sphere. In that regard thetransfer of responsibilities from the state to the community is not,in some cases, an initiative that will improve the quality and efficiency

The role of the state in cducation

of the service or give uscrs greater control over its characteristics,but simply a transfer of financial responsibility.

On the other hand, it must not bc forgotten that the considerationsgoverning the actions of the state in Third World countries arctwofold: internal and external. These twin considerations lead tosituations that arc difficult to reconcile. The weakening of the nation-state (in terms of sovereignty, decision-making autonomy, ctc.), madeworse by the stringent conditions imposed by adjustment policies fordealing with debt payment, may generate internal conditions thatstrengthen the machinery of authoritarian political control.

The difficulties faced by democracies in Latin America, in tryingto reconcile existing internal participative practices with a strongexternal negotiating capacity, attest to the complexity and fragility ofthese situations.

Analysis of the state's role in the light of the two-pronged challengeof achieving both equity and efficiency reveals a series of problemswhich, though intimately interlinked, should be considered separatelyso that they are easier to understand.

In terms of policies to achieve equity, reference will be made toproblems of resource allocation and the quality of education. Withregard to policies aimed at efficiency, we shall considcr the problemof how to achieve a broader spread of responsibility for results.

RESOURCE ALLOCATION

In analysing the state's role in resource allocation, it should bc bornein mind that scarcity will be the keynote of the future. The economiccrisis afflicting the Third World is not the transient result of circum-stances, and although it may be somewhat eased by favourablenegotiations on debt repayment, restrictions will continue in the shortand the medium term.

In situations of scarcity, competition for available rcsourccsbecomes keener. The struggle to acquire scarce resources becomesfiercer among both social groups and sectors of activity. With regardto education, it has been claimed that the problem will be one ofcompetition with two othcr powerful agcnts: 'the military (and mili-tarist circles) and those who wish to cut back resources in the publicsector in order to boost economic growth' (Carnoy, 1986). Further-more, competition also comes to the fore w ittin the education sectoramong those who claim that priority shoul 1 be given to the lowerrungs of the system (basic education, litericy, adult education) andthose who strcss that priority should go to higher education andscientific and technological research.

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In discussions on whether or not to invest in education, someauthors have put forward the hypothesis that the education sectorshould take the initiative again by demonstrating the value of educationin the processcs of growth and development. The impact of criticismon human capital theories and some prominent social phenomena(unemployment of educated people, little change in the distribution ofincome despitc educational expansion, etc.) have weakened thenegotiating position of those in charge of the education sector as faras other decisions on resource allocation are concerned. In developedcountries, on the other hand, this phenomenon is fading and thereis a growing conviction that in the future, possession of knowledgeand information, and the ability to produce them (intelligence), willplay a decisive role. The future of the education system is a keyconcern in all developed countries (Lesourne, 1988), and this concernsecms to bc closely associated with the need to maintain high levelsof competition for markets.

In the developed countries, there is noticeable awareness of thepriority that shall be given to training, in both private and statesectors. Firms invest heavily in training, research and developmentand these investments are said to be the cause of the growing privatiz-ation of the production and distribution of knowledge. As knowledgeis regarded as valuable capital, the characteristics of its productionand distribution are becoming increasingly similar to those thatdefine the production and distribution of all goods. More and moredifficulties arc therefore emerging, a case in point being use by thepublic of certain private products that are knowledge-intensive(software). In these contexts, demands arc being made on theeducation system to provide sound basic training that will preparepeople for work later on in the production and consumption of goodsand services. Demands are also being made for greater flexibility inallowing transfcrs from one form of education to another, the decen-tralization of responsibility for the implementation of curriculatogether with an increase in the capacity for evaluation and foralignment with national priorities, tc.

In Third World countries, on the other hand, the requisiteconsensus on the priority to be given to education does not yet exist.The need to maintain educational growth and guarantee the right toeducation for all is acknowledged, but these aims are not translatedinto public policy. Thc weakness of the private sector prevents itfrom offering an alternative to the state. In many instances, theprivate sector strives to ohtain larger public grants in order to financelevels and establishments attended by social groups in relativelyhigher income brackets. In others, however, although substantialpercentages of national resources are set aside for education, the

The role at the state in education 133

problem is that the total amount of resources available has fallensignificantly, because of external debt repayments, or because of thceconomic recession or for both of thesc reasons.

It is therefore relevant, in the case of Third World countries, tosupport the need for new initiatives in cnhancing the role of educationin development and growth, and this clearly cannot be done on thesame terms as in thc past.

A very serious dilemma facing those countries is to determincwhcther priority in resource allocation should be given to the bottomor the top of the system. The logic of social demand favours allocationto the top, since the middle and upper classes are in a better positionto state their demands and, besides, their educational credentials havebecome devalued, with the result that more years of study are neededin order to stay in the running for posts at the top of the market. Thespurious growth of post-secondary levels of the education systemassociated with the political and social consequences of excludinglarge population groups from education serves to justify calls for thestate to shift the emphasis to the bottom of the system in its decisionsconcerning resource allocations.

However, wc should not make generalizations or wholly under-estimate the importancefrom the point of view of national interestsand the process of endogenous developmentof public spending onstrengthening scientific and technological potential in Third Worldcountries. The economic crisis has aggravated still further the tra-ditional weakness of scientific activity in dependent countries. Butat thc samc time their capacity for consuming imported technologyhas also declined, and growth will be possiole only if their endogenoustechnological potential increases significantly.

Third World countries undoubtedly have to tackle these problemsfrom very different starting points. Generally speaking, however, itwould seem that no one contests the need to ensure universal accessto basic education; with regard to thc top of the system, on thc otherhand, it is claimed that there is a need to limit and select accordingto specific criteria (the labour market's absorption capacity, individualmerit, the system's ability to cater for candidates offering guaranteesof quality, or a combination of all these criteria).

Thc challenge of dealing simultaneously with problems at thebottom and top of the system therefore makes it necessary to definecriteria for both at the samc timc. In othcr words, the validity of aspecific policy for one part of the system may be judged by its Ofectson the system in its entirety. Hence it may be said that the validt, y ofselective policies on access to the top of the systcm depends on theexistence of systematic and efficient policies for expansion at thebottom.

134 Joan Carlos Tedesco

Thus the aim is not to choose either alternative to the exclusion ofthe other. It is vital to solve problems at the bottom of the system inordcr to ensure that social development is democratic in character.Strengthening scientific capacity, by promoting the training of highlyqualified resources and the production of knowledge in order to solvesocial and productive problems, is vital to ensure growth and theavailability of resources. This implies acknowledging that whereasthe criterion for evaluating policies aimed at the bottom of the systemis their impact on access and general provision of education (elimin-ation of academic failure, dropping out, etc.), a criterion for evalu-ating policies concerned with the top of the system is the excellenceof their output (whether knowledge or human resources).

In this approach, we must consider the role of each of the socialagents and that of the state. If decisions concerning resource allo-cation continue to be governed by each social sector's ability to exertpressure, it is obvious that inequalities will be perpetuated andstrengthened. The alternative, in order to break out of this 'market-oriented' line of reasoning, lies in consultation and co-ordinationmachinery that enables the state to play an effective compensatoryrole by transferring the resources to the neediest sectors. Thc futurcof principles of equity in the development of poor countries willhenceforward be to a large extent determined by the creation of suchmachinery and by its efficiency in producing results.

QUALITY OF EDUCATION, SOCIAL EQUITYAND THE ROLE OF THE STATE

The question of equity in education is a matter not merely of thenumber of years spent studying but of the socially significantcharacter of the knowledge that pupils gain while at school. Equityis therefore defined by the possibility of ensuring that the entirepopulation has access to a homogeneous core of knowledge, values,skills, etc., which constitute both the cultural expression of nationalunity and the medium through which active participation and socialawareness is possible.

The state has traditionally borne responsibility for providing thiscentral core of education for the entire population. This expectationhas been given as a reason for administrative and organizationalpatterns based on the centralization of authority, little communityparticipation and curricular uniformity. Thc implications for schooladministration will be discussed below. Wc shall now analyse theproblem of curricular uniformity as a strategy for ensuring equalityof opportunity. Two different phenomena have been reported as

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evidence of a crisis in this traditional approach. First, the processof quantitative expansion recorded in reccnt decades has gone handin hand with growing internal differentiation from a qualitative pointof view. The existence of different 'brands' of schooling has beennoted in various countries, and in many cases the differences dependon whcther the establishments are state-run or private. Second,cultural homogenization has been challenged from two differentangles: (a) the cultural identity of peoples and cultural diversity arenow claimed to be factors that enrich, not weaken, national unity;(b) the burgeoning output of scientific and technological knowledgeand the increasingly pervasive influence of science on modern cultureare rendering obsolete curricular content and the values that schoolsnormally instil.

These two phenomena are distinctive features of the culturalheterogeneity characteristic of many Third World countries which,in the case of Latin America, is manifest in what some authors havecalled the 'low normative integration' of society (Germani, 1985) or'societies in which there is no basic consensus' (Brunner, 1986).

In contexts such as these, the cultural level defined as basic is du.specifiC nucleus of one sector of society, and, for that reason, itsextension to the rest of society is predominantly authoritarian. Thisis most noticeable in societies where there is strong ethnic differen-tiation (Amadio, 1988). In such cases, however, group demands aremade, not for separate treatment, but for a broader and more balanceddistribution of the benefits of development through a culturallypluralist state.

From this point of view, the problem of educational standards is,in very general and abstract terms, part of a twofold challenge: on theone hand, the need to capitalize on cultural relevance through diver-sification at the start of the learning process and, on the other, theneed to draw on the capacity for innovation and change characteristicof contemporary scientific and technological culture. These twoaspects are not contradictory. Cultural relevance in a situationproviding no access to science may lead to isolation, which willcompound backwardness and dependence. The incorporation ofscience and technology in the absence of a strong endogenous nucleuswill lead to a mere cultural enclave or, on a large scale, would be anundertaking doomed to failure.

The problem is not exclusively one of teaching; thc role of theschool is, however, a very important and specific one and may besummed up in the question of how to end the school's culturalisolation by ensuring that there arc effective links between thecurriculum and local culture, on the onc hand, and between thecurriculum and the world of work, on the othcr. This two-pronged

1

I 36 7uan Carlos Tedesco

approach obviously implies that there is a risk of fragmentation anda weakening of national unity. In that connection, but from thecultural angle, there re-emerges the subject of the consultationmachinery which, if the aim of imposing a single homogeneous modelis abandoned, would make it possible to reach basic agreements onthe rules of conduct, co-existence and mutual respect. The role ofthe state would bc defined less by the imposition of a given culturalpattern or model than by encouragement of values and forms oforganization that reflect such a basic agreement. Certain values arefrequently mentioned because they arc closely associated withendogeneous development strategies, and the education system wouldhave a significant role to play in disseminating them through thesocialization of schooling: these are solidarity, creativity, participationand efficiency.

THE STATE AND RESPONSIBILITYFOR EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMMES

Closely connected with the foregoing point, but viewed now fromthe angle of educational administration, is the problem of responsi-bility for the management of educational services. We shall addresstwo problems in particular: (a) the role of the state and of the privatesector; and (b) the role of central government and of local authorities(provincial, municipal, district, etc.).

In recent years there has been a groundswell of opinion in favourof privatization, on the one hand, and decentralization of state admin-istration, on the other. The arguments given for supporting thesealternatives differ from one author and experiment to another, andthe only conclusion that may possibly be drawn is that these issuescannot be analysed in general terms.

The importance of the social, political, economic and culturalcontext for each alternative is crucial in determining its value andthe form that it takes. Educational administration, for example, maybe decentralized within the framework of democratic and partici-pative political processes, and likewise under systems that arcauthoritarian, socially hierarchical and exclusive (Pescador andTorres, 1985; PIIE, 1984).

Organizational models of educational management arc not endsin themselves, but instruments that facilitate or impede the attain-ment of specific objectives. From this point of view, thc key problemfacing education systems in Third World countries is the low levelof responsibility for results to bc found in thc styles of administrativemanagement in vogue, particularly in the state sector.

Thc rolc of the state in education I 37

The shrugging off of responsibility for results that characterizesthe working of education systems is usually blamed on administrativecentra)ization and curricular uniformity. Similarly, there is wide-spread agreement that strategies for achieving institutional autonomy,decentralization and community participation in school adminis-tration can generate greater dynamism, relevance and responsibilityin dealing with specific social demands. In practice, at least in LatinAmerican countries, these features have been the privilege of theprivate educational sector only and have therefore been associatedwith educational services catering for the middle and upper classes.The theory that the state's educational functionwhich is toguarantee national unity and equality of opportunityshould beindependent of group pressure associated with the concept of pro-viding services to satisfy the client, has in fact led, in most cases, to adifferentiated structure in which the possibility of participating anddemanding a particular quality of service is determined by the abilityto pay. The public service is beyond thc community's social controland thus suffers from low innovative capacity and a lack of responsi-bility for results.

The kcy question is therefore how to run educational adminis-tration on lines that guarantee equity and efficiency, democracy andinnovation. The results of decentralization experiments begun inrecent years arc little known and far from conclusive. There is,however, a hard core of questions concerning antidemocratic trendsin decentralization, associated with the weakening of the role of thestate, when decentralization is put into effect without any compen-satory arrangements to prevent the already existing inequalitybetween regions and social scctors from becoming more acute.

There is a case for saying that strong central administration isneeded if decentralization is to achieve its objectives of democracyand reinvigoration. The strengthening of central administrationshould clearly not follow the traditional pattern. It will be requiredto deal more with two main areas: evaluation of results and compen-sation for differences.

In a decentralized system in which component institutions enjoy ahigh level of decision-making autonomy, conditions at the outset maybe as differentiated as need be. The methods and resources used toachieve the objectives may also be highly diversified. However, therole of the state should he essentially that of attaining a certain degi eeof homogeneity at the end of the process and, with that aim in view,it should have a strong capacity for evaluating the results of activitiescarried out by local bodies and, on a par with that evaluation, anequally strong compensatory capacity for backing up local units thatdo not have their own resources with which to attain thc objectives

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defined as national geals. These activities (evaluating results andcompensating for differences) presuppose the existence at the admin-istrative level of both an efficient quality control structure and a com-pensatory fund making it possible for decisions to be taken on thebasis of the evaluation of results. (It should be made clear that suchan evaluation should not be confined to measuring learning achieve-ments but should include all the variables that account for suchachievements and should, in turn, constitute thc basis for decision-making.) Exactly what such machinery will be like will depend onparticular national characteristics; the point that must be stressedhere is th: need for these functions to be established as the prioritytask of central educational administrations. If the state is to performthese functions efficiently, it must have a basic componentacapacity to inform. Only if it has a strong capacity to produce suitableinformation can decisions be duly adopted relating to the identifi-cation of problems, the definition of priority policies, managementcontrol, resource allocation, etc. The value of information is not,however, confined to these functions within the state machinery.Information is also a basic component of any policy to strengthencitizens' participation in making and in monitoring the implemen-tation of educational decisions.

EDUCATIONAL PLA, NING

To conclude, we should also look at thc implications of this analysisfor educational planning. The subject is a very broad one and muchattention is currently being paid to it. An exhaustive study of thefuture prospects of educational planning is, of course, outside thescope of this article. I shall merely make two main comments sum-marizing the most significant implications of the foregoing analysis.

First, it would seem possible to predict a strengthening of statemachinery, especially in countries with a high foreign debt. Severalauthors (Lagos, 1988; Gurrieri, 1987) have outlined the mainfactors that necessitate such strengthening. From the economicstandpoint, they have mentioned the role of the state in: (a) nego-tiating the foreign debt; (b) obtaining international funding; (c) raisingthe rate of investment; and (d) formulating a strategy for industrialtransformation. From the political point of view, the strengtheningof the state seems to be bound up with its role of providing themachinery for consultation among thc different social sectors. In thatregard, it is interesting to call to mind Crozier's (1987) view that thegreater the number and freedom of agents to express their interestsand demands, the greater the need for organization and management.

The role of the str.te in education 1 39

Although responsibility for that organization does not necessarily fallto the state, it would seem that only the state is capable of bringingall parties together to manage common problems. This statement byCrozier, which applies to developed capitalist countries, must beexpanded in the case of Third World countries to include the state'srole in raising the level of participation of sectors hitherto excluded.

Strengthening state machinery obviously docs not imply raising itslevels of intervention or increasing its size. Mention has already beenmade, at least with regard to Latin America, of the paradox of theexistence of large but weak states. Strengthening the state meansproviding it with an adequate planning capability (Gurricri, 1987)so that it can dcal with problems arising, inter alia, from the followingfactors: (a) shortage of resources; (b) growing complexity in decision-making processes and the need to co-ordinate different levels andsectors; and (c) reconciling short-term demands (emergencies) withmedium- and long-term requirements.

Secondly, it must be pointed out that there is an urgent need torevise planning models. From the socio-political standpoint of thisarticle, it would seem that the new approaches in educational plan-ning should take at least three considerations into account:Better acquisition with and provision for the various social agents,

in terms of thc membership of their groups, their general propen-sities for action, their negotiation capacity, abilities and scope, etc.

The need to confine planning to what can actually bc planned, bylimiting the state's action to those aspects which serve a prioritypurpose (setting prioritics, evaluating results, off-setting differ-ences, developing public information systems).

Special consideration for strengthening management capacity toensure that syllabuses and curricula are not reduced to mcrcempty formulae.

Finally, educational planning in the futurc will have to face thechallenge of defining its own identity and role between the growingcomplexity of both the political decision-making process and therequirements of an efficient administration based on the co-existenceof a wide range of alternatives.

Rcfcrences

Astauto, t813 La cultura coma :Tomo politico dindmieas y renden,io, en Ainers:a LarindSantiago.

13Aote, 13.; BIRNBAUM, B. 1982. Sociologic de Pleat, l'aris,BOON, A. t986. De:mu:rum y reform social en America I.atina: retlexiones a proposito de

Ii experiencia europea. In: EURAL, Crisit y regulaiidn estatal: &lona, de politico en Arnim aLatina y Furopa. pp 279-98. Buenos Aires, GEL.

1 ti t_


BRASIAYSICY, C. 198$. La disennunacidn educativa en Argentina. Buenos Aires, FLACSO/Grupo Editor Latinoamerumno.

BRUNNER, J. J. 1986. Los debates sobre la modernidad y el futuro de America Latina. Santiago,FLACSO, April.

CARNOY, M. 1986. Educational Reform and Planning in the Current Economic Crisis.Prospects, Vol. XVI, No. 2.

ECLAC. 1985. Crisis y desarrollo cn America Latina y el Caribe. CEPAL Review, No. 26,August.

CROZIER, M. 1987. Etat modeste, hat moderne: strategic pour un aurre changement. Paris,Fayard.

Gancla, W. 1987. Notas sobre a crise da gestao educacional. Em Aberto (Brasilia), Vol. 6,No. 36, October-December.

GERMANI, G. 1985. Democracia y autoritarismo en la sociedad moderns. Los Undies de lademocracia. Buenos Aires, CLACSO.

GRACIARENA, J. 1984. El estado latinoarnericano en perspectiva. Figuras, crisis, prospectiva.Pensamiento :beroamerrcano, No. 5, January-July.

GUIDDERI, A.1917. The Validity of the State-as-Planner in the Current Crisis. CEPAL ReVICIV,

No. 31, Apri .KAZANCIGIL, A. 1985. L'Etat do ',lurid. Perspectives de sociologie historigue. l'aris,

ECONOMICO/DneSCO.LAGOS, R. 1987. Efectos del proceso de ajuste econamico sabre la educación cn America Latina.

Santiago, OREALCUnesco.. 1988. Para enfrentar la crisis. Nueva sociedad (Caracas), No. 94, March-April.I.E.souaNg, J. 1988. Education et sociiti: les delis de /*an 2000. Paris, I.a DecouvertelLe Monde.LEwIN, K. M. 1987. Education in Austerity; Options for Planners. Paris, Unesco/IIEP.LOAEZA, S 1988. DesigUaldad y democracia. Next's (Mexico City), Vol. 11, No. 123, March.MARTINS, L. 1984. Expanc5o e crise do estado (reflex6es sobre o caso brasileiro)'. Pensamiento

iberoamericano, No. 5, January-July.PESCADOR, J. A.; TORRES, C. A. 1985. Poder politico y educachin en Mexico. Mexico City,

UTEIIA.PI1E (PROGRAMA INTERDISCIDLINARIO DE INVESEIGACIONE-5 EN EDUCACION). 1984. Las transfor-

maciones educacionales bajo el rtgimen ',Ishtar. Santiago de Chile, PIIE.RAMA, G. 1984. Educaci6n, participacidn y esnlos de desarrollo en Amirica Latina. Buenos Aires,

Kapelusz/CEPAL.RAssEgit, S.; VAIDANAU, G. 1987. The Contents of Education. A Worldwide View of Their

Development from the l'resent to the Year 2000. Paris, Unesco.SCIIMITTER, P. C. 1986. El futuro del estado benefactor. In: EURAL, Crisis y regulacicin

estatal: dilernas de politica en Atnerica Latina y Europa, pp. 267-78. Buenos Aires, GEL.TEDESCO, J. C. 1987. El desafio edutativo: calidad y democracia. Buenos Aires, Grupo Editor

Latinoamericano.. 1983. Pedagogical Model and School Failure. CEPAL Review, No. 21, December.TogatAN, V. 1985. El proceso de acumulación y la debilidad de los actores. CEPAL Review,

No. 26, August.Mutilator, A. 1987. Actores sociales y infernos politicos en Amirica Latina. Santiago de Chile,

OREALC-1LO.UNgsco. t987. Evoluetin cusp:titans a de lot internas educativas de America Latina y el Cartbe,

andlists estadlstiro. Paris, 1 'ilesco.

SECTION II

The Practice of Educational Planningin Different Regions

t.

Educational planning,administration and

management in AfricaVinayagurn Chinapah

The contemporary socio-economic situation inAfrica is one of general pessimism inteispersedby flickers of optimism. Perhaps what is reallyneeded is pessimism of the intellect, whichimplies recognition of past errors of economic,political and social nature as well as scepticismabout perfection of remedial and developmentalmeasures suggested from outside the Africansub-region. The continent also requires an opti-mism of the will, to keep on trying. Court andKinyanjui (1988) argue that Africa is a continentcharacterized by tumult and change over thepast twenty-live years, but it has one fascinatingconstant which is the persistent and seeminglyinsatiable public demand for formal education.

Vinayagum Chinapah (Mauritius). Associate Pro-fessor of International and Comparative Educationand Deputy Director, Institute of InternationalEducation, Stockholm University. Has worked as aconsultant to UNESCO, the Swedish InternationalDevelopment Authority (SIDA), the SwedishAgency for Research and Cooperation with Devel-oping (.:ountries (SAREC), the Organization forEconomic co-operation and Development (OECD),the United Nations neve foment Programme(UNDP.1, and the Internatwnal DevelopmentResearch Centre f IDRC I in a number of countriesin Africa and Asia. .4 uthor and co-author of severalbooks and articles

The political, social and economicsituation in Africa

Never before has the African continent wit-nessed such a popular commitment to pro-grammes of action for economic recovery anddevelopment, structUral adjustments andhuman-resource development. However, thiscommitment is far from being a general consen-sus among these countries to adopt 'packages'pioposed by others. These packages need to bemodified according to the political, social andeconomic conditions of each country.

THE POLITICAL BACKGROUND

There have been increasingly concerted effortsin the 1980s among African leaders to tackletheir countries' social, and economic situation.At all international summits and conferences,the rallying cry for aggressive developMent strat-egies is heard. In the field of education, thesesummits and conferences have laid the founda-tion for new educational strategies in the region(Lagos Plan of Action, 1980, the Harare Confer-ence of Ministers of Education and those respon-sible for Economic Planning in African MemberStates, (MINEDAF) V, 1982, the Organization

%.e. \\I I.1941

144 V nayagu m (.hinapah

of African [tiny (OA( ) I leads of State Confer-ence on Priority Programme for Africa's Recov-ery, 1985, tne Khartoum Declaration, 1988; etc).We should also mention the commitment of theinternat tonal community, including bilatet aland multilateral agencies such as the SwedishInternational Development Authority (SI DA),UNESCO, UNDP, the World Bank, etc.,towards programmes of economic recovery,human resources development planning, and in-digenous development in the region. In the faceof seemingly intractable problems for socio-eco-nomic des elopmem, Cie people of Africabecome emboldened to question the legitimacyof some of the socto-political systems that rulethem. In many places, for example in Algeria,Nigeria, Zambia and Ghana, to name but a few,there is extensive debate with regard to genuineand popular participation in governmentthrough well-defined channels.

soCIO4CONOMIC. CONTI' X ts. -

Socio-economtc and structural imbalances inAft ican development are often approached in apolarized manner. There are those who view thecurrent situation as an outcome of the Interna-tional crisis ts ith worldwide inflation, unfavour-able terms of trade, etc.; while others see the crisisto be internal, namely in the nature of state pol-icies, internal class structure or political instabil-ity (1.*X ES(;O, 1987, p. 36). Ilow.n.:er, the currentthreat of economic stagnation or decline wouldhit the alreadt underprivileged or marginalgroups in Aft wan societies the hardest.

The social situation in the mid-1980s has dete-riorated in mant ways and has been marked bycrisis in most areas of human development -health, nun ition, housing, education and em-ployment. By 1987/88, poverty had become wide-spread in both the urban and rural areas of theregion affecting between 50 and 75 per cent of the

; population. In 1987, around 4 million Africans! %vete identified as tefugees and as many as 10 mil! lion displaced persons. Many households are [iv-

ing under the nummal level of basic humanneeds.

1 r

Furthermore, an explosive deterioration ofthe quality of education marked by increasingproblems of educational wastage (drop-outs,repeaters and failures) is noticed in such a sit-uation. By 1984 as many as 40 pet cent of theschool-age population had no exposure of anykind to formal or non-formal education (ECA,1989).

Other socio-economic Indicators for coun-tries in the region show marked variations. Theannual population grosuh-rate between 1975and 1983 was below 2 per cent for some coun-tries (Cap Verde, Gabon, Mauritius and Sey-chelles, all of them with a population of notmore than 1 million in 1984), while it was above4 per cent for countries such as Botswana, Coted'Ivoire, Kenya and the Labyan Arab Jainaha-riya. Furthermore, in some countries the per-centage of rural population was as high as 80 percent or more (fourteen countries), and as low as50 per cent or less (three countries). A similartrend was observed in terms of life expectancy, ashigh as 60 years and above foi eight count! iesand as low as 50 years and below for twenty-twocountries. Marked differences between countriesin the region are recorded also in terms of lowGNP. In 1985, there were seven countries in theregion with per capita GNI' above $1,000 whileas many as nineteen countries had GNP per cap-ita below 5300. Real GNP growth-rate per capitaduring the period 1965-85 ranged front a minusin thirteen countries to a plus of more than 3 percent in nine countries. This evidence of socio-economic variations between countries in theregion confirms to a certain degree the danger ofapplying cook-book prescriptions of structuraladjustment to programmes suggested outsidenational contexts.

The difficult economic situation has in therecent past been exacerbated by reneweddrought, floods, civil tsars and regional conflictsin countries like Ethiopia, Sudan, Mozambiqueand Angola. These pioblems have created pre-carious food situations, disrupted transporttout es, upt noted ommunittes and produced

. millions of refugees, affecting both economicand political conditions.

Sei ions economic dissatisfaction originates

I:dthational planning, administration and management in Altica 145

from rapid inflation. distribution and structuralimbalances, wage-policy problems, harsh staplefood-price adjustments and marked reduction inpeople's living standards. The above socio-cco-nomic problems are further aggravated by ter-rible housing conditions of low-income earners.poor nutrition, low resistance to disease, thelooming menace of AIDS and serious drug-abuse problems. Important gains made in theeducation sector in the 1960s and 1970s havebeen reversed, and employment as well as em-ployment services have deteriorated both in

terms of quality and quantity. Brain-drain andthe exodus of labour are on the increase in theregion.

The overall economic picture, however,

remains gloomy, and the human costs of moststructural adjustment programmes are extremelyhigh and give much cause for concern bothinternally and externally. According to the

recent economic report from Africa (ECA, 1989,p. 6) the number of countries experiencing nega-tive or below 3 per cent growth-rate have, in fact,increased from twenty-nine in 1987 to thirty-onein 1988. Botswana and Mauritius have recordedexceptionally high growth results for specificreasons: Botswana because of its booming dia-mond industry and Maurittus because of us rapid

industrialization.The gloomy economic situation of Africa

over the past Years has also led to a worsenedexternal debt position, which in 1988 stood at$230,000 ni II ion. The volume of debt rose by$10,000 million in 1988 alone. New loans (lead-ing to actual new debt) is only increasing mar-ginally. The btu densome Increases essentiallyreflect effects associated with the fluctuatingvalue of the US dollar, the accumulation ofarrears, and the capitalization of interest rates.

Coming back to the field on education,Wright (1989. pp. 80-90) provided an extensiveanalysis of the World Bank Policy Study in sub-Saharan Africa (1988) starting with the argnmentthat the study has sevei al shortcomings in termsof: (a) controversial interpretation ot ak,olabledata; (b) a hint ot idealism and naivety in somesuggestions and recommendations; (c) an

unwarranted fudging of issues related to the

wider implications and implementation strate-gies of some policy suggestions; (d) a rather re-strictive policy framework imbued with pessi-mistic caution; and (e) insensitivity to the

crisis-induced potential for initiative and creativ-ity which always lurks within situations of socio-economic decline. He further warns against thecost-strategics and cost-measures proposed inthe structural adjustment programmes in educa-tion which he considers to be purely dictated bymonetarist economic theories.

The views expressed above are pertinent toexisting planning, administrative or managerialstrategies and to those designed for educationaldevelopment in the region in the 1990s and be-yond.

An overview of education in Africa

Around the time that most countries in Africa,especially sub-Saharan Africa, gained independ-ence from colonial rule, the region lagged farbehind the rest of the world on nearly every indi-cator of Western-style educational development.Since the early 1960s, however, the nations ofAfrica have invested heavily in education at alllevels. There has been a firm belief that withouteducation, development could not occur. It hasalso been gencrally conceived that only an edu-cated population could command the skills nec-essary for sustainable economic growth and abetter quality of life (see the Harare Decla.a-tion). A recent report (UNESCO, 1987) providesa comprehensive overview on the past and pre-sent achievements as well as shortcomings ofeducational development in Africa. Some of themajor points are examined here.

African achievements in the education sectorhave been impressive, both in absolute termsand in relation to other sectors or to other coun-tries, in the period between 1960 and 1980. Thatis a tribute to all involved: African parents andleaders, missionaries, United Nations agenciesand external donors. In the period after 1980,

! however, it has been increasingly difficult to mo-bilize resources for education, and a somewhat

146 Vmayagum Chinapal;

decreasing proportion of GNI' has been allo-cated to education since 1980. When viewedfrom an international perspective, the propor-tion of GNP destined for education in the regionis rather low, especially when applied to theyoung population. Statistics reveal that educa-tional expenditure per pupil represents hardly aquarter of the world average. The economic andfinancial constraints since the early 1980s havehad increasingly adverse effects on quantitativeas well as qualitative aspects of education andtraining in the region. At the same time, poorcapacity for educational planning, administra-tion and management is manifested in mostcountries, which are regarded as the sine qua nonof successful implementation of educationalreforms, changes and innovations.

THE PRESENT SVI UAl ION

Although it is almost impossible to take stock ofthe achievements and shortcomings of eclaca-tional development and to propose future edu-cational actions for such a heterogeneous, var-ied and complex environment as Africa, anattempt is made here to look ahead from a syn-

! optic educational view.

School enrolments have stagnated since 1980,and in some cases fallen below the levels reac-hed in the 1970s, in almost all the basic educa-tional institutions of the region. This reflectsthe present economic situation in Africa. Forexample, children, especially girls, are keptaway from school because they are needed tocontribute to the family income, not the leastbecause of the recent droughts, which haveforced many families to migrate. This povertyhas also caused malnutrition and poor health,which in itself reduces the number of educablechildren, and accounts for part of the lack ofsuccess at school. Furthermore, in many coun-tries the fall in total family income has coinci-ded with higher fees for schooling and relatedactivities, which have been introduced becauseof the scarce resources available for the sector.

1 5

Although basic education remains a require-ment for at least reasonably successful partici-pation in the labour market, the demand forschooling is expectcd to remain at a lower levelthan prior to 1980, as the immediate privategain by basic education is limited. This is dueboth to the recent economic stagnation and theincreasing number of graduates, which haveprompted a rise in demands for educationalqualifications on the labour market.

The quality of education has declined at all levels.Among the explanations given for this are thelow expenditure per student and thc ineffectiveallocation of existing resources. The expendi-ture per student is especially low at the primarylevel, which is particularly disturbing becauseof its importance as a foundation for other levelsof education and because of its close link toadult literacy. In addition, there is evidence toshow that over the years, little progress hasbeen made in improving teaching/learningconditions, that is, unavailability or shortage oftextbooks, lack of curriculum relevance, andpoor supervision and management.

School failure that is, early and later drop-outs,frequent grade repeating, and poor academicstandards - is a problem that has been noted atall levels of schooling, particularly at the pri-mary level. This phenomenon deserves specialattention in relation to its vast implications forthe cost of education, which are also reverber-ated at subsequent stages of education. In termsof quantitative research the problem is quitewell documented, and the statistical reports ofthe problem give cause for much concern. As toa qualitative analysis of the causes, the arearemains insufficiently investigated (Chinapah,1990b). The 1982 Harare Conference pointedout social and economic factors, and the per-ceived scant relevance of education, as plausi-ble determinants of the problem (UNESCO,1987, p. 25). On the other hand, in Zimbabwe agloss primary enrolment ratio, over 100 per centis reported. With a low rate of repetition, Zim-babwe seems to have achieved the goal of uni-versal primary education.

1 din ational planning, administration and management in \Inca 147

A low level of cognitive achievement has further-more been recorded, though there are excep-tions to this in some of the well-established sec-ondary schools of the region, whereachievements arc quite high. I lowever, somecaution is necessary in allowing the level of cog-nitive achievement, as evidenced by test scores,to be the only basis for drawing conclusionsabout the quality of education. Although the lev-el of cognitive achievement is certainly an essen-tial indicator of the pupils' future productivity -as it reflects one of the most important goals ofeducation yet, quality is a multi-faceted mea-surement. Quality, therefore, will also have toencompass such factors as the extent to whicheducation manages to accommodate modernmarket-oriented skills with existing traditionalneeds and values.

The problem of maintaining the standard of exist-ing resources, for example, maintaining an ade-quately trained and motivated supply of teachersand restoring dilapidated premises and facilities,may at least, in part, be due to a preference foremphasizing development as defined by newprojects, rather than maintenance of existingfacilities. Poor teaching materials are yet anotherproblem that needs immediate attention.

SOME ALI ERNAllvE SOLLMONS- _

The question of a better performance of Africaneducation systems, involves consideration ofboth quantitative and qualitative dimensions.Problems need to be seen in their proper culturalcontext and approached in a mulu-disciplinaryway with an eye on revitalization, selectiveexpansion, diversification and decentralization.Serious rethinking would call for the following:Matters concerning healthy and educable pupils,

qualified and contented teachers, suitabletextbooks, relevant teaching materials, and ap-propriate instructional language poll( ies needto be addressed.

Better educational administration, planning andimplementation imply clearer formulation

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and articulation of objectives and involvement ,

of relevant groups at all levels.The intensification and rationalization of school i

and out-of-school literacy teaching, with anemphasis on the complimentarity of adult lit-eracy teaching and primary education has tobe considered. An enhanced use of the exist-ing non-formal education pattern has anessential contribution to make with respect torationalization of literacy teaching.

Curriculum restructuring is needed to includerealistic basic environmental care in schoolsand the consideration of choice of languagefor instruction as well as for the maintenanceof indigenous languages.

The stepping up of relevant educationalresearch and educational evaluation as well asa systematic use of scientific, cultural andtechnological research must be pursued inorder to identify, define and master some ofthe problems of the continent.

Educational planning

The institutionalization of educational planningin Africa is a rather recent phenomenon. In mostAfrican countries, educational planning wasinstitutionalized in the 1960s and 1970s. InAfrica, as in various other parts of the world,educational planning was greatly influenced bythe general policies of planned social, culturaland economic change replacing the traditionalpiecemeal and laissez-faire approaches. Educa-tional planning became an important compo-nent of national development planning. At thetime of independence and immediately aftet -wards, African countries found it imperative tohave a prospective rather than a retrospectiveoutlook when planning their educatioi.i systemsto meet the needs of nation building. Elitist andrestrictive access and provision to educationalservices were in general replaced by a populistsystem of education.

Planning education for the young Africans oftomorrow became a challenge to people from allwalks of life. At an earlier phase, the stxial-

148 1 mil agtoit C hinapah

demand approach to educat onal planningbecame predominant. There was a massive

expansion of educational facilities and services inordel to compensate for the limited educationalaccess syffich prevailed dui ing the colonial period. Later, educational investments were exam-ined from the standpoint of meeting a particularcountry's manpower needs and requirements.This was then followed by a greater emphasisupon cost-hetwfit analysis of such investments interms of priorities attached to different levels andtypes of education. It is Important to note that allthree approaches to educational planning (social-demand, manposser-planning and cost-benefit)%WIT Med simultaneously at various points intime. One would not he surprised to find that theyare still in vogue today in most circles of policymaking, planning and implementation in thesecountries

OR6 AN I LA I ION AND MAJOR I CNC !IONS

In recent years, the notion of educational plan-ning and as relevance to the present political,socio-cultural and economic contexts of Africancountries were strongly debated at both nationaland international levels. New directions for edu-cational development and educational planningin Africa sLere presented at various summits andconfetences The current challenges to educa-tional planning should he understood in thelight of the recommendations front these sum-mits and conferences as well as in view of therecent analytical documrnts dealing with thisparticular topic in Africa.

An attempt I s made here to select some of thematot ti ends in the practice of educational plan-ning in Africa It should be noted however, thatIt is impossible to do tftstice to particular changestaking place in this field within each of the Afri-can coutitt ies. Very often it is the case that thesenational changes ate not properly documented,disseminated or accomm .1 for

.,unnies do not claim to has(' anendogenous system ot educational planning. Infa( t, the development of educational planning in11i is a Isas meads mspued by tht hue,ements

1 C 1

and progress made m othei parts of the woi Id,mainly wnh regard to its org....izational struc-tures. functions, techniques and innovations.Tor example, mcmy of the ciiimeni issues andproblems of educational plannmg as addressed atthe international seminar organued by the Inter-national Institute for Educational Planning(IlEI') m 1983 are constantly reported innational and sub-national seminars and work- '

shops on educational planntng in the Aft icancountries. Three fundamental questions arosefrom the I1EP seminar Should educationalplanning sull di aw its inspiratnIn from past expe-rience? Should it open up the hortions of its .

thinking as regards the necessary and sufficienttypes of information? If so, upon what criteriashould this information be identlfied. gathered. .

classffied and disseminated- (llEI', 1984, p. 10).The 1 'N LSCO Regional Office for Educa-

tion in Africa (BREDA) has since its inceptionbeen instrumental in the process of Institution-aliznig educational plannme in Africa with theassistance of national, bilateia), regional andinternational agencies and institutions. III tecentyears, the maim anus Ines iii IIRE1)A m this fieldhave concentrated on the Regional TechnicalProtect for 'Framing and Reseals-1i in Educa-tional Planning and Admmistiation, having asits acronym COTORP.1 The COFORPA pro-tect is open to all Menthe] Stales of NESCOsub-Saharan Aft c.i. BY 1988. Minty-four of Wsforty -four Membei States icr the ieoioir paint ipa-ted its %at ion,. actn ines

Organuational and tunt Ilonai activities inthe field 01 educational planning have, over theyears, expanded licIllcIldolick in mtg.! Africancountrin in response to the lapid quanntatiVeand qualitative des elopments Lit then educationsy %tents sshIch lot dee,tdes v e Hocked hc thecolonial authotmes Starting %kith a small unit,bureau or depat tment located at the \Itiusuy ofEducation, educational planning %Las glyen los

pi etennous and ambinous task It i esulted in theL intent situation in 111,1111 "Iffiest' c outlines, that

is. the iieed to compatimuniall/e educationalolannIng units. buteaux or duct ttuates into dist-sions, department., oi lahnng inmums aspects of ethic planome ,it the

1 docanonal pi inning idministiation and inannsic Inc ii iii \fit( 149

central level Likewise, mans cons entionalmacro-level educational planning strategies gas ewas to more micro-oriented ones, as es idencedthrough the importance attached to school map-ping and [moo-planning, decentraluation toplanning bs programmes and pi oiects An

equally impot Lint emphasis is gis en to the quid-native aspects of educational planning inainlsrelation to problems of educational ssastage(drop-outs. failures and grade-lepeating), educa-tional inequalities between legions and heist eendifferent socio-economic and cultut al gioups.gendei disparities, unemployment and ii)h-cie-ation; south and adult illiteracy; and «-ist icc )%ci y strategies in educational tinanenU4

An important function of educational plan-ning units or their equivalents has been to coordinate and communicate with othei [turnstilesand with corresponding units at iegional andsubregional levels. Hew it is often difficult toseparate the planning functions from those of ad-ministration and management. At piesent. ccilittle is done to ascertain the practice ot centraluanon and/oi decenualvation ot educa-

nonal planning in .1frica. !luring)) ihe ompaimentaluation of educational planning in mostAfrican commies, the number of dis Isoons, set .

lions, or departments fulfilling sat is edus anonai planning functions has Inc teased Flies

ai e giouped heir Into tour maim categoi les toillustrate their different functions.Staloticy, Inlorminton and do, win-Paxton i e -

s p T i s i b l e for collecting. pi ocessmg. a it.i Issi ng

and disseminat ing educational mai !sus s

involving diagnosis and pi otert ionSchool mapping, congrualon tiparmoit e-

sponsible lot the updating of the Nu 1101)1 Alasand maps, selecuon tif Wes and plans loici hool buildings and construction. updatingspec dications lin all educational supplies. c,u .s mg out studies and curves s on emnpment

and maintenance iequirements hien theseactivities its i,ls e tnicio planning ut institutional los els

Pi, paratfoif, truffiii

monitor/1,T ult/Cali,,n,iiOld ptohtt,.- t esponsible s tit

natfishal needs and pi fin int". tot shoit tint

and long-teim educational plans and fol exter-nally funded pi ogrammes and protects, identi-fication and allocation of human, financial,mat coal and olganuational resources; es alua-non, and monitortng of programme and pro-tect implementation.

hvir/uatrorr quilre, and risearch iesponsible totdiagnosis, evaluation, and tnrecasting of needsfor various levels and types of education; sur-es s on cult iculum, examination, educational

finance. educational disparities; studies onschool admintsti anon and management.

kvidence horn menu. -one countries showedthat these bun categoi ics occupy the mator share'of educational planning functions in Africa( rabic I; In addition to these lout main cate-gories. there ale special units dealing solels withextet [tally Imanced tt ogi amines and pi otectslike the external relations sets ice it hthiopiaand the Central African Republic, the pi otectunplementanon unit in Kenya or the projectplanning. mormonng and es aluation Unit inSierra I cone In some cases, thete are countrsspecific units, I'm 111'4:Ince, progranuningcontrol in Remit. pedagogy in Cap Vet de, com-puters in Gabon. of school facilities section inthe Gambia

I silt 1 1' MI le, 110111 lukellti ,\ An (MIMI les

tII 111,110I ol VOIR ,111011,11 planninv.

Collet !no.. r,(.:1,2. .111,1

tilsse111;11.11111 ,..1tislit1,1b01.111,11 4:1,1 1

5.11,101111.111,1111.

I )1qe!ell! titr,

14 (N-

W

It t

1.1(.11.11.11

01 III% t,tnItii l,11.11111110 24

I .4111111.11,0 .111,1

c.d.Mon 24

1111131,11.

.11...1e1.111171's .1111 14

5.-

I 1,, .

150 1 'm nav.u:tun l'humapah

An eser-increasing amount of co-mdination hasevolved in the process of plannIng education inAfrica as seems also to be the case elsewhere. Itis often argued that educational planning whichencompasses a vast and complex area of social,cultural, political and economic interventionswith a focus on the entire education sectorshould be seen through the eyes of differentgroups of actors, agents, and beneficiaries sit-uated both upstream and downstream of theplanning and administrative systems (I1E11,

1984, p. 131). Co-ordination, information, andcommunication linkages are often the primedeterminants of successful planning and imple-mentation.

PROGRI-S sN C.11.11.1.1. N61

In most African countries, educational planningunits, or their equivalents, function mot, as co-ordtnating bodies establishing liaisons at boththe horizontal and vertical levels of edmationaldecision-making and implementation, as hasbeen observed above. Paradoxically, many of thedrawbacks of current educational planning prac-tices ate related to poor co-ordination, infOrma-non and communication linkages evidencedthrough a number of countrs reports (Chinapah,I990a). However. it Is Important to note that,generalls. there is no corresponding improve-ment in resources (pet sonnel, financial or mate-sal) to meet the expanding functions and activ-ities of educational planning at both central andsub-national levels. Many of the future chal-lenges of educationat planning will need to focuson some of the largels unattended pi oblems ofthe past as well as to those that have recentlyemerged.

Among the mans hallenges iii edutationalplanning in Africa, those associated ss ith (a) or-ganintional and structural issues; (hi) personneldevelopment; and (c) qualits of the infm manon-base for planning, deserve pat ticular attention

lti:autzartommal and limo mura/

Instead of ienti,ili/ation 0 osei-Lennithiation

plannmg, school mapping and ultimo-planning.l'hese ate necessals changes which will contilh.ute to developments in the area of. (a) establish-

; ing or strengthening the linkages betsseenics -making and actual implementation ofeducational plans, pi ogrammes and protects,which in win may result in better and more real-istic planning and pi ogrammmg; (1.0 mei easm,,the floss. of information and ensui mg a gleam-participation between different agents, actorsand beneficiaries dii ectls or induct-11s involvedin the ptocesses and outcomes ot educationalplanning at central, regional, and sublegionallevels; (c) reducing pi oblems of educational Inc-

: qualities and wastage and enhancing the tele-vance of education; (d) improving planning, ad-ministration, management font nons at thesubmit tonal levels; (e) pri,s iding bettel opportu-nities for es aluation. monitoringind folloss -upof educational policies, plans, pi oglammes andprojects; and (ft fat Miming the I itionali,,itiotiand utilization of as-ailable resom es foi educa.lion anti educauonalls i elated-set S ices.

Pirmumna .1, 7-, lopm, mit

The rapuils changing and espanding ss stems oteducational planning and admmistiat ton inAfrica have not been aitompamed bs ton e-sponding Int tease and mipiosement 01 Pei SIM-nel serving these ssstems Besides lugh pi oh-lems of attrition and mobilo among theplanning personnel. m.ms ss stems has e sulletedfrom a lack of a proper sti nom e, lot ensui Inv tina permanent basis, pi c-st'll .111th 111-St0s it

training of edut ational plannets 1 akewise, %els

little has been done to imptose the mutat skillsand competent es needed to adiust to thedemands and hallenges of edu, amiu,d plan-ning in lesponse to the last-, hanging ens itommews of these t tummies In the pm esenteducational planning needs to be sso, tamed is oima new and mote holism appt It to humansow( e des clopment planiung o hid, tit minsplaces new demands im the skills udstanding of edut ationaI pfaimeis hmapah ci

gieatet emphasis should be plat es on l, 1989, p 291

rionat planning, administration arid management in Airica 151

Intormanon tu,, 10, planning

I he peiloimance ol educational planning de-pends faigely on the nature, coverage, .qualityand ieleyance of the Information base. In themaionts of Ali tcan countries, there is a lack of,mt k maw and c omplete data for a systematic and

opt ellensic e analysis of the present educationsystem tot making protections and scenarios folthe futuie Similaily, there is a lack of informa-tion pet taming to personnel and financial man-agement stall ieeruitment and (urnover, salarypatterns and pi omotion principles, resource allo-t. di 1011 and re-allocations procedures and pi-3c-m es, co ordination of funds from public and pri

tic soul ces, and cost-recovery strategies).inphasis on crude and quantitative data often

limas the possibilitws of examining the guarrat e aspects ot educational planning. Data are

mialyses of the causes of educational\castage and rhiii academic achievement amongcc Inaiils and students in many of these countries.Altogethei, an impiovemem in the information-base lot education can only be encouragedthrough frequent and mow effective evaluation,monnoting and tese:uch works.

Administration

Min Ii ot %chat has heen observed in the previoussic in,n hems a duec t relevance to educational3,11111111stt anon in Africa liducational adminis-tration and educational planning overlap eachot het in (he lulnlment of their functions, which,to a large extent, ale of a complementary nature.Ii is On:while ditlic ult, it not impossible, to di awthe boundai hem een the two. Instead, the rela-tionship hem een planning and administrationmay he better «inceived as a continuum rattier

a dll iltM1111l (Mt, i9x7, p. 36).edui anonal planning has often l'een

lo cell .1 ode of tic ocs it. ethic ational admint.non has . on tlw othei hand, been closely associ.awd %cull the geneial ss stem of public adnums-ti anon nom oiganizanonal, functional and

opchinonal standpoints Foi instan«., in many

African countries decentrahaation of educa-

tional administration per Se cannot be separatedfrom overall policies and practices of decentral-ization (Chinapah and Miron, 1990).

lkfore dealing with the organizational fea-tures and major functions of educational admin-isuation in the region, an attempt is made hereto summarize the maior bottlenecks in its prac-tice as reportM in some of the country studies(see 'Fable 2). The results clearly indicate a poorcapacity for educational administration in termsof skills and competences. As a whole, it is pos-sible to conclude that successful educational ad-ministration depends more on the quality of iheadministrative personnel and to a lesser extenton financial and material lesources.

FAist I- 2. Entries !tom sixteen countiies 0 .\trica onmaior bottleneas for eductitional adminnatanon

. .

I Al: cii qualitied personnell'eisonnel winos-el and mobilii,I Ai: (It resourc('s

!Imam lai and material)intrasiructuic

transportation. c0-.)I at k of training facilities

oidination, participation an..1anon harneis

aik re,aids and in( cultic es

(, 100 041 8

\i ci (). )900, a ct S / r thrIncr nep \ t! cc.. \ 1 . !I

A11,,,, .0! ,le rrosrits .......1 .1.4-

ORciANI /A I ION AND Ai A JOH I l'N( I IONS

Educational administration as any type of ad-ministration can be approac hed from three inter-related perspectives: organizational/structural. .

functional and operational. (;enerally, educa-tional administration ran be delincd as an oiga-nizational suucture consistmg of a [Heim( hy ofsystems and subsystems at natitmal and subna-tional levels with different Intel ielated functionsdelegated and made operational thiough tlw in-

16

1'111,11,P1i .11 ( :111,1001

teractions of an ensemble of different actors andagents, serving educational des elopment pulposes of a nation. This definition does not earsmuch across countries, but in practice thenature, scope and coverage of educational ad-ministration are very much determined by thepolitical and socio-economic structures of acountry.

In the 1960s, most African nations ss ere heav-ily involved in setting up approrriate educa-tional administrative structures to cope with themassive expansion of their educational and edu-cationally related developmental needs. Foisome years, concerted efforts were made tostrengthen these structures in terms of uainedand qualified personnel, financial and materialresources and facilities, and geneial infrastrmtures. Today in these countries, the maintenanceof existing structures, their adiustment andimprovement in order to satisfy the prerequisitesfor educational reforms, changes and innova-nons are the major preoccupations of educa-tional adininistration.

From the information available on sonic ofthe countries in the region, the following gcheral trends can be observed. First, educationaladministration is often pursued in loint collab-oration with other ministries, directly invok edwith certain types of education, for example,ministries of social welfare, youth and sports.health, employment, and the like. Se«md, insome countries, educational administration is oiganized along more than one ministry and bslevels or types of education. Third, it is i ather

common in many countries that some aspects ofeducational administration have remained cen-tralized (educational financing. personnel man-agement, curriculum planning and des clop-ment, legal allairs, research and policy-making,fellowships and awards), while otheis sus h asinspection and supervision, exanunation,duction, distribution and maimenance ol equip-ment and facilities are delegated to regional andsubt egional levels. Fourth, in sonic countries,regional and to a lesser extent, district administrat we offices are mandated to administei piinun y cit basic education as well as non- lot midand literacy programmes. A a whole, it can be

1 6

said that in the regitin mcwasing eflorts arebeing made to decentralize educational adnnnis-tranon while emphasizing greater participationin educational management nom head teachersand school principals, school committees andparent-teacher assoc fictions.

DECEN URALIZA ION AND PAR I RAP:\ I ION

A down-to-earth approach te educational devel-opment in Africa has been a long-standingiequirement. I lowever, this can only be achievedccith an appropriate structure permitting effectiveeducational administration to take place. Thisrequires not only enough resources but also astiong commitment by all partners to decentral-ized educational policy-making and educationaliinpletnentation.

Decentralization and greater participation ineducational administration can contribute tomole demoaatic decision-making processes. Bel-ief opportunities fot the onderprivileged andmarginal groups to voice then educational needs,prim ities and expectations can be piovided,%%Inch in turn can contribute to a reduction ofeducational inequahties. In a situation of eco-nomic austerity which the majority of Africancountries are at present exposed to - decentral-ization and participation can addiess one of theprevalent limitations by creating opportunities toidentify and mobilize local resouices. Similarly,education can be made more relevant and moreefficient through better contacts with local needs,expectations, and realities. In this context, theachievements made in Ethiopia through an ap-propriate system of administration and manage-ment to ensure smooth planning and iinplemen-tation of educational refoims, in Zambia throughthe self-help action plan for education (SHAPE)and multigrade schools, and in Botswana andZimbabwe through the works of thc Brigades, atecases in point. These benefits ate often ascer-tamed by donor agencies themselves. In a recentWorld Bank l'olicy Study (1988, p. 82), it Is

aigued that greater decentralization correspondsto the c haracteristics of African countries, namely

1 ducationi planiong, administration and management n Africa 153

the long distances between individual schools andthe centre, great ethnic and linguistic diversity;and relatively poor systems of communications.Evidence from some comparative studies ondecentralization and participation in educationalplanning and administration contirms these find-ings (Coombs and Ahmed, 1974; McGinn andSchiefelbein, 1980; Chinapah, 1989).

The success of decentralization and partici-pation in education depends on the extent towhich the decision-making processes are

adapted to them, that is, involvement of imple-mentation agents of education programmes andprojects in these processes. Simply transferringexisting organizational administrative structurestogether with their conventional practices,

norms and values to local levels will not work.An improvement in the administrative and man-agerial competencies at regional and subregionallevels is equally important.

Effective decentralization arid participationin education in Africa calls for well-defined

centres and universities) play a decisive role in theactual realization of educational policies, pro-grammes and projects that arc administered ei-ther in a centralized or decentralized manner.The educational management capacities of mosteducation systems in Africa need to be strength-ened. In the World Bank Bulky Study (1988, p.89) two areas of top priorities were mentioned: (a)the improvement of programmes for selecting,training, and supervising school headteachersand principals, combined with greater institu-tional autonomy, and (b) the development andimplementation of achievement testing systemsthat provide feedback on institutional perform-ance to individual schools, their supervisors andthe communities they serve.

Educational management in African coun-tries suffers a great deal front a scarcity of qual-ified and motivated personnel due to inadequatetraining facilities and insufficient reward struc-ture of incentives. A centre-periphery patternpersists in the availability of resources. The best

roles, functions and boundaries of various units educated and most committed educational man-

and divisions at various levels of educational agers arc often encouraged to leave local-levelplanning and administration as well as an effec- administration in order to serve in central-level

live mechanism for the flow of Information administration through promotion practices.

downstream and upstream as well as holt/on- There is evidence from countries in the regiontally. Such a mechanism can spare time, re- (e.g. Botswana, Ethiopia, Senegal, Zambia and

sources and personnel from the central units and Zimbabwe) that disparities in skills and compe-

divisions to strengthen their roles and functions tence are reinforced by socio-economic, cultu-

in policy formulation and analysis, quality con- ral, and gender differences between the person-

trot and dissemination. nel serving at the central level and those servingat subnational and local levels.

Returns to efforts and investments in educa-tional management are many. In the present sit-uation of economic austerity in Africa, we can-not overlook these returns. Educational

The principal agents of educational reform and managers arc among the most appropriatechange ID a country are those mandated to tipple- agents to ensure implementation of any cost-

ment them, whtle at the decentralized levels these recovery strategies in education, that is, strate-

agents often function as actors and potential bene- gies designed for optimal use of existing as well

ficianes. I lowever, seldom, their conierns, needs as untapped resources. I'hey are equally the

and interests arc subjects of scrutins ot inical drive behind quality Improvement in educationappreciation They rue very often left out of the which demands appropriate leadership stt le, ,

discussion of educational policy-making and ad- entrepreneurship and commument.

ministration. l'hese agents being the front-line Most African educational-management svs

implementors at the different levels of educa- tems are challenged by pressui es front educa-

norud institutions (schools, (olleges, educational nonal reforms and changes initiated at the c en-

Management

b

154 I iti Chinapah

tral level of decision-making or by currentinnovations or experimentations which they arcnot prepared to easily accommodate. The WorldBank Policy Study (1M, p. 81) indicates that thenew challenges do not reflect a problem of ap-propriate policy but rather poor managementcapacities mirrored by: (a) low investment in thisarea; (b) fragmentation of efforts by governmentsand donor agencies that inhibits sustained insti-tutional development; (c) multiple and some-times conflicting donor policies and procedures,which often consume a disproportionate share ofmanagement time and attention; and (d) difficul-ties in adapting modern forms of organization tothe values and patterns of allegiance character-istics of many African cultures.

,,..Training in educational planning,administration and management

.1-he linkage between educational policy-makingand educational implementation depends verymuch upon a country's national capacities ineducational planning, administration and man-agement. This aspect was emphasized more andmore in the 1980s through successive interna-tional, regional, subregional and national con-ferences, seminars, and workshops in Africa.Planning, administering and managing contin-uously changing aim), expanding systems of for-mal and non-formal education in Africa requirenot only a sufficient amount of human resourcesat national and sub-national levels of planningand administrauon, hut also different categories

: of personnel possessing relevant skills and coin-petences to meet the quantitative and qualitatiseeducational challenges.

Unfortunately, most countries in the egiondo not possess an adequate stock of human re-sources to serve their expanding systetns of edu-cational planning and adnunistration, and alsohave not yet created a permanent structure to de-velop their national capacities for relevant pre-and in-service training in the field of educational

' planning, administration and management. In

1 6

the absence of such a permanent structure, it ishardly possible to pursue integrated training pol-icies, linking initial training with in-servicetraining and/or 'common core' training pro-grammes for the several categories of educationpersonnel. The lack of competent educationalplanners, administrators and managers has oftenbeen the mator reason behind the mismanage-ment of the scarce resources available and thepoor performance of the education systems inthese countries. In many countries, the local-level capacities in educational administrationand management were found to be the weakestlinks in the systems. Likewise, unsuccessfulimplementation of new educational policies,reforms and innovations were caused by a gen-eral resistance to change, from those not proper-ly upgraded to meet the new challenges. In otherssords, there is still much to be desired in estab-lishIng and strengthening the existing nationalcapacities fOr educational planning and adminis-tuition in the region.

1.1.1 OPMFNI 01. NA rIONAI CAPACI I IFS

In 1980 l'NESCO published a directory of gov-ernmental bodies and institutions dealing witheducational planning and administration aroundthe world. There were thirty-one countries inthe region which provided data on their nationalcapacities for training and research in educa-tional planning, administration and manage-ment. In that year, only three out of the thit ty-one countries had a comprehensive pre- and in-service training pi nw ant= as well as researchincorporating planning, administration andmanagement. However, there were more institu-tions offering programmes in educational ad-munsu anon than planning or management.There were nearly twice as many Institutions of-fering pie-service as in-service prograninws.Based on the data and documents available onthe national capacities fot training and reseal chin educattonal planning, administration andmanagement in the countries of the region, Chnapah (I 98X, p I 3) made the followmt . maim ob.set ations

Educational planning, administration and management in Africa

Training 3nd research programmes for educa-tional planning, administration and manage-ment are limited in the region and have a frag-mented and compartmentalized structure.

This does not permit a comprehensiveapproach to the problems facing the educa-tion systems of these countries. As a result,educational planners, administrators and

managers have a different perspective on theunderstanding and treatment of common edu-cational issues and problems.

There are great imbalances in the capacity forpre- and in-service training and continuity be-tween the two programmes is not ensured. Asa result, the structural changes and innova-tions meant to improve existing education sys-tems hardly becomes a sub-ject or a commonplatform of action for the recipients of bothprogrammes.

Reseal ch in educational planning, administra-tion and management tends to follow a routeof its own and ends up in the academic (i.e.products from basic research works disserta-

tions, working papers and articles). As a result,it has practically no effect on the changes andinnovations anticipated in education in theregion.

I he national structures for capacity-buildingtends to separate training from research. As aresult, the complementary functions that arerequired to ensure that research contributes topolicy-making are neither perceived nor pro-moted. Research persists in being a theoret-ical and academic pursuit divorced from thepracticalities and problematics of day-to-dayplanning, administration and management.

Strengthening existing institutions or creatingnew ones will not always succeed in confront-ing old problems or present needs and chal-lenges of African education systems without agenuine approach to educational planningand administration. Zambia has since 1984mut these challenges through various mod-alities such as mobile training programmes.This appioach should be directed to the needsthat can be tackled at national, regional andsubregional levels through ti aining trainersand researchers in these fields.

_ .

TACKI.ING THE TRAINING NEEDS

of mu. 19805 AND ritE NEW CHALLENGES

OF TUE 19905

155

In the 1980s, different modalities were used forthe training of educational planners, adminis-trators and managers in the region. These mod-alities arc a mix of International, regional andsubregional programmes and activities gearedtowards the long-term objective of enhancingand strengthening national capacities in educa-tional planning, administration and manage-ment in khe various countries of the region. Atthe COFORPA meeting in 1984, it was foundthat countries in the region would require train-ing of different categories of planning, adminis-trative and managerial personnel in the follow-ing areas: (a) high-level technicians, trainers andofficials of ministries of education in educationalplanning and administration; (b) middle-levelofficials in educational management (inspectors,principals of teacher-training colleges (TTCs),head teachers, etc.); (c) middle-level officials inEducational Planning and trainers in "1-TCs,directed to statistics, school mapping and micro-planning, school building and project manage-ment and monitoring; and (d) financial manag-ers at the institutional level.

Since 1984, most of the efforts of theCOFORPA project have been geared to theseneeds, as well as Others identified during thecourse of implementation, through additionalnational inventories, regional, national and sub-regional workshops and consultations. At the1988 COFORPA Phase 11 consultation, differentmodalities and activities were proposed to streng-then the national capacities for educational plan-ning, administration and management in theregion. The following needs were identified: (a)90 trainers in educational planning able to pre-pare, conduct and evaluate in-service trainingprogrammes in educational planning, and espe-cially, in the fields of educational statistics andmicro-piamung; (b) 180 'national nucleus train-ing in educational administration able to prepare,conduct and evaluate in-service training pro-grammes in educational administration; and (c)

156 nayagum Chinapah

1,300 'part-time' trainers in educational adminis-tration able to assist in the preparation of in-ser-vice training programmes in educational admin-istration. In addition, it was dccided thatmethodological guides in educational planningand educational administration should be pre-pared for each of the three linguistic groups(English-, French- and Portuguese-speaking)together with 'generic' training materials on edu-cational statistics and micro-planning in the caseof educational planning as well as national train-ing handbooks and materials.

Collaborative efforts in trainingand research

UNESCO, through its regional office in Dakar(BREDA) plays the most significant role in es-tablishing, promoting and maintaining regionaland subregional co-operation in educationalplanning, administration and management. Col-laborative efforts are heavily dependent uponexternal funding, for projects like COFORPA,IEPA (Institute of Educational Planning andAdministration, University of Cape Coast/Ghana for West Africa) or KESI (Kenya Educa-tion Staff Institute). On the whole, structures, ifthey exist at all, for promoting regional or sub-regional co-operation in this arca (with theexception of those established and maintainedthrough UNESCO) are limited in scope andcoverage.

Collaborative efforts at regional and subre-gional levels in educational planning and admin-istration, besides those from UN ESCO-13REDA,are strengthened through the works of the IIEPand through support from several regional bodiesand donor agencies (ECA, UND1', the WorldBank, SI DA, OPEC, etc.). Besides training ineducational planning and training of trainers ineducational administration and management, theCOEORPA project has been, and remains, themost effective mechanism for establishing difkr-ent types of networking activities in the region.The summaries of national experiences in edu-

16

cational planning and administration inCOFORPA-Liaison serve as a powerful informa-tion base in this field for countries in the region.To encourage information exchange and to up-date collection, analysis and dissemination ofeducational statistics, the UNESCO-BREDAoffice has a computerized data bank (BREDA-STAT) and publishes regional bulletins. China-pals (1988, pp. 3-5) provided a summary of themajor achievements in the region in the light ofthe collaborative efforts in training, research, de-velopment of materials, eic., ensured during thefirst phase of the COFORPA project (1983-88).These observations served as a feedback for theplanning of the second phase of COFORI'A, thecontent of which indicates the challenges in thisfield for the 1990s.

.4t the regional level

Co-ordination and execution of the COFORPAproject by the Technical Secretariat ofUNESCO-BREDA: (a) ensure the participationof Member States of the Region (thirty-four ofthe forty-four Member States; those not yet par-ticipating are Botswana, Cameroon, EquatorialGuinea, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Mauri-tius, Nigeria, Uganda, and Somalia); (b) mobili-ze resources from different funding agencies(UND1', SIDA, UNESCO, OPEC); (c) establishoperational structures for the implementation ofthe project at subregional and national levels(subregional offices and national co-ordinatingbodies); (d) cement the co-ordination for and ex-change of thc various activities through meet-ings, workshops and missions; (e) ensure thedocumentation and dissemination of experi-ences (COFORI'A-Liaison, BREDA-STAT,etc.); (0 implement the programmes at regional,subregional and national levels for training andresearch in planning, administration and man-agement (research has been the Cinderella ofthe first phase); (g) provide the necessary consul-tative services for the smooth running of the pro-ject; and (h) monitor the project activitiesthrough progress reports and final reports to theDirector of the Regional Office and to relatedfunding agencies.

Educational planning, administration and management in Africa

' At the subregwnal level

Co-ordination and execution of the various ac-tivities envisaged at the subregional level for thetraining of trainers, the development of trainingand teaching materials, and the mobilization ofavailable resource persons in the subregion forsuch activities: (a) set-up an organizational struc-ture for co-ordinating training programmes inthe subregion (Nairobi, Dakar); (b) ensure theparticipation of Member States in the subregion(nine of twelve English-speaking countries, fiveout of five for Portuguese-speaking countries,and sixteen out of sixteen French-speakingcountries); (c) make optimal use of nationalcapacities for training at subregional, inter-coon-trs , and national levels (eight trainers and nine

, national co-ordinators); (d) develop training andteaching materials for the residential courseswith the assistance of expertise from the projectteam, the technical secretariat of 13REDA, andothers (consultants) and finalize them in theform of handbooks; (e) ensure the creation of

; national centres and teams for the co-ordination; and execution of national training programmes: and the preparation of training and teaching ma-: terials or modules; and (f) sub-mit progress. reports to the Technical Secretariat at 13REDA.

;It the national level

Cu-ordination and implementation of nationaltraining programmes: (a) form national teams forthe execution of national training programmes;(b) establish a permanent structure for in-servicetraining of national cadres; (c) ensure optimalparticipation of national cadres in the pro-w ammes; (d) develop teaching and trainingmanuals for such programmes; and (e) sub-mitprogress reports to the project co-ordinators atsubregional and regional levels.

UNESCO-IIEP programmes in educationalplanning and administration in Africa are manyand should be continued in the 1990s. Increas-ingls surmounting efforts ate needed to fill thegap at the national/central and sub-national lev-els (regional and district levels). A much greateremphasis should be given to training of plan-nmg, administrative and managerial personnel

157

at regional, district and local levels. The prob-lems of overall administration, co-ordination,monitoring and development of educational ac-tivities at the sub-national levels within the con-text of national educational policies should bethe genera) focus for training (IIEP, 1987, pp.41-3). In more specific terms, the training skillsfor educational planning and administration andmanagement would have to include:Knowledge of the.socio-economic conditions of

the country and of national educational pol-icies, prioritics and plans.

Fundamental statistical skills and techniquesneeded for the collection and analysis of data,the description of local educational provision,the assessment of needs and the making ofprojections.

Ability to manage and control finances, to pre-pare estimates and to manage educationalfacilities and stores.

Skills in planning, managing and executing edu-cational programme and projects as well asskills in personnel management.

Ability to communicate effectively on educa-tional issues, to provide leadership and to pro-mote community involvement in educationalundertakings.

Ability to administer public examinations effi-ciently, with special care for the preservationof security as well as the ability to identify in-service training needs and to organize suitableprogrammes.

References and bibliographyCHINAPAII, 1985. Regional Technnal Co.operanon in Erin, rr

Hon far Human Resourie, fleviqopment in Africa Dakar,UNESCO-BREDA

-- 1989. Planning Education Implementation ProblemsIn T. !Wien and T. N Postletivaane (eds 1, The Iniernailimal FP:cyclopedia of Fducanon, Stipp. Vol. I, pp 580-4Osford, Pergamon l'ress

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Educational planningand administrationin Latin America

From optimism to uncertainty

Fabio M. Bustos

Pioneering work

On the eve of the 500th anniversary of the land-ing of Christopher Columbus and his navigatorsin the Western hemisphere, the image presentedby Latin America and the Caribbean is one of asubcontinent not yet completed in terms of itsinstitutional structures, irresolute in its approachto basic problems and reflecting an ill-definedcultural and ethnic identity.

In the course of its historical development

Fabio Bustos (Colombia). Professor of EducationalPlanning and Administration at Universidad delValle (Colombia). Former Director of the LatinAmerican Educational Administration Programmeof that university. Served as expert and consultantin a number of countries of Latin America and theCaribbean for UNESCO, OAS and UNICEF. Cur-rently co-ordinating the Evaluation and Restructur-ing of Intermediate Education project in Ecuadorsponsortd by the Inter-Araerican Development Bankand au, Ministry of Education and Culture of Ecua-dor. Former Director of Cinterplan, Caracas, Vene-zuela.

(conquest and colonization, independence andthe republican experience, and more recentlurbanization and pseudo-modernization), it hastended to superimpose social structures and val-ues and to accumulate unsolved problems (Lata-; ' 1990). Historically the subcontinent has hadto deal with two contending forces: on the onehand its pre-Columbian roots and on the otherthe modernizing approaches imposed by outsidepowers or taken up by dominant national groupsor elites.

Among the institutions imported from theWest, education is perhaps, one that has played adecisive role, introducing a highly complex ele-ment into the social fabric of the region. Inquantitative terms and in terms of diversifica-tion, this phenomenon has become particularlynoticeable over the past four decades, coincidingwith the changes in the world situation that oc-cuffed in the aftermath of the Second WorldWar.' Among the changes affecting educationaldevelopment in the region, planning can be seento have been a key factor in the process of sup-porting and regulating pressure for the expan-sion and diversification of education. At meet-ings held as early as the mid-1950s, theeducation authorities in some countries adopted

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integrated planning as a means of steering edu-cational development, even before economicplanning had been accepted and become part ofthe system of running the region's economic af-fairs./ Latin America's experience in educationalplanning made quite an important contributionto international education inasmuch as its con-ceptual and methodological approaches weresubsequently extended to other regions of theworld through international organizations suchas UNESCO.

In educational administration, on the otherhand, Latin American experience has been lesssystematic and more diffuse and its results havebeen less visible. This is largely due to the spo-radic nature of the changes introduced, the over-whelming influence of the traditional State orga-nizational structure, excessive centralism i.nd anarrow 'pedagogic' approach to educational de-velopment.

It should be noted that although some com-mon trends and features are discernible in edu-cational planning and administration in LatinAmerica, there are clear differences within indi-vidual countries or groups of countries, depend-ing on their historical development, geo-demo-graphic size, socio-cultural and behaviouralcharacteristics and the historical development oftheir education (Cinterplan, 1988). Bearingthese considerations in mind, we may draw cer-tain lessons from the past, identify certain trendsand seek to find our bearings and see where thechallenges lie in a future marked by uncertainty.

Educational planningin the phase of 'euphoria'

It is beyond dispute that the end of the SecondWorld War altered the geopolitical and econom-ic map of the world and to some extent initiateda new era in world history. The resulting chang-es had very swift repercussions in Latin Amer-ica, especially in demographic structures, urban-ization processes, the general initiation of a trendtowards economic modernization and the un-

precedented growth of the state and its institu-tions. Concurrently with or as a consequence of,these developments, depending on the situationconcerned, education recorded an unpreceden-ted quantitative expansion coupled with increas-ing diversification of its services.

This phenomenon was first observed in the1950s, gathered strength in the 1960s and muchof the 1970s but was showing signs of waning to-wards the end of that decade. The main thrustsof educational action were the reduction or era-dication of adult illiteracy, the expansion or uni-versalization of primary education and the grad-ual broadening of the coverage of secondary andhigher education. Some of the basic strategiesadopted were the raising of the level of the statebudget for education, massive school-buildingprogrammes and equally massive teacher train-ing and recruitment schemes. Programmes de-signed to change educational content and strate-gies and the supply and use of teaching materialswere also introduced, but on a less systematic ba-sis.

The state played a leading role in this processof expansion and diversification of the educa-tional supply, and planning became a means ofregulating or even stimulating this growth. In asense, planning was, at this stage, the most sig-nificant and decisive technical input.

Some of the most striking features of educa-tional planning practices at this point were themore or less univei II institutionalization ofplanning in the Ministries of Education, the de-gree of importance attached to quantitativemethods and instruments, the centralism ofplanning activity and the employment of 'educa-tional planners' as a new category of technicalofficer (Bustos, 1990).

Among the approaches that explictly or im-plicitly guided the planning process, two may besingled out.

First, social demand based on socio-politicalassumptions (the right of the individual to edu-cation as a human right, the social value of edu-cation as a means of individual social advance-ment, the political dimension of education as avector for the democratization of society, etc.)and on new factors such as population growth,

,.

Educational planning and administration in Latin America: from optimism to uncertain4 161

urbanization and the socio-cultural value at-tached to being 'educated'. This approach pre-dominated in the countries with the highestpopulation growth rates and the lowest coverageratios.

Second, human resources, that is, the pro-ductive economic dimension of the educationalprocess as a supplier of qualifled personnel - atdifferent levels and in different branches in or-der to meet the needs of the productive appara-tus in various sectors and at different levels ofemployment. Although this approach was adopt-ed in response to the boom in the modern sectorof the economy and to the limited relevance oftraditional educational processes to the require-ments of technical production work, mentionshould also be made of the influence of interna-tional trends resulting from the influx of econo-mists into education and from initiatives in otherparts of the world, in particular the OECD'sMediterranean Regional Project (Rogi, 1984).

Other approaches that had some influence(albeit formal and theoretical rather than practi-cal) not so much on policy-making as on the for-mulation of certain educational projects werebased on the theories of human capital and ofcosqbenefit analysis.

This phase of expansion and credibility ineducational planning was based on a number offactors, originating both within and outside theregion and Latin American education, such as:(a) the social and political value attributed toeducation by governments and political forces;(b) the demand for qualified personnel by econo-mies engaged in a process of industrialization;(c) rapid urbanization; (d) international educa-tional trends influencing the region; (c) the keyrole of outside technical assistance from orga-mrations such as UNESCO and the OAS andlater on from international financing hanks; and(f) the training and appointment of planning spe-cialists.

This major planning effort had certain con-structive results or effects, which may be sum-

; marired as follows: (a) a more or less orderly ex-pansion of the supply of educational facilities; (b)

j the gradual formation of national education sys-terns; (c) reinforcement of the technical capacity

of the bodies responsible for running the educa- I

lion system; (d) an increase in state budgets foreducation and an effort to allocate such funds inrelation to established priorities; (e) introductionof certain innovations and changes into the edu-cational process, and (f) recruitment in the field .

of education of specialists in other disciplines(sociologists, economists, architects, engineers,etc.).

However, certain shortcomings and weak-nesses in the region's educational planning ef-fort have, in turn, been frequently noted at con-ferences and technical meetings and in

analytical studies) Some of the most frequentlymentioned inadequacies relate to the followingaspects:The virtual predominance of emphasis on quan-

titative variables and methods to the detrimentor total neglect of qualitative factors, reflectedin the preferential use of statistical tech-niques. It is curious to note the parallel anduncoordinated development in the region oftwo types of planning based on different para-digms: planning of the education system as awhole and planning of curricular processes.

The unduly optimistic, confident and even re-ductionist approach to planning illustrated inthe preparation of educational plans, with noattempt to initiate and strengthen horizontaland vertical planning processes. This phe-nomenon has several connotations such as thedisproportionate weight attached to analyticalstudies, assignment of major importance tothe plan document, neglect of the other stagesin the planning process and, in somc cases,technocratic arrogance on the part of plan-ners.

The rigidity and centralism of the plans, basedon assumptions of homogeneity of both prob-lems and their solutions, even in countrieswith geographically dispersed populationgroups reflecting a diversity of social, econom-ic and cultural situations.

I he limited ability of planning to bring aboutchange in the face of new needs and changingcircumstances in society. An example hasbeen the prevailing mismatch between theproducts of formal education systems - on

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162 Fano M. Busies

which planning has concentrated - and theneeds of the labour market.

The widening rift between the planning exerciseand the national political process, with a cleardivergence between the plans presented aspromises to be fulfilled and the actual processof discussion and decision-making that guidesthe action of the authorities on a day-to-daybasis (Matos, 1987). This is perhaps the mainreproach that has been persistently levelled inrecent years against development planning ingeneral and educational planning in partic-ular.'

It should be noted, however, that many of theselimitations and restrictions may be attributed notonly to internal planning processes but also tothe context in which planning takes place (polit-ical and administrative centralism, discontinuityof governments and policies, political paternal-ism, the imposition and transfer from outside ofpolicies, models and even 'fashions', etc.).

Disillusionmentwith educational planning

The predominant educational planning modeldesigned in support of a quantitative expansionin education due to the pressure of social de-mand ran into difficulties in the mid-1970s be-cause of constraints originating both within andoutside education systems. From the endoge-nous point of view, the model's weaknesses wererevealed by the fact that available technical andfinancial resources fell increasingly short ofneeds. Severe imbalances were also generated bydisproportionate quhntitative growth in terms ofthe pedagogical and administrative even social

aspects of educational expansion (social andregional imbalances in coverage, (Ieterioratingquality and over-supply of qualified personnel).

External factors also had an overwhelmingimpact. The prevailing world economic crisisengendered by the oil crisis - began to have anadverse impact, initially on the non-oil-export-ing countries and, later, on the rest. Matters

came to a head when foreign debt emerged asthe most acute expression of the economic crisisin Latin America. The direct and indirect reper-cussions of the crisis have been clearly visible.Within education systems they can be seen inthe form of stagnating and/or declining publicexpenditure on education with adverse effects onteachers' salaries and on investment, which wasreduced to the minimum. Outside the systemsthere has been a deterioration in the economicand social circumstances of the neediest sectors,with repercussions on children's access to andcontinued attendance at school, on their per-formance and on the already few employmentopportunities for young people who manage tocomplete a level of education (Tedesco, 1987).

During this stage of the economic crisis thatdominated the 1980s, planning in the sector re-vealed its weaknesses and limitations and itspoor ability to cope under conditions of crisis,poverty and austerity. This led to a loss of confi-dence in planning, which had its credibilityeroded both in government circles and in othersectors of society.

It should be noted that more recently, as a re-sult of the financial constraints on education, es-pecially as regards investment, outside fundingsources (particularly the World Bank and the In-ter-American Development Bank) have begunto play an all-important role in some countriesand in key areas of education. To some extentthis had subordinated the sector's planning ac-tivities to the demands of the funding agencies,with all that that implies.

In addition to the internal crisis in educationsystems, exacerbated by the foreign-debt crisis,other associated or concomitant factors havemade the task of educat;onal planning morecomplex: changes in educational scenarios andactors, the impact of technological and scientificdevelopment, changes in value systcms in socie-ty and in the family, the influence of new socialforces and groups (mindrity ethnic groups), thegrowing importance of groups and associationsin education, etc.

At the same time, educational planning inthe region has had to contend with some partic-ularly tricky problems, so far without much suc-

Educational planning and administration in Latin America. from optimism to uncertainty 163

cess. The first problem is financial constraints,especially in the public sector, in spite of the per-sistent trends in educational demand, particular-ly at the intermediate and higher levels. A fur-ther equally complex factor has been thegrowing dependence of policy decisions in edu-cation on political trends and forces, which hascalled for a realignment of strategy in regard tothe planning process. In some countries an im-portant role has also been played by the ideolog-ical radicalization of teachers' unions due asmuch to salary-related factors as to ideologicalpolarization.

The wastage occasioned by a combination offactors has led to disillusionment with educa-tional planning, at least the centralized variety.Nevertheless, it has to be recognized that insome cases action aimed at changing the situa-tion has evolved into mediumand long-termtrends. Some examples are:The move from predominantly quantitative

planning to a form of planning that focuses onthe qualitative aspects of education.

The growing importance of decentralized and/ormore evenly spread planning, giving a largersay to regional and local bodies.

Promotion of social participation and its integra-tion into planning processes.

The growing importance of information systemsas an aid to and input for decision.making.

Consideration of planning as a systematic, on-going process.

Promotion of out-of-school education as a com-ponent of integrated educational planning(Arrien, 1988).

These and other new dimensions of educationalplanning have developed unevenly in the coun-tries of the region. Two clearly defined socialtrends or models may be distinguished: one di-rected towards the restructuring of educationsystems and the other towards their moderniza-tion, that is, towards making them more dynam-ic, efficient and flexible.

Educational administration:a weak spot?

As already noted, in the 1960s and 1970s prioritystatus was assigned to planning. it was assumedthat proper planning - in the form of a soundplan was.a sufficient means of achieving aimsand targets and channelling resources. This ledto a lack of co-ordination between planningprocesses and those of execution and control.The former were guided by a technocratic ideaof 'the way things should be' and the latter by alaw of inertia consisting in the routine repetitionof habitual modes of action.

The 1950s and 1960s have little or nothing toshow in the way of progress in the administrationof education systems. Some limited attemptswere made to apply school administration tech-niques borrowed from the literature of the indus-trialized countries, in particular the UnitedStates.

In the late 1960s and to a greater extent in the1970s, some countries tried to initiate processesaimed at the modernization of public adminis-tration and hence of the organization of centraleducational bodies. One effect of this trend wasthe 'centralized decentralization' of ministries ofeducation involving the redistribution and sep-aration of functions and activities through thesetting up of decentralized educational bodies atthe central level. The aim was to enhance the ef-ficiency and relevance of some specific aspects ofeducation (culture, sport, higher education,school buildings, literacy teaching, adult voca-tional training, etc.). This organizational struc-ture - resembling a solar system - initiallyplayed a revitalizing and technically innovativerole in some countries in terms of the mechani-zation and speeding-up of processes, the admin-istration of resources and more searching devel-opment in specific fields of action. But in themedium and long term, alongside its advantages,this strategy also presents a number of drawbacksand limitations such as the fragmentation of theeducation system through excessive independ-ence of policies and resources, bureaucratization

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164 Fabio M. Bustos

of management and duplication or parallelism offunctions and resources. Moreover, the structureof some of these bodies remained rigidly cen-tralist, with little regional and local outreach.

But perhaps the most striking administrativephenomenon that emerged in the 1970s and be-came more pronounced in the 1980s was a de-centralizing trend, no longer at the central levelbut moving gradually from the centre to lowerlevels (Arismendi, 1984).

This phenomenon was due to a number offactors. On the one hand, planning played an in-fluential role, particularly through two strate-gies, sometimes interconnected and sometimesunconnected: the regionalization and the nucle-arization of educational facilities. The formergave precedence to and focused on the regionallevel and the latter gave priority to the local orbasic level. This process is as yet unfinished, andhas not been sufficiently clarified in conceptualterms; it has given rise to different kinds, of ex-periments that have not been evaluved (for ex-ample nuclearization in Peru and Colombia andregionalization in Argentina, Chile and CostaRica).

In adLl Mon, a decentralizing administrativetrend has emerged in two directions, one de-scending from the centre to middle and/or grass-roots levels, reflecting a general trend towardsdecentralization of public administration, andanother moving up front lower to higher levelsas a result of the quantatitive growth and tech-nical improvements in the middle levels, whichdemand a greater degree of intervention in theirown spheres of influence and greater independ-ence in taking decisions. This current and pro-spective future trend assumes different charac-teristics and is based on different paradigms fromcountry to country; it is associated with factorsoriginating both within and outside the educa-tion system (size of the countries, historical im-portance of centralism, communication routes,the way in which a country is divided up politi-cally and administratively, the availability ofqualified human resources, the degree of invol-vement of regional and local authorities in the fi-nancing of education, etc.).

There has recently been evidence of modern-

izing trends in educational administration,though they have not yet succeeded in permeat-ing rigid and bureaucratic educational manage-ment structures. Some examples of these mod-ernizing trends are:The changeover from manual to computerized

procedures through the gradual intioductionof computer technology into some manage-ment practices.

The introduction of new management tech-niques taken mainly from business adminis-tration, a tendency that has been impeded,however, by tradition-bound attitudes or polit-ical interference.

The appointment in educational administrationof specialists in other disciplines or in educa-tion itself.

The growing involvement of the pi ivate sectorand of non-governmental organizations ineducation, challenging the competence of thetraditional educational administration.

As regards the theory of educational adminis-tration, considerable progress has also beenmade in the search for new approaches, backedup by advances in some of the social sciencesand in administration and by the prevailing con-ditions with respect to administrative develop-ment in the region (Sander, 1990).

Prospects and future scenariosfor educational planning and

administration

Assuming that planning and administration aresubsystems providing support fol educationaldevelopment, their future will be associated withthe role that education is expected to play. Edu-cational processes will in turn be determined inthe future by the economic, demographic andsocio-political situations prevailing in the re-gion.

If the future of Latin Amei it a in the shortand medium term is viewed in the light of an ex-trapolation of the trends that have emerged inthe last decade, the resulting foiecast is one of

I'ducational planning and administration in Latin America: from optimism to uncertainty 165

pessimism rather than of uncertainty: economicgrou di failing behind population growth, lowsavings and investment capacity, a continuallydec lining shale of international trade, an in-

. creasMg 'social debt', accumulated deep-seatedsocial imbalances that are tending to becomemore severe, obvious technological backward-ness, and so on. Given all these factors influen-cing education and that education can help toremedy, it has to be concluded with Latapi

. (1990) that

there is as set no socio-educational theory of uni-s mai scope to explain the maio: problems now be-setting educational development m Latin Ansel icancounu tes or to offer guidance on ways of makingeducation as vitally significant as it should be in thelives of the vanous groups in these societies.

We must in turn clarify the new theoretical,methodological and operational dimensions ofplanning and administration from the standpointnit onls of the education sector but of the re-gion's overall development, seeking both to rem-eds the shortcomings that have underminedthem in the past and to tackle the new scenariosemerging in a world whose power bases, ideolog-

structures and development paradigms arechanging (Costa-Filho, 1988). Some currenttrends that are likely to persis: in the immediatefuture would appear to point to the followingtac tors

A sit engmening of the neo-liberal economicmodel based on free and highls competitivemai kets. This model implies, inter alia, a re-definition of the scope and role of the state,dismantling of controlled and centralizedplanning systems, competition in the supplyol services in terms of effic iency and quality,etc.

l'he speed of technological change and its im-pact on economic processes, labour-marketdemand and even individual and social beha-viour patterns.

Hie fiend towards decentralization and socialparticipation as a result of which grassroovbodies and organizations have a greater say indecisions concerning them.

I .1'he 'globalization' of the main educational

problems and options, though this is a devel-opment that also brings to light the need topreserve regional identities and safeguard andstrengthen the specific cultural values of eachcountry or social group.

The strengthening of democracy as a politicaloption, while underlining its social and eco-nomic dimensions with a view to maintainingbalance between the different sectors of socie-ty.

Protection of the environment and its resourcesfrom the increasing depredation and pollutionassociated with industrialization.

The formation of new economic blocs and geo-economic associations that transcending na-tional barriers, geographical frontiers, etc.

What are the possible implications of thesetrends in educational planning and administra-tion and what challenges may they be expectedto pose? The best way of answering this questionis to examine some of the factors that may deter-mine how priorities are ordered in the 1990s. Asnoted by liallak (1990), the following may beviewed as criteria to be applied in assigning re-sources for education and training:

(i) correcting imbalances, (ii) reaching the target ofuniversal literacy, (iii) reducing inequalities of ac-cess to education, (iv) expanding the coverage, (v)improving the quality, and (vi) increasing efficien-cy in the use of resources.

In the light of the foregoing, the following pointsmay be suggested as possible trends in educa-tional planning and administration:The design of planning processes that take into

account new educational scenarios, new ac-tors in education and the increasing pace ofsocial change.

Predominantly future-oriented planning, espe-cially through the use of simulated models forscenario-building, exploration of anticipatedor unexpected changes, gauging of eliects andinfluences of endogenous or exogenous fac-tors, etc.

Ihe introduction of new technologies intoplanning and decision-making processes, es-pecially increasingly elaborate informationsystems.

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166 Eabw BLIVOI

Strong emphasis on a management approach toeducational services, using criteria such as ef-ficiency, relevance, quality and appropriate-ness.

Enhancement of administration and planning atthe grass roots (local and institutional) levelwith a view to increasing the social participa-tion of communities, the relevance and appro-priateness of educational services, the feasi-bility of intrasectoral integration, andintersectoral and interinstitutionai co-ordina-tion.

Recognition of the fact that educational innova-tion is a permanent and integral part of educa-tional development.'

To sum up, although the experience gained ineducational planning in Latin America is ex-tremely valuable, present circumstances and fu-ture needs make it urgent to carry out a thoroughreview of its traditional approaches and to searchfor new strategies.

NotesI hi the last few decades, the social sciences have made an

important contribution to the study and analysis of educa-tion in relation to development, both within particulaicountries and in a regional context. Perhaps the most umportant and comprehensive corm Minion has been madeunder thc Education and Development in I anti AmericaProtect co-ordinated by German W Rama, a sommaiy leport OD which was published in two volumes M EditorialKapelur, Buenos Aires, in 1987.

2. Some milestones in this pioneering process wereThe Second Inter-Ametican Sleeting ol Minisiets of Edu-cation held in Lima in 1956, which tor le lirst time recog-wed the role that could be played bs planning in educa-tional development.The Inter-American Seminar on Overall Planning tor Edu-cation held in Washington in 195g under the auspices ofthe OAS and UNESCO, which addressed, in particular, theinstitutional, methodological, technical and financial as-pects of educational planning.Ile meeting of Ministers ot Education or 1 atm America

and the Caribbean convened SC() and the OAS inSantiago de Chile in 1962 to propose a Regional 1:ducation.al Development Programme with a view to taking action onthe educational proposals of the Alliance lor PiogressIle International Seminar on 'Problems and Strategies olEducational Plamung in I .atin Amer ic a' cuganued by the

3.

4

S.

newly established International IlisMule fol EducationalPlanning (II EI', Pans, 1964) to review experience in the re .gion and explore new ways forward.In this connecuon, one of the most important events wasthe Technical Meeting of Duectors of Educational Plan-ning held in Buenos An es in 1986 to analyse 'the state ofeducational planning and new challenges'. Among morespecific analytical studies, mention should be made of: A.Moneada, The Crisis in Educational Planning in Latin

mencw, Madrid, Cmterplan/Editorial TeCflos, 1982.An in .depth analysis of the recent situation of and trends ineconomic planning in Latin America was carried out by theInternational Colloquium OD New Directions for Devel-opment Planning in Marker Economies, organized byECLA, ILVES and UND1' Its most important conclusionsweie published in CEPA!. Review (Santiago de Chile), No.31,1987The recent International Congress on Planning and Man-agement of Educational Development held in Mexico Coy(26-30 March 1990) under the auspices of UNESCO andthe Mexican Secretariat of Education, set out some coursesof action for educational planning in the y eat s ahead.

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and managementin the Arab States

Antoine M. Gennaoui

The purpose of this article is to take stock, brief-ly, of educational planning and administrationover the last decade in the Arab countries and tooutline future prospects in this area. Featurescovered are structural aspects, practice, mecha-nisms and relations between planning structuresand administrative authorities in general, draw-ing primarily on the author's own experience ofthis sector and his knowledge of the Arab coun-tries' development problems and secondly ondocumentation available in UNESCO and theInternational Institute for Educational Planning.

Antoine M. Gennaoui (Syrian Arab Republic).Ph.D in economics. Has worked in the Syrian Min-istries of Industry and Planning afterwards teachingeconomics in several Algerian universities. Consult-ant and researcher in economy of education, he ful-filled various missions in Arab States on behalf ofUNEDBAS, UNESCO, the Mgr& Bank and FAO.Author of several articles and reports on educationalplanning, population education and the economy ofdevolopment.

Methodological approach

The Arab States have a common historical back-ground and form a relatively homogeneous areain their civilization and culture but it was feltthat a global approach would not be sufficient. Inmy view the difference and similarities of thecountries comprising this region need to be stud-ied from a less global (subregional) standpoint.In this case the traditional UNESCO presenta-tion, though offering the advantage of beingconvenient and practical, seemed to us to be seri-ously inadequate. We therefore felt that a differ-ent type of subdivision was required for this verylarge and relatively heterogeneous area and theproblem of what criteria to choose thereforearose. Wc opted for the following four: (a) a spa-tial criterion, (geographical contiguity); (h) so-cio-cultural similarities (life-style, prevailingtype of social organization; historical openness tomodernizing influences); f,c) standard ol living(in terms of per capita income); (d) pattern ofeducation system, in other words the level of de-velopment of the education system itself and the

r,oirv,, Vol \ NI, No I, I991

168 Antoine M. Gennaoui

original model on which educational adminis-tration is based. This gives the four followingsubregions.

GROUP I: THE MAGHREB STATES

This group comprises the traditional Maghrebstates and the Libyan Arab Jarnahariya. Inclu-sion of the latter certainly weakens cohesion inthis group but it seemed more logical to us thanto put the Libyan Arab Jamahariya with Egyptand the Sudan, for example, in a group apart.Here we sec socio-cultural homogeneity, geo-graphical contiguity, a strong similarity in stan-dards of living and a definite resemblance (ex-cept in the Libyan Arab Jamahariya's case) ineducatior.al patterns.

GROUP 2: THE NEAR EASTERN STATES

This subregion comprises Egypt, Iraq, the Syr-ian Arab Republic, Jordan and Lebanon. Forhistorical reasons, there is considerable politicalinterdependence between these countries. Theyopened up to modern civilization at approxi-mately the same time. Furthermore, they consti-tute a unit with very strong geographical conti-nuity and `subregionar socio-culturalhomogeneity (in ways of thought and value sys-tems and, although there are considerable dis-parities in their living standards essentially dueto difference in natural resources, their aspira-tions and life-styles are very close. With the ex-ception of Lebanon, their education systemshave been subject to the same influences and ap-ply much the same solutions to educationalproblems.

_- --_-_.- -----_-_-GROUP 1: THE (WTI S IA rEs

This group is comprised of the Gulf Co-oper-ation Council, that is, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, theUnited Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman and Bah-rain. Their geographical unity, like their socio-

c j

cultural homogeneity, is obvious. Their livingstandards, too, are comparable and, although atdiffering stages of development, their educationsystcms seem to be built on the same principles,governed by the same influences and driven bythe same motivation.

GROUP 4: THE ARAB STATES SURROUNDING

THE RED SEA AND TIIE HORN OF AFRICA PLUSMAURITANIA

This fourth subregion comprises the two Ye-mens,' Sudan, Somalia, Djibouti and Maurita-nia. Five of these countries arc grouped aroundthe Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Similaritiesin life-style and standard of living are particular-ly marked and their education systems are at thesame level of development and face the sameproblems. The present state of thcir educationsystems, their economic vulnerability and thesimilarity of their present economic situationjustify the grouping together of these countries.

Education policies--In contrast to thc somewhat stormy socio-eco-nomic and political conditions which it wouldtake too long to analyse here, educational pol-icies in the various subregions have been main-tained; reaffirmed and pursued. According to arecent UNEDBAS surveys positive developmentin education during the last decade were as fol-lows:Progress was made in the demociatization of

education.The ties between educational and socio-eco-

nomic development Wert strengthened, em-phasis being placed on linking education andthe working world.he educational content broadened to includeissues involving cultural and national identity,and moral instruction.

'he teaching of science and technology was pro-moted.

Review and prospects of educational planning and management in the Arab States 169

Number of students in thc Arab States by educational level

Level 1980 1987 On

Amage annual growth

1980-87 1970- 80

Primat) 20 604 67.0 27 281 63.6 4.1 5.1

Secondar 8 692 28 0 13448 31.4 6.4 9.4

Ifighei 1 468 5.0 2 159 5.0 5 7 12.5

30 764 100.0 42 888 100.0 4.9 6.4

Schools became open to their environment andcommunity.

Programmes to eliminate illiteracy and to pro-mote adult and non-formal education were in-tensified.

Planning was promoted at provincial and locallevel.

'rhe main indicators point to some significantadvances as Tables 1-6 show (taken from UN-ESCO, Statistical Yearbook, 1989,1990).

At the practical level it was noted that theMaghreb states gave priority to the effective im-plementation of compulsory basic educationTunisia, the Libyan Arab Jamahariya and Alge-ria in the early 1980s and Morocco as of 1986.The Near Eastern countries (Group 2) arc fol-lowing the same direction but are some way be-hind, except for Jordan, which has already madethis reform and Egypt where it was brought in in1988 and where the primary-education level hadpreviously been shortened from six to five years.

In the Syrian Arab Republic and Iraq the re-form is still at the project stage. In these coun-tries priority is given to the universalization ofprimary and the diversification of secondary edu-cation as is the case in Egypt and Jordan.

The countries in Group 3 (the Gulf states) fo-cused more on reinforcing educational structur-es (Kuwait, United Arab Emirates), extendingprimary education (Saudi Arabia and Oman), na-tionalizing the stalling of education and improv-ing the quality of teaching.

The Group 4 countries, given the unfavour-able context, were primarily concerned withmaintaining the enrolment rates they had al-ready achieved in primary education, developing

technical education training teachers and ad-ministrators and continuing with their efforts tobring down unit costs. However, recent reportson primary education do not justify optimism.The combined impact of economic and financialdifficulties coupled with political instability con-stitute a serious threat to the progress made sofar. In fact, primary education is no longer hold-ing firm as a defence against illiteracy. The de-cline in enrolment in Sudan and Somalia is crit-ical.

Other countries which have not wholly con-solidated their progress in this field are also ex-posed to this kind of difficulty. Given the relativeinadequacy of their resources, the extent towhich Morocco, Egypt and the Syrian Arab Re-public arc able to cope with the crisis will consti-tute a test of how soiid their administration isand how far attitudes have changed, measured interms of determination to hold on to the progressthat has been made for the danger of a return tothe past is not to be discounted.

In general terms the problems facing Arabcountries as a whole may be classified under twoheadings: (a) problems generated by the rapid

TABLE 2. Gross and net enrolment rates byeducational level in the Arab States

Gross rates \ et 14Ifi

14140 I AO

Primary 79.9 83 1 681 714Secondaiii 38 0 49.3Higher 9.5 11 3 42 9 50.8

170 Anwine M. Gennaoui

not to say explosive (Algeria and Saudi Arabia)growth of the education system, insufficient co-ordination of the different factors of educationalproduction and ill-adapted teaching; and (b)problems related to the internal and external ef-ficiency and performance of the system and itsadaptation to the requirements of development.

Problems in the first category are generallyeasy to identify and their solution is essentially amatter of finance, for example, the reform of vo-cational training in Tunisia Jr Kuwait, the re-form of secondary curricula to include new con-cepts (population, health and nutrition) inMorocco, Egypt and Sudan, improved primary-teacher training in Morocco, the Yemen ArabRepublic and the Syrian Arab Republic theshortage or poor state of secondary-school prem-ises in Egypt, the relatively low pay levels in Ku-wait and Saudi Arabia, the difficulty of recruitingprimary teachers in rural Morocco, and so on.

The more structural problems, however, ne-cessitate mere radical reforms such as the adop-tion of basic education, the restructuring of tech-nical education and vocational training, thedccompartmentation and diversification of typesof secondary education and the policy of broad-ening higher education, greater exposure to theprivate scctor, etc.

As a guide to the general level let us take stu-dent/teacher ratios and failure rates - for both ofwhich some data are available. The reduction inthe student/teacher ratio is significant in GroupsI, 2 and 3 (except Oman). In the first two groupsthe number of students per teacher ranges from25 to 30 and is thcrefore close to the average for

TAM i 3. Secondary educ ation In the Ardh States,percentage bleakdown by t,pe

I 'Pe ofedmAtton

Students

Insa lair

I ea. lung sail

19t., sir

Generalher

training

87 s

1.5

57 0

1 7

81 }t

2

}.1

2 sTechnical 10 7 11 A 1 4 118

IOIAI 10(1 100 0 1(1011 1(1(1 ()

the developing countries (29). In Group 3 (Gulfstates) it is similar to that for the developed coun-tries (19). In countries in Group 4 the situation isdeteriorating rapidly (Mauritania, Djibouti andYemen Arab Republic): in ten years the figurehas risen from around 35 to 45-50.

In 1988 the rate of students having to repeat aclass fell in total but remained high in Tunisia,Morocco and Iraq (about 20 per cent) and to alesser extent in Oman and Saudi Arabia (12 percent), Qatar (10 °per cent), Mauritania (15 percent) and the Yemen Arab Republic (17 percent). The figure in Egypt, however, was excel-lent in spite of a poor student/teacher ratio andgood in Jordan, Kuwait and the Syrian Arab Re-public. Elsewhere only Tunisia still had a stu-dent/teacher ratio over 30 whereas Somalia wasthe only country in Group 4 to have a ratio below30. Powever, the situation may have got farworse since that time.

.1-ARI.F 4. Estimated public educational expenditurein the Arab States

Yell Pen napita IS1 lodes

1975 5 9 611980 4 4 112 1001987 6.6 134 148

The profile of educationalmanagement

TI1E 01(VELOPMEN r AND GROW111

01' FDUCI1/4.1 1ONAI. MANAGFMF.N1

Modern public management is a recent devel-opment in all the Arab countries except forEgypt and often dates from the colonial period.Administrative structutes were patterned on anauthoritarian and centralized model and theirhallmark was the efficiency with which they op-erated. Indeed they were invested with moderngovernmental functions.

Reiew and prospects of educational planning and management in the Arab States 171

Colonial administrations, however, did notexpand sufficiently and the systems inherited bythe newly independent Arab states suffered fromthe following basic ills: lack of co-ordination, afield of action confined to socio-political controland the lack of a specific it:entuy (particularly inthe Maghreb countries). "I 1.v, development ofpublic management was therefore one of the ma-jor problems that the independent Arab coun-trics had to grapple with.

On independence it was thus necessary to re-lease the forces of develOpment and to organizethe transfer of responsibility for administrationthe sovereign state. That administration neededa project and a mission. Its project was the exten-sion of is field of authority to the under-adminis-teied national territory and its mission was to ex-

, pand thc public sector.Education was one of the areas that received

priorit. Urgent problems of access to educationand the provision of staff and premises becameimperative in the face of the strong demand,heightened by ambitious industrialization and

; economic and social development plans.llowever, expansion of the education sector

bets% een 1950 and 1980 progressed at differentrates in the subregions. The Near Eastern coun-tries sk ere the first to experience it in the early1950s. Close behind came the Maghreb and Gulfstates in the 1960s and 1970s. The Group 4countries set out on the same road at the sametime but with less ample resources.

The expansion was both cause and effect ofthe qualitative change in tile conception and im-

significant point here is that the change repre-sented the transition from elitist to popular edu-cation with development as its objective.

Expansion projects introduced by educationministers were quickly overtaken by the vigorousgrowth in demand which had to be met as far asit could be in inadequate facilities, using expe-dients like double or even triple occupancy,higher student-teacher ratios, etc. But it quicklybecame apparent that this expansion was accom-panied by regional and social imbalances and, inmost cases, quality suffered.

PRESFN1 EDUCKIIONAI. STRUC. 1 ("RFS-

Formal education

Most Arab countries set about reorganizing theneducation systems in the 1960s and 1970s. Theyoften adopted the 6-3-3 division except for Le-banon and Morocco which chose 5-4-3. Somereorganiz.ation has been taking place since theearly 1980s, each system seeking its own internalequilibrium consistent with its past and specificdemographic and cultural identity.

Current concerns in most Arab countries fo-cus on a twofold objective: the uriversalintIonof primary education and access for primary-school leavers to the various types of secondaryeducation.

As regards compulsory education, most Arabcountries have tended to establish this by legisla-

plementation of educational policy. The most tion, the period being six to seven years in some

I Mil I snmated numhei (millions) 01 kmale students and petcentage of total students h level utedikanon

I C111,11. ,I.i.1Cnis Malt Sla.trill,,-

11..1,1,t ill

_

1980 1987 1980 19S- 1980 1'01-

FI011.0,rr

429

124(1

I I s9,144S

4 I

40

1., 1

11 9

11t(thet -61 Is IS 6

I 12 12- 142 s s 6

BEST COPY MAILABLE 1 L

172 Antoine M. Gainaoul

(Iraq, Sudan, United Arab Emirates; Mauritaniaand the Syrian Arab Republic and ninc in others(Algeria, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Egypt andMorocco).

However, compulso. y primary education hasnut been institutionalized in every Arab country.Some (Qatar and Lebanon) have very largelysucceeded in establishing primary and secondaryeducation without making enrolment compulso-ry while others (Sudan, Mauritania, Yemen ArabRepublic and Saudi Arabia) have not dk...ze so fora variety of reasons specific to the countries con-cerncd.

Making school compulsory, however, doesnot always mean that the problems of access toeducation have been overcome or that capacitiesare sufficient; it is more the statement of an ob-jective towzrds which the action of the author-ities has to strive, witness the fact that, in somecountries (Egypt, Morocco, Sudan and YemenArab Republic, certain social categories under acombination of various socio-economic or ge-ographical handicaps are excluded from theeducation system altogether.

Another point is that the trend towards pro-longing the period of compulsory schooling hasbeen accompanied by the wish for greater rele-vance to socio-economic requirements in what istaught. Education focused on practical aspectsthus seemed to be the answer to the problem offindin work for young people leaving school atthe end of the primary level. Countries that haveput this principle into effect (Algeria, l.ibyanArab Jamahariya, Jordan, Somalia, Morocco,Democratic Yemen, Kuwait and Tunisia) be-lieve that it provides a solid basis of knowledge

for all students prior to reaching working age(IS).

Varyingly systematic attempts at reformingeducation content have been made in somecountries, for example the introduction of pop-ulation regiects in secondary education in Tu-nisia, Sudan, Egypt, Yemen Arab Republic andMorocco or the teaching of environmental,health and nutrition regiects as in Morocco,Egypt and Sudan.

All these reforms seem to be based on a phi-losophy that is closely related to the problems ofeconomic and social development in the coun-tries concerned. No detailed review of how theyhave fared, however, has yet been undertaken.

Non-formal education

To.a large extent non-formal education in theArab countries means adult education. There isthe adult literacy campaign in its traditional andfunctional forms and a very wide range of pro-jects like the integrated rural development pro.grammes in the Yemen Arab Republic, familyplanning in Sudan, community development,youth activities, social service, etc. There is alsovocational training (or dome-Aie science in somecountries) including the basic education of therural population. The target population is theover-fifteens living .n both urban and rural areas.

The meaning of 'adult' in this context is veryflexible. In actual fact adult programmes oftenadmit children over 9 if they are no longer at-tending school. The remarkable thing here isthe variety of the bodies involved. They may beclassed under three main headings: (a) profes-

TABLE 6. Total enrolment, fen,ale enrolment and teaching staff trN educational le%el

I esti1-0131 enrolments

1980 198

,

Primar) 124 164

Secondan 1 s2 216Higher 161 240

01,51 132 1144

1 c J

1 out Instate 1,11,1i1111,11, 11..

1980 19s7 1980 19S"

144 1S4 I 1 149

168 281 164 298

176 297 I -0 2'9

143 210 14s 2 Ats

Res less and prospetts of educational planning and management in the Arab States 173

sional institutions like the unions (tor trainingtodustriai and agricultural workers and govern-ment service staff, and training in activities forwomen, and crafts and household activities); (b)cultural institutions; and tc) socio-cultural andsports institutions.

Fhere were some 6,000 such institutions in1984, about two-thirds of them governmental.one-fifth private and the remainder mixed pub-lic/pi Rate. Three-fifths of them were education-al, one-fifth socational and the remainder cultur-al and social.

Idle main value of these bodies is that theytorm a platform for launching into other types ofnon-formal education, such as adult education,ultural guidance, vocational training and fur-

ther education.Nondormal socational training is still mar-

ginal, ineffective and dominated by the formaleducation establishments whereas its originalput pose was, precisely, to fill the gaps left by for-mal education in terms of its response to the re-quit entems of the working world.

Fin ther or continuous training was originallyfocused on primacy and secondars teacher train-ing. The idea of vocational training as under-stood in the des eloped countries is new to theAi ab countries Its first beginnings to hack to tne1970s and it is Only recently that any kind of phi-I osuph ii tin, area has begun to become clear inon tam counti ies (Morocco. Egs pt. Algeria, theSs man Arab Republic and Saudi Arabia). In spite

es el vthing; in general; resources and numbersins ols ed in the non-formal sector are vet v sien-del

NES( :()'s most lecent estimates (1990) for illit-etac v ne daunting, varying ft oiri 20 per cent ofthe rivet -fifteens in Lebanon and Jordan to 76pci , clii in Somalia, 73 pet cent in Sudan and 66

vitt mu 11aurnama aod the Yemen At ab Re-pHi tfic as clage being 49 pet cent

Plow( non% fot the number of illiterates for e-we an increase from 61 million in 1990 to 72 mil-lion in the year 2000. Although in percentagect ms the tate will account tot most ot this fig-

ure. Two-thirds of illiterates arc concentrated in '

Egypt, Sudan, Morocco and Algeria. The follow-ing comments may be made about the differentsubregions over the recent period.

For the Maghreb countries the illiteracy rateis similar in the 1.ibyan Arab Jamahariya andTunisia. Algeria has a midway position (42 percent) whereas Morocco is lagging behind in thisfield (50 per cent).

Progress has been made in practically all theNear Eastern countries, certainly in Egypt's casebut above all in Iraq, the Syrian Arab Republicand Jordan. Lebanon and Jordan are clearly bet-ter than the average for the group whereas therate of improvement in Egypt seems to be slow-ing down.

The Gulf states have a similar average (be- .

tween 22 per cent for Bahrain and 37 per centfor Saudi Arabia). The illiteracy situation seemsto be more or less stationary except in SaudiArabia where it continues to improve. Possiblythese countries are up against a barrier of soci-ological resistance as would seem to he suggest-ed by the unchanging illiteracy rate amongwomen.

The figures for the countries in Group 4 arecritical. A national campaign for the eradicationof illiteracy has been launched in the YemenArab Republic but results do not come up to ex-pectations. The situation in Maurttania %couldappear to be improving slightly but that in Soma-lia and Sudan is serious given the deteriorationin primary education over the last ten years.

It also has to be pointed out that the some-times rapid decline in the illiteracy rate in someArab countries is partly due to higher enrolmentamong the over-fifteens than in the past.

l.astly, even if we assume that there is effec-tive regional co-operation, that the political willto tackle thc problem cxists and that the pi ob-lents of financing and mobilizing human andphssical resources are resolved (which is not thecase at the moment). putting into effect a plan toeradicate illitetacy ss tll have to cope ss ith themaim pi oblem of the availability of reliable data .

fru operational purposes (analysis, diagnosis andthe organization and implementation of plans ofaction).

174 Antoine M. Gennaout

THE ORGANIZATION OF EDUCATIONAL

MANAGEMENT SERVICES

Attempts at decentralization

Education authorities in the Arab countries arestill, for the most part, highly centralized, mir-roring in this respect their general political sys-tems. In fact most Arab countries are still at theconstruction stage in the development of gov-ernmental powers. The principle of territorialand national unity, sometimes written into theirconstitutions, takes precedence over all others.Objective factors favouring centralization arestill very powerful: the need for political and eco-nomic integration, ideological diversity, geo-graphical and ethnic differences and regionaldisparities. The state is also the guarantor of acertain social cohesion through various func-tions it assumes. It addition there is a certaincentralizing tradition in the Near East (Egypt,Iraq and the Syrian Aral; Republic). There is nohistorical background for the organization offederal-type powers, and independence of au-thority at the local level is associated in the col-lective conscience with periods of weakness oreven decadence in the central authority. So theidea of decentralizing administrative power is ve-ry recent.

Generally speaking, education is managed attwo levels - central and local (or provincial).Where there is a regional government (as in Su-dan) or the contours of an economic region aretaking shape, a third 'regional' level is arising. Inthis case the region anticipates, so to speak, a fu-ture economic unit. This applies in the case ofMorocco, Tunisia, Algeria and perhaps Jordanas well.

But most countries operate on the central/provincial model, tempered by a blend of de-concentration and decentralization. Administra-tive reform is primarily designed to moderate theexcesses of centralization b!, lightening the bur-den on the central administration and delegatingpowers to the local offices. This is the case inSaudi Arabia, Iraq, the Syrian Arab Republic,Sudan, Egypt, Algeria and Morocco.

All in all, significant advances have beenmade in the reorganization of education author-ities. The work done over the last ten years ondesigning structures and legislating for, regulat-ing and setting in place those structures has beenvery considerable. The principle of delegationhas been accepted everywhere. Its practical ap-plication, however is still in the early stages andhas yet to be consolidated in practice.

Also, the territorial structures still have to bedefined and clarified. However, the predominantmodel for relations is that of hegemony and cen-tral control. In no country does the region orprovince yet have its own tax-raised income onany scale (local taxes for example). This lack of aspecific financial basis for a region or province isa hindrance to decentralization

What is more, the majority of administrativereforms are handed out by the centre. They donot necessarily correspond to a crystallization ofaspirations or local awareness. Experience showsthat habits of guardianship and the assumption(or non-assumption) of problems by the centraladministration are in most cases an obstacle todecentralized management particularly wherethose governed (after decades or even centuriesof centralism) finally have the automatic reac-tion that theadministration does not depend onthem, still less belong to them. It is difficult tosee how, in that case a regional counterweight tothe central authority could develop and operatein the short term.

Greater exposure to the private sector

The relatively minor importance of the privatesector in the education systems of the Atabcountries, except for the Libyan Arab Jamahari-ya, is as much due to the legacy of past history asto events in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1960sand 1970s for example; the prevailing trend wasprimarily to consolidate official education andstandatdize and nationalize ptivate tducation(Svi tan Ar ab Republic, Moiocco, Tunisia,Egypt, Iraq, etc.). This situation has changedslightly. at least in certain cmintries where thepi ivatc sector has been called upon to play agreater part. This has taken the form ot

Review and prospects of educational planning and management in th,.: Arab States 175

ized departments set up by the education author-ity to make the most of the potential of this sec-tor in educational planning and the framing ofpolicy. The desire to have codes of law for pri-vate investment in education is enlightening(Egypt and Jordan). In a general way, the offi-cials responsible for public administration arcbeginning to recognize the limits to wt ich pub-lic education may be expanded and are .hereforegradually conceding a greater role for e.ie privatesector at all levels.

While it is true that the share of the privatesector in primary education is still rr arginal, it ispredominant practically everywh..re in pre-school education in its religious (Koranic) ormodern form. It is significant at the upper-sec-ondary level in countries where comr,ulsory edu-cation is confined to the primary le .el. It is cer-tainly not insignificant at the secondary level andcould soon make its appearance in higher educa-

ADMINISTRATION, REFORMS AND TRAINING

The management of education operates in ageneral adrniniArative context and its reformtherefore partly depends on that of the system asa whole, which is both an active agent and some-thing to be striven for, mastery of which securespower over the socio-economic and cultural lifeof the country. Any reform of the administrationtherefore presupposes a measure of political will.

Unfortunately the context of political and ec-onomic instability has not been conducive inmost countries to large-scale administrative re-form. The first priority was to manage what ex-isted, which seems to suggest that administrativereform was not a priority. Even so, the back-ground of crisis prompted and developed varyingreactions. In spite of this lack of clarity, it is pos-sible to identify a number of attitudes sarying

tion, with period and country:Apart from Lebanon, an extreme case with a The maintenance of the status quo, that is, hes-

majority private sector, the countries most corn- itation or refusal to take decisions, generallymitted to this approach seem to be Morocco, jor- implying no change in educational structuresdan, the Gulf states and Egypt. Conversely, Iraq, and policies.

I the Syrian Arab Republic and perhaps Algeria Crisis management, that is, budget cuts (noappear. al the moment, to be offering the most more recruitment or employment of gradu-resistance. The fee-paying private sector ac- ales), cuts in investment, rationalization andcounts for about 2 per cent of enrolment. Its revision of the operation of the education sys-sponsors are private individuals and popular or- tem where this has a direct financial impact.ganizations. Its licensing, operation and cunic- Review of parts of the system structures if thisula are strictly monitored. brings indirect operational or investment

In conclusion, even if primary education still economies (changing the number of years ofremains :he prerogative or even monopoly of the compulsory education, reducing the numbercentral governments, the latter have every in- of repeaters, encouraging the private sector ortention of authorizing the private sector - or recourse to outside assistance) or improves ad-even encouraging it through tax or other finan- ministrative methods (computerized manage-cial incentives to play its part in achieving na- ment, data systems).

tional obiectIves while still exercising their con- Oversimplifying, it may be said that althoughtrol oer the content of education, financial the Gulf countries were able to absorb the effects

conditions of access and exercise of the function of the crisis at the level of the functioning ofof teaching, their education systems, the external context

tended to favour a certain structural inertia ex-cept perhaps in Saudi Arabia whet e the s stemcontinued to expand. The Maghreb states were

, also able to introduce certain reforms (basic edu-: cation, decentralization) in spite f the cnsis.

They now need to be consolidated. In-depth

.:h..)

176 Antoine. M. Gen llama

structural reforms have been more difficult toachieve in the Near East and management of thecrisis and the short-term situation took priority.The countries in Group 4 are still in the throesof the crisis and any large-scale reform therewould seem impossible.

None of these reforms has really overturnedthe internal power relations between adminis-trations and traditional value systems. For exam-ple, argument and discussion have continuedpractically everywhere to be in terms of hierar-chy and functions rather than activity and re-sponsibility.

Above all, the characteristic feature of educa-tion authorities has continued to be their bu-reaucracy and excessive formalism, whose rigidprocedures paralyse initiative and obstruct ac-tion.

Low rates of pay for administrative officials inthe Near Eastern countries and Sudan in partic-ular have also done nothing but worsen the sit-uation and given the mechanisms of inefficiencyand emigration a stronger hold.

Administrative formalism is further amplifiedby the lack of importance attached to the in-service training of administrators; the principlesof management, effectiveness, efficiency, plan-

, ning, rationalization of decisions and evaluationare still rarely applied.

Educational planning

DEVELOPMEN I* AND GROWTH

OF PLANNING ST RLCTURES

Although the concept of planning was new andmotivating in the early 1960s, its introductiondid not take place everywhere at the same timeand in the same manner. Its deselopment, too,varied from country to country. Generally speak-ing, the Near Eastern and Maghreb counttieswent in for planning at an earlier date and to a

ider extent. The first planning units therecame into being because of thc coexistence of anumber of favourable circumstances: the vigor-ous growth of the education sector, the political

1 S

will to opt for planning, the wish of United Na-tions organizations to promote planning in na-tional administrations and, lastly, the availabilityof qualified staff, generally statisticians and econ-otnists.

In the Gulf countries, planning was intro-duced only later and its structures developed atthe same time as the education system itself.Lastly, in the Group 4 countries, educationalplanning made a timid emry in the 1970s and1980s, particularly with the surge forward in pri-mary and secondary education.

Planning structures

RESPONSIBILITY FOR PLANNINGDEPARTMENTS

There are two models for the way in which edu-cation planning departments arc attached to theministry for national education. In the first, theplanning units are directly responsible to theminister (Saudi Arabia and Iraq) and in the sec-ond they come under the authority of the secre-tary-general of the ministry (Algeria, Tunisia,Egypt, Morocco, United Arab Emirates, YemenArab Republic). Direct responsibility to the min-ister himself may demonstrate the authorities'wish to attach special importance to the positionand thus assert its importance in relation to theother departments in the ministry. In such acase, the planning function would be seen as apolicy-making aid.

The second model is more traditional arilmay mean that the department is already well in-tegrated in the regular day-to-day work and has

, carved out its role and place in the system.The planning department's internal structur-

es arc most usually in the form of a ministerialdirectorate with its own statistics, research andsometimes enforcement sections. The planningfunction ma) also be performed by a directorateresponsible for technical affairs (Yemen ArabRepublic), financial and administrative affairs(Kuwait, I nked Arab Emirates) or internationalrelations (Sudan). The differences in the rights

Ro.u. ik Ind plowccis ol educational planivng and manaw. nuni in the \tab Silks 177

and duties of specific planning departments arenot always meaningful, being more the expres-sion of short-lived changes and/or the interplayof influence and puss er between government of-ficials than of a given orgamtational doctrine.

The co-ordination planning activities

i n spite of the differing degrees of developmentof planning departments in Arab countries thereseem to be practical similarities in the way theyoperate. For example:The Maghreb and Near Eastern countries are

similar in the internal co-ordination of theirwork.

'rile planning directorate in Morocco co-ordi-nates the planning activities or central and ex-ternal offices. It also maintains links with theother educational and administrative directo-rates and is the channel of communicationwith the planning and finance ministries.

In the Syrian Arab Republic, the plannt .g de-partment co-ordinates the preparatory workfor the educational plan, which is carried outon its instructions by the different types andlevels of education and teacher training.

Besides its role of direction and co-ordination,the planning department in Kuwait seems tobe particularly invols ed in relations with theconsultative bodies of the education and plan-ning ministries

In Sudan, on the other hand, the only planningin existence at the moment is for higher edu-cation.

In all countries there are other institutions out-side the education ministry and various advisorybodies involved to vary mg degrees in the plan-ning and management of education.

The logical sequence ofthe process and its different stages

In all the Arab Lount et the planning processseems to take the following logical sequence.The startline is an analysis of the situation of

' education in the base s ear fot the new plan. I le-

mographic and statistical data are then consid-ered and enrolment projections made by agegroup and/or region. Then comes the compari-son with socio-economic data so that all the sec-coral employment requirements implicit m theeconomic and social development planning fore-casts can be taken into account in setting the tar-gets for the education system. Forecasting hu-man resource needs still seems to be a difficulttask for many Arab countries because of the poorquality of the data available, the inadequacy ofthe calculations and the lack of realism in theplanning goals. The use of projection techniquesis common, enabling targets and projections tobe matched.

Once the draft plan is approved by the policy-makers the implementation process begins. Inmost cases the plan is broken down into annualpart-plans. generally used as a framework for an-nual budgets. This is rarely an in-depth activityand the relationship between plan and budget isoften very loose.

In theory, the various units in the educationministry take part in drawing up the plan andthere is a specific executive organ for each of itsindividual parts. Some missions call for co-oper-ation between a number of inter- and inn-a-min-isterial bodies in the administration.

Implementation differs from country to coun-try. Some, such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait,have separate units to monitor implementationwhereas others, like Algeria, the Ss rian Arab Re-public, Egypt and Iraq, make thc executive de-partments responsible. The strictness of this en-forcement activity may indicate how mandatorythe plan is.

Assessment is generally left until the plan has. oeen implemented. It is used as a basis for the

drafting of the next plan and covers both quanti-tative and qualitative aspects to varying degrees.The extent to which tesources and objectiveshave been matched is also brought out.

It would not, however, seem that assessment isa systematic or sulfa iently thotough operationOn the contrary, the requests for evaluation madeto the international agencies by the Arab coon-

' tries suggest that it is not per foimed in a salts-' factory manner. In pray rice, too, countries differ

U

178 Antoine Al Gen naou

in the depth to which they take the different edu-cational planning and management functions.

Some Gulf states, for example, see and prac-tise planning as a technique for the collectionand processing of data and the implementationof projects. The intervc ning analytical stages areregarded as less important, so that the decision-making function does not appear to be derivedfrom the planning process but imposed fromoutside.

In another approach (in the Syrian Arab Re-public for example) the analytical function (fromformulation to management analysis) is morehighly developed, implying that planning ismore highly institutionalized. The integration ofthe decision-making function suggests that cer-tain decisions of varying importance are taken inthe light of the planning process.

Educational planning techniques

Econometric techniques used for educationalplanning are relatively elementary and only pri-mary effects are generally taken into account.Cost-benefit analysi: is rarely used.

A certain confusion is also apparent on thesubject of educational investment. The idea ofhuman capital is mentioned but rarely elaborat-ed upon. Sometimes the proclaimed resolve torationalize educational investment and expendi -ture fails to have any effect because of the in-comprehension between educationists and plan-ners due to the almost invariable prevalence ofthe attitude that edu:ation must not be influen-ced by economic considerations.

The most widespi cad techniques arc those ofquantitative projection. Past trends arc extrapo-lated with certain adjustments or modifications.Countries where planning is now part of the cul-ture (e.g. Egypt and Morocco) somet:mes, and toa limited extent, use sophisticated statistit altechniques and simulation models.

To our knowledge, no specific sectoral modelexists for educational development in the Arabcountries. EIPDAS is apparently looking for aflexible educational model that could be applied

to the countries in the region. Lastly, use oflong-range forecasting is very limited.

Old planning problemsand new responsibilities

By intensifying the factors of instability, the eco-nomic crisis is changing the basic data. Planninghas to prucluce better results with the same re-sources or aim at the same targets with reducedresources. These new constraints affect mostArab countries regardk ..s of then resource en-dowment.

But better management requires better train-ing and a b,..tter information system. So govern-ment se, dices need qualified and properlytrained managers. These new constraints imposenew recpirements for the training of senior edu-cational olanning staff in management, evalua-tion, budget control, etc. Administration alsoneed data designed and organized in relation tothe evaluation, efficiency and output objectivesthat are proposed. Unfortunately, today's infor-mation systems in the Arab countries are gearedmore to the needs of quantitat:ve expansion andare sometimes ill-adapted to the functions re-quired for the systematic control of the efficiencywith which educational factors of production areused. Hence the ncd to produce new data forthe requirements and situation of each country.Particular needs, especially for the countrieshardest hit by austerity, are to devise and set upindicators for evaluation and short-term man-agement functions and to train administrators intheir use.

To sum up, tlierefare, the need for autonomyas well as the need for consultation and agree-ment are the new factors that planning hm to ad-just and respond to in the Arab world. Unfortu-nately, attitudes and thinking on this subject inthe Arab countties seem to us to fall short of as-

; pirations.

Re% less and prospects of educational planning and management in the Aiab States 179

The training of officials responsiblefor planning and administration

UNI)FRES TIMA TED TRAINING REQUIREMENTS

It is clear from the USIEDBAS survey that thenumber of senior staff with planning responsib-ilities is very low, that most staff have no initialqualifications and that the number of specialistswith degrees in educational planning is verysmall. Fills loss percentage of qualified and spe-cialized staff (about 25 per cent) is probably offsetby the use of technical assistance where possibleor by the further training of officials. In themain, initial training is given by the universities,while further naining is provided in the minis-tries or in public management institutions.

The above information about the training ofplanning staff in fact covers only' a certain pro-portion of the staff engaged in planning activ-ities. lo these must be added the officials in thedepartmental services and educational-planningunits in the other ministries concerned (highereducation, culture, etc.). Mention should also bemade of the planning units for specialized edu-cation which are often the tesponsibility of tech-

, nical ministries (industry, agriculture, public; works, health, defence) which manage certain

institutes or training centres. The population ofplanning staff thus far exceeds the few hundredofficials covered by the survey.

It needs to be pointed out that the Arab edu-cation ssstems' potential for e::pansion is by nomeans exhausted. Six or seven oc these countriesnon }me universal primary education, but formost of them this goal is a long way off. Thescope for expansion is still considerable in

Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Oman, hie two Yemens,Sudan, Somalia and Mauritania. Potential existsin general and also technical secondary educa-tion I astls, impt oved quality would not neces-saidy mean an inci ease in administiative andteaching staff. What is more, if the Regional Pu o-

gi for the Universalization of PrimaryEducation and the Eradication of Illitetacy (alsoailed he Maim Proiect), launched by tlS

CO in 1989, is applied it will necessarily bring anincrease in planning and management work,particularly in the non-formal sector, and willtherefore create more demand for planners 2ndadministrators.

In short, improving the quality of education,universalization of basic education, the eradica-tion of illiteracy, and greater control over the de-velopment of education by management andplanning are all factors that could be the sourceof potential growth in the administration andplanning sector.

INSUFFICIENT REGIONAL I RAINING CAPACITY

Turning now to the supply side of the training ofplanners and administrators at the regional levelit can be seen that the training structures arc otseveral kinds:The education system's secondary teachers, in-

spectors and administrators are trained by theuniversities. In the main, the training given isinitial theoretical training, but further trainingcourses in administration have been devel-oped. The university tradition for the trainingof senior staff is predominant in the sear East-ern and Gulf states.

Administrative training institutes and organiza-tions for public service staff are of recent ori-gin (Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Iraq andAlgeria). They provide both initial and furthertraining.

Planning institutes generally offer both annualprogrammes and further training cow ses tnrollicials already in jobs. Their sphere is eco-nomic and social planning as a whole, educa-tional planning being just one option. Onlyminor importance is theiefore attached to thissubject.

The education, higher education and planningministries all provide further training for cdtt-

; cation administrators (the I 7nited Arabates, Bahrain, the Syi ian Arab Republic, Qataland Kuwait) and planners (Sudan, the UnitedArab Emirates, Jordan, the Syrian Ar ab Republic, Iraq, Qatar and Kuwait). It is nue that,

1 (-

180 Antome %f. Genna('ta

up to now these institutions have met part ofthe training needs for planners in the educa-tion ministfies of the countries concerned butthe number of education planners and admin-istrators that they have trained is very small.This insufficient coverage of iequirementssuggests that some of the training demand ismet outside the country. The shortage of qual-ified senior staff would appear to be a majorcause of the Arab countries' weakness in theeducational planning field.

The prospects for regionalco-operation in educationalmanagement and planning

THE AC FRI HES OF UNFSCO KFGIONAISt RUCTURES

When EIPDAS was set up by UNESCO in 1979it was part of an ambitious scheme, one object ofwhich was to modernize the administration ofeducation and to develop a regional network forthe exchange of experience in the field of educa-tion and training.

gional level, starting up the network, launchingcase-studies, organizing national and regionalworkshops) arc more in the way of preliminaries.lf it is to get beyond the stage of good intentions,this structure will have to be given the resourcesit needs for its activity to meet requirements interms of the spread and promotion of innovation.

In addition its activities will need to be moreclosely harmonized with those of UN EDBAS sothat complememarity between UNESCO agen-cies is effective and operational.

. _

ritE EMF.14GIINCF 01 SUItHRIIONAI.ORGANIZMIONS

Al .ECSO and ABEGS (the Arab Bureau of Edu-cation for the Gulf states) subregional Mlice ofthe Gulf Co-operation Council - were both setup in the 1970s. The Islamic Educational, Scien-tific and Cultural Organization came into beingin the 1980s. In 1987, the Maghreb countries(Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, for their part,agreed on a closer relationship that brought thebeginnings of co-operation in the education sec-tor (intention to harmonize curricula, exchangeof teachers and information, joint educational re-

From the outset, LIMAS set itself the task of search, etc.), facilitated by the similarities inbeing the link between Arab national and sub- their education systems. The Conference ofregional educational establishments, spurring Heads of State of the countries of the greatercountries to set up their own co-ordination cen- Maghreb (including the Libyan Arab Iamahari-tres so as to form a regional network for the ex- ya and Mauritania) in 1988 also proclaimed thischange of information, and itself joining a world policy of subregional co-operation. In 1988 too,exchange network, thus forging the remaining the countries in the Arab Council of Co-oper-link in the national- regional international ation (Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and the Yemen Arabchain. Republic also announced their intention to co-

But the task of running and supervising na- operate in the field of education.tional and regional institutions is clearly imps- Ehese specialized institutions are alream-B, orsible given the kind of human and material re- may become, active participants in co-operationsources currently assigned to it. Scrutiny of the and the promotion of educational projects. Inproposed E1PDAS plan of action for the period this way, new resources can be mobilized for spe-1989 -92, particularly in the administration and ( tic education pr olects in the cotton ies of the e-planning area, reveals the gap theme is between guarits ambitions and the resources available toachieve them.

In fact, for the most par I,. El PI )AS activitiesI (signing up t orrespondents at national and ie

1 c

Res less and prospects of educational planning and managems 01 in the \ rab States

HIE MAJOR PROJECT AND REGIONALCO -OPERA ION

. _

UNESCO and ALECSO activities have oftenhad the same objectives and in some fields; forexample, the organization of the last MinisterialConference in Abu Dhabi in November 1977,the two have collaborated. That conferenceadopted a set of recommendations concerningthe universalization of primary education, theeradication of illiteracy, adult education and thestrengthening of administrative and planningstructures in the Arab countries.

These tecommendations were taken furtherat the regional level when the ExceptionalALECSO Congress (Khartoum 1978) adoptedthe report entitled 'Fowards a Strategy of Reno-vation in Education Within the Context of theIntegrated Development of the Arab Nation',whose implementation target date was set at1995.

As things now stand, it seems that concreteorganization and planning problems are likely toarise in the implementation of the Major Project.The first has to do with the links of co-operationand co-ordination betwelii ALECSO and UN-ESCO regional projects in the sante area and

, with the same object. UNEDBAS and ALECSOregional conferences and meetings held duringthe last ten years have been consistently con-cerned with the problems of primary educationand have been consistently concerned with theproblems in this area, first by ALECSO and laterby UNESCO.

Ihe appt oach to the problem has alsochanged with time moving from a strategy basedon pit mary education to one embracing non-for-mid education. More recently (in 1987) the prob-lem has lwen viewed front the angle of globalano co-ordinated strategies. Differing targetdates have also been propose': first 1990, then1995 (bs L( SO) and finally the vein 2000 inthe Major Project.

These die indeed uncial projects for the Arabworld [WI what, it may be asked, justifies the op-timism of then authors?' Idle results of the sur-vey esented at the ALECSO Congress in Alex-

181

andria in 1984 showed how great the gap isbetween what is planned and what is achieved agap that has been read as a sign of serious differ-ence in perception and interpretation of the ob-jectives adopted by the countries concerned.

Above all, however, the feeling that arises isthat there are too many rather than too few re-gional projects and that the shortfall is more inthe field of preparation and implementation.The multiplicity of projects creates the dangei ofduplication, rivalry and even divergence, all im-plying additional costs impairing the efficiencyand credibility of the various regional bodies. i

This has to be faced and it would therefore beuseful, before anything is done, to make sure ofthe commitment of the various national author-ities in the light of their capacities and their realresources. This is vital to the success of the Ma-jor Project. Given the fact that this concerns apopulation that is similai in its socio-econonlicand cultural characteristics, effort should per-haps be concentrated on defining the objectivesof the national plans (which would take accountof concrete implications at the national level I'mthe year 2000) and then on looking for variousforms of subregional co-operation in this field(Maghreb, Gulf states, etc.) which, at a laterstage, would enable the various subregionalplans to be brought together in a relatively cred-ible and realistic overall regional plan.

The second problem concerns the internalcoherence between the scale of this project, ex-pressed in terms of quantitative and qualitativetargets, and the subsequent proposals for thetraining of the implementing personnel (design-ers, planners and mangers) and anyone else con-cei ned.

At the administrative level, an intensive elfin twill be requited to activate and mobilize the in-stitutions and organizations of every country(technical ministries, the public sector, tradeunions and employeis' oiganizattons, and socio-cultural bodies, en.) It will also lw necessm toinstitutionalize pal ticipat ion and decon«mti a-non in order to involve local participants in theproject. Considerable management capacitieswill also he called fm in evel y country far in ex-cess of the Arab States' present potential tu the

182 .1 InOilh' tf ?Mani/

way of managers, regional and national planne rs,administrators, heads of establishment, counsel-lors and other specialists - as will a very seriousplanning exercise.

Prospects for the future

Questions concerning the future of educationalplanning arc closely bound up with the socio-economic future of the Arab countries. To try toglimpse this future, we must accept the hazardsof linking together, in a reasonable dialectic, thevarious levels (economic, political and cultural)of the social dynamic. Here we shall simply for-mulate a number of assumptions on which a re-ply might be based.

_

ASSUMP HUNS

Oil and gas currently form the main wealth ofthe Arab countries. During the present.decade,oil prices may be expected to fluctuate about anaverage of $18 a barrel or to rise gradually to$24-25 a barrel if growth in the developed coun-tries is sustained. It is also reasonable to supposethat the world, and Western Europe in partic-ular, in spite of the changes in economic strategytowards the East European countries, will con-tinue to take vast quantities of Arab oil. On thatgeneral assumption and with the emphasis var-ying according to the different groups of coun-tries, the A..ab economies will avoid marginal-ization and participate, some more some lessactively, in the increase in growth generated bythe imminence of 1993 and the Single EuropeanMarket and the general trend already evident to-wards closer relations with Eastern Europe, pos-sibly to the detriment of some pat ts of the VhirdWorld such as sub-Sahat an MIR a. Thus the tateof economic gi owth and gi owth iii the i e-

sources assigned to social expendum e mc I tid ngeducation - could well masti ip that of thegrowth in population.

I X I RI MI NCI NARIOs

Against this ba, kgiound, what are the prospectsfor education policies and systems? There aretwo possible extreme scenarios, both bound upwith the Major Project, depending on how thesituation develops in the Arab region.

In the first, the Major Project would promptforceful recognition of intra-regional interde-pendence and the need for solidarity and a read-iness to pick up the challenge. In that case itwould become the expression of a political will totake Arab civilization a stage further by giving ab-solute priority to the qualitative leap forward. TheProiect would be the theatre of regional co-oper-ation embracing the many countries that are stillso far behind in this respect. This would be thescenario of change. It would require broad con-sensus on the role and content of education. Theconditions applying to the creation and spread ofinnovation would be drastically but positivelychanged by the environment of co-operation. Il-literacy would probably be overcome and primaryeducation universalized by the year 2000.

Individual countries would also continue toapply their own education policies designed toenhance the quality of basic education, improveteacher training, expand science teaching at sec-

, ondary and higher levels and develop research inthe universities. Co-operation in other fields (re-search, curricula, etc.) would also be easier topromote in such cilcumstances. It would meanthat the rich countries would have to be pre-pared to finance a large part of the Project,whose implementation would also depend onthe participation of the Near Eastern and Magh-reb countries in providing staff.

The scenario representing the other extremewould be the continuation of past trends: cling-ing to a narrow nationalism with more concernfor rhetoric titan action. In fact, this scenariowould be a flight front reality gis en the culturaland human interdependence of the Arab coun-tries. It would mean weak legional co-ordinationand co-operation, unequal development of edu-cation between and within subregions, consid-erable illiteracy even at the dawn of the third

Res ieo and prospects of educational planning and management in the Arab States 183

millennium, continuing obstacles to universaleducation, bottlenecks in technical educationand vocational training in many countries and adeterioration in higher education.

Other scenarios betwcen these two extremesare obviously possible, even probable, and couldopet ate ot alternate depending on the situation.The possibilities thus range from the wholly un-changed continuation of past trends to overcom-ing the inertia of the present and a new drive to-wards an ideal situation or some combination ofthe two. They clearly take no account of thestorm-clouds menacing the peace and ofthe Middle East: a highly pessimistic scenario al-lowing for the possibility of war would imply thereversal of the considerable progress that has al-ready been made and jeopardize, perhaps for aVetc long time, the prospects for progress in edu-cation in the Gulf and Near Eastern states.

CON ITAIPOHARy ARAB PERCEMIONSEDUCATIONAL PLANNING

What would become of Arab educational plan-rung in all this? What new role would it be as-

! signed? The truth is that there seems to be noagreement among Arab experts (except possibly

; in the Maghreb) on the role of either the ethica-1 tional planner (as practitioner and theorist) or

educational planning (as a method of action or asystem of knowledge).

For one school of thought, the place of theplanner in the decision-making circuit and theeffective weight he carries with policy-makers,

.

government departments and civil society as awhole varies with how his mission is perceived,angmg from that of a manager with a budget

that he has to spend in the best way possible tothat of the inventor of a future society with re-soot ces at his command matching the projects in

y la that of a strategist with limited freedomol c non in his field of activity.

I his somewhat over-simplified definitionraises the question of the relevance of the plansthat are formulated and the role of the planner inrelation to policy-making, a relevance which is

often questioned by Arab education specialists.For them it is a source of frustration, to say noth-ing of the misunderstanding, incomprehensionand even hostiiity that planning sometimesarouses among administrators, educationists andeven the general public.

Arab planning has admittedly experiencedfailures in the past. Taking into account whathas been achieved, its im-gact has not been con-clusive by any mew's Selief in the value added itcan contribute has sl ink for many' actors on thesocial scene. And y, its failures are more to beascribed to the wca. less of its insitutionaliza-tion, the fragmentary and routine niture of theprocess and sometimes the lack of convictionand resolve on the part of certain policy-makerswho are basically hostile to planning. Its inade-quacies may be put under three headings.

Thc admintstrative context

Planning has not ahsays found the public servicefavourable ground to take root ;n, difficulties be-ing excessive staff mobility and lack of motiva-tion (ill-paid, ill-considered and ill-trained),pressure from parallel authorities (pressuregroups and parties) and low credibility in gener-al. With one thing thus leading inevitably to an-other, the administration of education has accu-mulated a large number of handicaps in manycountries (Syrian Arab Republic, Lebanon, Su-dan and Egypt).

The planning horizcn

Because of the present world situation, the factthat almost all technology is imported and theincessant pressure of social demand, planninghorizons in many Arab countries are relativelyclose compared with the time-scale of the learn-ing period. Planning has been more concernedwith short-term gains than looking to the future.It now, therefore, needs to change to a kind ofplanning that takes more account of time, un-certainty, the reversibility of phenomena and thebehaviour of members of society. This will re-quire training in, and wide use of, forecastingtechniques as a systematic management methodat all levels, including the decentralized offices.

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184 4 mosne Gennaour

Net: or negle,ted areas

Planning in the Arab countries needs to considercertain fields that it has so far disregarded andsome new concerns arising out of social devel-opment. In particular, it should think about: (a)the organization of non-formal education in allits forms and its linkages in various contexts withformai education; (b) the meeting of manpowerrequirements in the 'non-formal' sector, whichis growing in the present situation of crisis; (c)private-sector proiects, bearing in mind changesin the population's needs and aspirations andthis sector's potential and capacity to meet them;(d) the wish for independence of basic commu-nities and regions and therefore the introductionof procedures for communities and regions andtherefore the introduction of procedures forcommunication and consultation to improve ef-ficiency and achieve greater parity between pe-riphery and centre; (e) the quickening pace ofurbanization and its implications for the contentof education; (f) adjustment to the environment;(g) organization of the family and economic ac-tivity; (h) the inter-Arab migration dimension;and (i) certain specific problems which may arisehere or there such as biculturalism, already rec-ognized or about to be recognized.

Beyond these concerns, the existence of theMajor Project throws down a challenge to re-gional anei national planning, as we have seen,and the sort of planning adopted will be influen-ced by the scenario selected for putting the Pro-ject into effect. The co-operation scenario wouldlead to mechanisms for national and regionallink-up and co-ordination in the planning andmanagement fields. It would also require a large-scale training strategy in those fields. The otherscenario would simply consolidate the presentisolation of national planning activities, the lackof any real regional planning and the inadequacyof national and regional training policy.

Notes1 This paper was prepared and presented prior to the uni-

fication of thc tit o Yemens on 22 Mal. 1990 and obvtousl,before the Gulf War.

2 Ed-87/SENION OFFICIALS/3, June 1987.

Bibliography1111. ARAR ANNING UTE (various authors) Edwational

Planning and its Relations with Economic and Social plan.rung. Round Table, Kuwait. 1987. (In Arabic )

Planning Bodies in rhe Arab States (mint ssork). Kussait,1987. (In Arabic.)

BERNARD. C. L'auto.einplos en A lgtrre, une noutelle r deur Paris, Tiers Monde, 1988

CHAKIR, Mustapha. Etude comparec des systemes administra-tifs arabes au Maghreb et au Mawn Orient, Pans, L'NESCO,1982 (SS-83/WS153.1

CAI I IFR, A, litSSLER, V. Ecenmnies sr: developpcment dc'demograpluques, Algerie, Egypte. Mans a Tunisic Paris,

Documentation Erancaise, 1989 (Notes et etudes docu.mentaires, 4878.)

it SAI MI, A M. Methodological Aspects of Adaptation of PublicAdministration and Management for Development of Socio-cultural Contexts in die Arab Region. Paris, UNESCO(SS-8I/WS/45.)

MARC, G Rapport rue la reorganisation de Padnumstrarion dereducation nationale au Liban. Bierm. Mimstr) of Educa-tion, 1980

RAHN* A Educational Planning. Damascus Unisersits Ness,1988 (In Arabic )

Sass ii, Mamdouh Retrospecrive Evaluation of ForecastingMethods for Qualified Manpower Naas for Egypt, Paris, UN -ESCOn IEP (Forecasting Methods for Qualified Manposs-er Needs Elie Experience of Eleven Countries)

Colloque regional sue le developpement fu:ur del'edmatton dans let Ns's arabes Reflesions sur developpe-

mem futur de l'education dans la region arahe au cours desdeux deeenmes 2980-2000. (ED-80/SYMARAB/2.)

avunteta de travail principal. Reunion des hauts responsables de P.:du:anon des pays arabes en Juin (987 (ED-87/SENIOR OEVICIAI S/3.)-- Esperienee with Basic Education in Egypt FIN /AS (Re-search and Studies, 3, in Arabic )

.Surt el. of the Training of the .4rab States in the .4 real of1-diasional Planning and Administration and Economics ofEducation alth a Proposed Program to ifeer Those NerdsAmman. l'NFIMAS, 1989

' \ 1.1)1155.1.11DAS Plan d'activite pour 158g 1992 Ku-nail, rtil:DBAS, 1988.

; N ESCO Rapport hnal de la Reunion preparatoirs yexpest,pubh, pour la conference des Minnow de reducation a del.tfmnfre, charges de la plandwation ecor.omiqu dans lesFiat, ,..abes iii,iis, 22-26 Mart Is 1982

onalityamong diversity

A review of planning

and administration

of education in Asia

Cheng Kai Ming

Introduction

It seems justified to begin this article by quotingfrom a recent UNESCO report (UNESCO/PROM', 19896, p. I):

The huge area defined as UNESCO's Asia and Pa-cific region, extending as it does from Turkey inthe west to Samua in the east and with nationalpopulations that range from 150,000 to a billionis so culturally, demographically and economicallydiverse that a survey of (education! . in it almostdefiec imagination.

Cheng Kai Ming (Hong Kong). Senior lecturer,Department of Education, University of HongKong; hoard member, Commonwealth Council forEducational Administration; founding chairman,Hong Kong (7ouncil for Educational AdministrationAuthor of China's Education on the Move 09901,Planning Basic Education in China: Two CaseStudies in the l'rovince of I.iaoning (research re-port for UNICEF, published by IIEN.

On the one hand, there is China, with a pop-ulation of over 1,100 million, and with a per cap-ita GNI' of $330 (World Bank, 1990). On theother hand, there is Brunei, a country with apopulation of around 240,000 but with a per cap-ita income of $17,000. The region is also oneembracing many cultures: the more visible beingthe Confucian, Indian and Islamic cultures, plusAustralasia with its prevailing Western culture.Therefore, this article does not pretend thatthere are trends that can be applied to all coun-tries in this vast region. Nevertheless, hetero-geneous as it is, the region does display certainidentifiable common attributes among countriesin their educational development.

Economic background

In terms ol economy, the region includes highlyindustrialized countries, such as Japan, Australiaand New Zealand, the Newly IndustrializedEconomies (N I Es), for example, Hong Kong,

Ptoire, It. Vol XXI. No I. Von

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186 Cheng Kai Ming

Singapore and the Republic of Korea, the ad-vanced developing countries (Thailand and Ma-laysia), the less developed countries (includingChina and India) and the small countries (main-ly in the South l'acific).

Despite the wide range of economic systemsand the difference in levels of development, thepast decade has witnessed general progress inmost of the countries in the region. Between1980 and 1988, the average GNI' growth of thedeveloping Asian countries was 7 per cent perannum, comparing favourably with the worldgrowth-rate of 3 per cent and less than 2 per centin developing countries in the same period(Asian Development Bank, 1989, p. 2).

Among the countries, the NIEs, despite mi-nor readjustments, experienced growth-rates of10.7 per cent, 11.8 per cent and 9 per cent respec-tively in the years 1986, 1987 and 1988. TheSouth-East Asian countries were also impressivein rising from a growth-rate of 3.2 per cent in1986 to 7.2 per cent in 1988, mainly attributableto industrial growth. They are likely to challengethe position of the NIEs. On the other hand, theSouth Asian countries saw their impressivegrowth of 7.8 per cent in 1988 mainly as a resultof the recovery in agricultural output. The mostnoticeable growth was still China, with a rate of11.2 per cent in 1988. The South Pacific coun-tries also recovered from declines in previousyears (Asian Development Bank, 1989, p. 2).The general healthy economy underlies the vari-ous national education reforms to which we shallreturn later.

Human resources

A remarkable characteristic of the region is per-haps the tradition of emphasis on human re-sources. Such an emphasis had existed long be-fore Western human-capital theories came intobeing. It is perhaps attributable to the Confucianand Indian traditions in their broadest sense,which place a high value on education. As is ob-served by the Asian I )evelopme;it Bank (1989, p.

I 159):

Because Asia has developed these values over along period of time, their understanding is essen-tial to an analysis of human resource developmentin the region. These social values differ substan-tially among Asian countries, but arc as importantas foimal and non-formal education in the devel-opment of attitudes toward work, saving and in-vestment.

Such values are commonly believed to have con-tributed to the progress in many Asian countries,as is also perceived by the Asian DevelopmentBank (1989, p. 153):

An examination of the postwar economic recoidsof the countries classified as newly industrializingeconomies (NIEs) and the more advanced South-East Asian countries reveals that human capitalformation has been a crucial underly ing factor inthese countries' growth. Examination also showsthat education and skills became increasingly crit-ical as these countries approached industrial matu-rity.... Indeed, what spells the difference betweengood and poor economic performance is the man-ner in which human and physical capital and tech-nology are organized.... Additionally, significantprogress in the task of reducing poverty can bemade by paying attention to human resource de-velopment and utilization, as was the case with themore successful Asian economies.

This assertion is to some extent confirmed inUMW's Human Development Report (199)1),where in terms of H DI (human development in-dicator), countries in the region often rank high-er than they do in terms of GDP. This traditioncontributes to a general enthusiasm for educa-tional development in mans countries of the re-gion. I lowever, such enthusiasm is often offsetby population and employment problems.

--POITI. A l'ION

The population of the region accounts foi morethan half of the world's population, and is likelyto grow even larger. Table 1 gives a summary ofdata available from twenty-six countries and ter-ritories in the region. It can be seen that the pop-ulation of the region will have almost doubled inthe four decades front 1960 to 2000. Population

Cormnonalny among dirers10... 187a resieir of planning and administiation 01 education in Asia

r sin I l'oNliail,1112000 (millions)

1960.

and the Pacific 1960-

-,

1970 9NO I 990 2000

Iota! ryo!aen 655 2060 2 526 2 992 1 435

0-14 \ 01,1 645 /t26 944 987 985

(14,

and ,6,1,1 Q94 I 214 I c82 200 2450s,16.°1

age duldien 254 108 150 165 162

, eko sr. p

is permanently on the policy agenda of manygovernments in the region. In terms of educa-non, the task of planning education to matchpopulation gi ossth (or fluctuation) is understan-tiably a ooxmx one.

ditlerent countries show differenttrends. Hie population growth-rate remainshigh in South Asia (2.3 per cent irs 1980-85). InSouth-East Asia, it declines slowly (2.1 per cent,1980-85) 'Ise growth-rate for the NIEs alsoshows a decline (1.6 per cent, 1980-85). in EastAsia, with the excepticn of China, a negativegloss th.ratc is likely to emerge (UNESCO"

tion will be under 14 in the 1990s (UNESCO/PROM', 1989, p. 3).

I'MPLOYMEN1

In many of the developing countries in the re-gion, education is meaningful only in the sensethat it leads to urban employment. In China andSouth Asia, two-thirds or more of the labourforce is employed in agriculture. This Isas a sig-nificantly negative effect on educational devel-opment where education is still seen as irrele-vant to rural life. In South-East Asia, half thelabour force is agricultural; in East Asia, the agri-cultural component has dropped to much lessthan a half (Asian Development Bank, 1988, p.81; see also Table 2). In this context, the condi-tions for educational development are more fa-vourable in East and South-East Asia.

Another element that affects educational de-velopment is urban unemployment. Japan andthe region's NIEs have enjoyed full or nearly fullemploymem for the past two decades. There iseven some degree of labour shortage in some

PROAP, 1989a, p. 2). Hence, the pressure of countries, though there are new signs of unern-population gtowth is greater on less-developed | ployment among graduates in the Republic ofcounti tes ss ho are least equipped to tackle pop Korea (Kim and Ihm, 1988). Among the South-

ulanons pi oblems. East Asian countries, Thailand has the best pro-

The ()serail school-age population (0-14) spects for full employment, though Malaysiapeaks in 1090. Dus seems to hint that there will came near to full employment in 1984 (Asianhe some whet in the 1990s in terms of education Development Bank, 1989, p. 156). All the other

expansion and insestment. However, according countries seem to suffer from unemployment in

to 'nued Nations protections, over 40 per cent one way or another, for very different causes. In

ot the population of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Australia and New Zealand, the causes of unem-

Islamic Republic of Iran, Nepal, Lao l'eople's ployment are very similar to those in \X'esternDemociatic Republic, Pakistan and Papua NewGuinea will be under 14 in the 1990s. I )uring thesame period. about one-third of the populationof Bhutan, Fni, Indonesia, India, Malaysia,Myanmai, the Philippines, Thailand and VietNam will be under 14 years. There is a fore-seeable NIS in educational development duethe disproportionate growth of the school-agepopulation l'his is not the case in the developedcountries, sot h as Japan, Austialia and NewZealand, whew only 20 per cent of the popula-

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Europe where modern technology has reduceddomestic job opportunities in favour of countrieswith more adaptable work-forces. In the devel-oping countries, unemployment is attributabloto the usual causes in the Third World: insuffi-cient jobs in the modern sector, economic aus-let over-moduction of graduates and trainedworkers, and so forth. In China, the new eco-nomic policies have created free job opportuni-ties that were inconceivable its a planned econo-my, but they have led to the emergence of

u

( hen; kai Ming

TABU' 2. Composition of labour force (1965 and latest figure available)

Count

Percentage of labour 656e in

Agri< situ, C Scissces

1965 19S0 190 19}1(1 1969 1980

China 69 - 19 - . 2India 73 70 12 13 15 17Japan 26 II 32 14 42 55Aust:alia 10 7 38 31 52 01New Zealand 13 11 36 33 51 56Hong Kong 6 2 53 51 41 17Singapore 5 2 27 38 68 illKorea (Rep of) 56 3,:s 14 27 30 7

Malaysia 59 42 13 19 28 39Turkey 75 58 I I 17 14 25Thailand 82 70 5 10 13 20Philippines 58 52 16 16 26 33Indonesia 71 57 9 13 20 30Sri Lanka 56 53 14 14 30 33l'akistan 60 55 18 16 22 30Lao People's I km Rep 81 76 5 7 14 17Nepal 94 93 - 1 4 6Bangladesh 84 75 5 6 11 1913hutan 95 92 2 3 3 5Afghanistan 69 - II - 20 -Burma 64 53 11 19 23 28Dem. Kampuchea 80 - 4 - 16 -Viet Nam 79 68 6 12 15 21Korea (Dem. Rep of) 57 41 23 30 20 27Mongolia 55 40 20 21 25 39Cook Islands - 29 - 7 - 24Fin 44. 8 - 19'l'apua New Guinea 87 '6 6 )0 7 14Solomon Islands 10 10 - 37fonga 44 2 19Vanuatu - 77 2 - -Western Samoa 11 Ft - 17

1 Diu fot other countries in the region not ....dank.2 1976 figuresSen.., World Rank, 19116. pp 210-9. Asian DeseIopinent Bank 19811 p SI

unemployment which was otherwise invisibleDifferent employment situations have led to dif-ferent aspirations for education in these socie-ties, and that in turn has considerably influencedthe development of education.

In recent years, the employment situation hasbeen complicated by the international migrationof workers: Filipino workers in South-East Asiaand the Middle East, Malaysian workers in Sin-gapore and Indonesian workers in Malaysia, and

so forth. Migration of workers also occurs inlarge countries such as China, where there arcmovenlents of unskilled labour from less devel-oped to more developed provinces. In all thesecases, migrant workers are replacing local low-!motile groups as sources of cheap labour. In themore developed countries and urban areas, theemergence of migrant workers is an indirectconsequence of educational development whet ehigher school participation has led to a shortage

Commonality among dive:say: 189a reviesi of planning and administration of education in Asia

t, 3 Education expenditure

Count I I

by country

l'ot <map. of GNP

FcfLentagc of Mal

pubht expentiaure

1971 I 9116 1971 19R6

Cluna 1.8 2.7: 4.2 8.11

India 2.8 3.61 8.6 9.42

JapanAustralia

5.5

6.0 5.6'

22.414.8

17.9'12.81

New Zealand 5.8 5.1 17.1 20.9

Ilong Kong 2.7 2.82 20.7 18 7:

Singapore 2.9 4 3' 8.6 9.62

Korea (Rep 00 2.2 4.5 13.9 27 3

Maylaysla 6.0 7.S 19.3 16 3:

"'Luke,. 2.8' 2 1 10.6'

Ilatland 3.6 3.9' 21.0 21.1"

Philippines 1.9 1.7 11.4 7.0'

Indonesia 2.7 2.0' 13.1 9 3'

Sri 1..nka 2.8 3.5 10.1 9 4

Pakistan 2.2 2.1 5.2 5 0'

5Ialdis es 0 6 3.11

1.ao People's Dcm Rep 1.0' 6.6

Nepal 1 5 3.0' 11.5 10.8

Bangladesh 1 1 2.1 13.6 10 5

Afghanistan 1.3' 6.4'

Burma 1 7 15.3

Solomon Islands 5 21 14.7 12.4'

Kiribati 4.9 17.5

Western Samoa 8.5'

Fin 4 7 6 7. 19.5

Brunri 2.0 2 0: 12.2 9.6'

American Samoa 14.2 16.0

French Polynesia 3 9.7,

Guam 13.3

New Caledonia 13 4.

Giok Islands 10 21

1 onga 3.0 4 4: 12.7 16.11

l'apua New Gumea 7 7 14.2

I Niue 18.6 10 9'

Noito lk Island 13.7 14 (1'

P4iihc Islands 27 0 19 0

Csprus 4.5 3.7 14.3 11 7

1 k1.,1 14 Ils 1A. .01 197'

51,1 1,0111% hut not 147th

1 ..1 5(.0..S1.111011/ Yes1,1,00k. 1998. I Able 4 1

of unskilled labour as well as higher wage expec-tations among local workers.

Nevertheless, the educatiop,0 composition ofthe labour force in developing countries in theregion is high compared with the rest of the de-veloping world (Psacharopoulos and Arriagada,1986). This is perhaps attributable to thc culturalnaditions mentioned above.

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Developments in education

General economic progress has fai -reachingconsequences on the development of education.On the one hand, better economic conditionsand changes in economic patterns have given

262

190 Chcng Kai Mmng

rise to new demands for education. This is trueboth for manpower requirements and for socialdemand. On the other hand, governments havefound themselves in a better financial position toentertain demands for educatior al expansion.Such wide-sweeping remarks may not apply toeach and every country in the region; they never-theless represent the situation in many coultriesof the region. We shall look at three aspects ofeducational development in the region: educa-tion expenditure, literacy and enrolment.

- _

EDUCATION EXPENDITURE

Table 3 shows exp-znditure on public educationby countries in the region. The industrializedcountries, Australia and New Zealand and Japanspend 5-7 per cent of their GNP on education.Their pattern of expenditure is Very similar toother developed countries and has been stablefor many years. In the NIEs, with the exceptionof Hong Kong, education expenditure has in-creased from less than 3 to above 4.5 per cent oftheir GNPs. This increase occurred at the sametime as these countries were moving out of thedeveloping category. The developing countriesmaintain a level of 2-3 per cent, which againcorresponds to other developing countries ofcomparable economic status. The extraordinari-ly low figure for the Philippines indicates thehigh proportion of private education rather thanlow investment.

There is in general a wide gap between theenormous needs for educational advancementand the resources available to undertake it (UN-ESCO/PROAP, l989a, p. 5). This has renderedthe developing countries in the region major cli-ents of international funding agencies. In recentyears, the attention of such agencies has shiftedto basic education. In particular, the Asian De-velopment Bank has ler ently established its edu-cation sector, h pays special attention to primary and non-formal education as a means ofalleviating poverty.

2

LITERACY

The literacy rate in the region had reached 70per cent by 1990 (See Table 4). This comparesfavourably with other regions, bearing in mindthat most countries in the region belong to thedes-eloping world. There are three points worthmentioning (UNESCO/PROAP, 1989, p. 9;Chu, 1988):First, much effort has been spent in eradicating

adult illiteracy. When viewed across the years,the achievement is remarkable.

Second, despite the imprOvement in relativeterms, the absolute number of adult illiteratesremains almost constant. It is estimated thatthere will be around 600 million adult illiter-ates in the region in the 1990s.

Third, there is significant gender disparity. Inthe years 1970 to 1985, the female aclilt illiter-ates in the region constituted over 65 per ccntof total adult illiterates.

Ts Hi 4 Laeracs, in Asia and the Pacific

\ that ViOil) rjr I lelat , kelaICS I Hilt, dIcf

I.31e. +". / +11.11100, +11IIIIIonsl

1960 19 6 393 6001970 50.2 781' 6141980 60 1 953 6281990 68 7 1 377 6282000 77 1 1 888 562

I (:hiti. 14S,r, ,+ I '.I 51 l'12(I SI+ p 6

Moreover, there is considerable disparity be-tween countries. The South Asian wuntries(with the exception of Sri I .anka) have otherlow literacy rates. Most of the countries with aConfucian culture (with the exception of China,which displays enormous disFrity within thecountry) have achieved a literacy tate of 90 percent, regardless of their economic stiength. Mostof the countries in East and South-East Asiashould apptoach full literacy during the 1990s.Austi aha and New Zealand, formerly regarded

Commonalas among discisits 191a review of planning and administrauon of ecucauon in Asia

I as having attained full literacy, arc facing relapseinto functional illiteracy, as is the case it otherindustrialized countries (UNESCO/PROAP,1989, p. 9; Chu, 1988).

Where literacy rates are low, it is usually be.cause of the rapid population growth. I'his runscounter the tremendous national efforts to erad-icate illiteracy.

ENROLMENT

Table 5 indicates the growth of gross enrolmentrates at different levels of the education system,in comparison with other parts of the world. Thegrowth of enrolment exceeded the increase inpopulation. This indicates the considerable ef-fort these countries have made to expand theireducation systems.

In the majority of countries in the region, themain thrust of educational development is stillbasic education. In this region, basic educationin general means primary schooling. UNESCO/PROAP (1989a, p. 14) estimates th, in 1990,the overall enrolment in primary education was86 per cent. The high overall figure is very muchattributable to the high enrolment in the twopopulation giants China (94 per cent) imd India(92 per cent), which offsets the low figures inother developing countries. However, enrol-ments in South-East Asia and the NIEs are gen-erally high. When the figure is compared with56 per cent in 1960 and 81 per cent in 1980, itshould be seen as a real achievetnent among the

na;ions in their efforts to universalize basic edu-cation.

I lowever, high enrolment rates do not relievethese countries from pressures to achieve uni-versal bask education. Non-attenders and drop-outs, despite being small percentagewise, re-main large in number. As was estimated by UN-ESCO/PROAP (1989a, p. 13), thenon-attendance rate amounted to 54 million in1989 and is estimated to be 26 million by the endof the century. The non-atzenders and drop-outsare found mostly in deprived areas where the so-cial and economic environment does not allowfor easy solutions to the problem. The enrolmentrate is likely to level out in the years to come.

In general, there have been encouraging im-provements in the drop-out situation in industri-alized countries and the NIEs since 1960, but itls worsening in the less developed countries(UNESCO/PROAP, I989a, p. 23). The reasonsfor dropping out arc manifold. Apart from edu-cational reasons such as low achievement inlearning and unattractive curricula, economicincentive remains the major reason. China pre-sents the typical case where the drop-out rate issevere in both the least developed areas whereformal education is seen as irrelevant to rurallife, and in prosperous villages where formalschooling incurs high costs when and whereyoung people can otherwise take part in com-mercial or industrial activities.

Gender inequality also contributes to non-attendance and dropping out. lii many tradition-al societies in the region, the major role of girls isstill seen as housework. Even where finance per-

FAR!! ( enrolmem rates, 1960 and imd-1980s (petcentages)

Primal% Set ondms I ritims

19111 1 i 960 1986 Nos 141,e.

Wm Id 80 7 99 9 27 S 47 0 5 2 12K

1 /0 cld math les 101.s 103.0 62 1 90 2 19 1 n I/esclpmg oun0 lc% 72 8 99 2 15.1 98 5 .111 : 2

(em 1 .Nral, States) 80 8 104 4 20.7 40 2 2 c 7 I

0,eania 101 6 106 /4 53.1 79 2 9 9 2C I

5. sr.. I \ I 51 I I %,,/,/,ss.,,/ I eorimok. 19511 I sl,Ir_

2UL

192 Cheng Kai .ifing

mils, boys are given priority in schooling (UN-ESCO/PROAP, 1989a, p. 15).

Most countries have also made considerableefforts to expand secondary education. Appar-ently, enrolments in secondary school reflect theeconomic strength of these countries, with prac-tically few exceptions.

Technical and vocational education was onceseen as a viable alternative to traditional school-ing in the region. Statistics show that two parts ofthis region show very different directions of de-velopment. In Oceania, the percentages of the ap-propriate age-group enrolled in technical and vo-cational secondary education were 0.7,1.3 and 1.5per cent in 1970,1980 and 1986 respectively (UN-ESCO Statistical Yearbook, 1988, Table 2.9). Theenrolment :ate is small yet steadily increasing.This corresponds to trends in other developingcountries where new training programmes werelaunched to cope with youth unemployment. InAsia, the corresponding figures were 8.0, 7.4 and6.7 per cent in 1970, 1980 and 1986 respectively.There is a steady decline which again corre-sponds to trends in other developing countries.Such a decline is not totally unexpected in coun-tries where favourable labour and employmentconditions are lacking.

It is noteworthy that in the region, apart fromindustrialized countries, some of the less devel-oped countries also operate a highly developedsystem of higher education. The Philippines andThailand are outstanding in their higher educa-tion enrolments when compared with countriesof comParable economic strength. India and Chi-na both possess a comprehensive network of uni-versities, though the latter has a low enrolmentrate.

Another characteristic of the region is ttiatthe NIEs and advanced South-East Asian c6un-tries, with the exception of the Republic of Ko-rea, rely heavily on overseas facilities. 1 longKong, Singapore and Malaysia are the top con-tributors of overseas students in the popular hostcountries.

Much effort is also spent in developing non-formal education in the region. Apart from liter-acy programmes and spate-time training of pro-fessionals, there arc also new ventures in setting

up non-formal higher-education institutes.There are now two open universities in Thai-land, one each in India, Pakistan, Indonesia, SriLanka and Hong Kong, and a self-containedelaborate system in China. Such non-formal in-stitutions have changed the access to highereducation, presented new challenges to curricu-lum design and teaching strategies, and haschanged the employment situation by way ofqualification and certification. However, most ofthe institutions are still too recently establishedto exhibit any impact.

Trends in educational planningand management

Again, any attempt to draw simple diagrams forthe entire region is bound to suffer from over-generalization. A few points of commonality areidentifiable, however.

COMPREHENSIVE REFORMS

There has been a tide of major education re-forms in the region over the past decade. Someof these reforms are comprehensive in natureand affect the entire national systems Such com-prehensive reforms are non-incremental in na-ture and often emerge as a total 'rethink' of theeducation system.

The comprehensive reform in China (1985)was a direct consequence and indeed a part ofthe entire reform of the country's economic andpolitical system. Its aims are the institution ofcompulsory nine-year education, an expansionof the technical/vocational component in sec-ondary education and a delegation of autonomyto universities.

The refot m in India (1986) was an attempt torestructure the education system to achieve bet-ter human-resources development. Its aims arethe instituncn of eight-year universal educationand the establishment of a national unified sys-tem for schools and curricula.

Commonalty, among dnersity 193a review of planning and administration of education in Asia

Japan (1987) and the Republic of Korea(1985) launched similar comprehensive reformsbut which are different in nature. The Japanesereform can be seen as an attempt to revolutional-ize the concept of education, to place more em-phasis on individualism, creativity and interna-tionalization. The Korean reform is seen as anattempt to increase the efficiency of the educa-tion system which will in turn improve manpow-er training.

It is noteworthy that all these reforms grewout of the respective nations' specific needs,rather than fashionable 'modern' trends. Othercountries launched reforms that were less com-prehensive in nature but nevertheless carried thesame notion of a rethink of the education system.

All the comprehensive reforms, without ex-ception, included in their schemes substantialchanges in the funding and management of edu-cation. Reforms in other countries, in one way oranother, also imply changes in the funding andmanagement of education. These countries in-clude Bangladesh, Indonesia, Lao People'sDemocratic Republic, Thailand and Viet Nam(UNESCO/PROAP, 19896, p. 40). Althoughthese reforms work in very different contexts, thefollowing themes, which are comparatively newto the region, are strikingly similar.

Dt-CEN fli A1.1 /.A1 ION

10 many countries of the region, decentraliza-tion is a very unconventional concept. Decen-tralization is seen in the reforms at two levels.

First, at the local level, there is a tendency togrant more autonomy to educational institu-tions. The reason for this is best expressed by theMinister of Education of Singapore: 'The pros-pect of greater quality in education rests at theleel of the school' (Singapore, 1987, p. 3). Inpumice, this kind of decentralization is viewedthiough the vague notion of 'pi n. atization' towhich we shall return.

Second, at the national level, there is the gen-eral tendency to delegate decisions and financeto lower levels of government. In China, reform

has resulted in local finance, management andplanning of basic education by way of a localeducation levy and local administration ofschools (China, 1985). In India, decisions aredelegated to district councils which take care ofclusters of rural schools (de Rebello, 1989). InIndonesia, recent reform placed emphasis on thetraining of teachers and school heads to becomeautonomous professionals in the management ofgrassroot schools (UNESCO/ PROAP, 1989a, p.40). In the Japanese reform, there is a majortheme of 'deregulation' of the school system,where local governments are urged to make in-dependent decisions according to the actual cir-cumstances of the localities (Kitamura, 1989). Inthe reform in the Republic of Korea, there arerecommendations to transform the local educa-tion boards into genuine decision-making bodiesfinanced by a local education tax and an educa-tion bond (Republic of Korea, 1987).

Decentralization has the manifest advantagesof creating a sense of local ownership of schools,mobilizing local resources, making schools moresensitive and adaptive to local needs, and reduc-ing the adverse effects of bureaucracy. Such ad-vantages arc already observable in China and In-dia where reforms have borne the first fruits.

However, decentralization has also renderedschools more vulnerable to local conditions. inChina, for example, decentralization has led toregional disparities where schools in poor local-ities sometimes may operate at a mere subsist-ence level. In India, as another example, localpolitical interference in schools has become ,

more evident.

NOVA1 IZATION

Parallel to decentralization is the transfer ofnance and management of schools to privateagencies. In both Japan and the Republic of Ko-rea, private schools are specified in the reformsas constructive partners in a 'deregulated' na-tional system. In Pakistan, a policy is under re-view to revert the trend of nationalizing privatelyrun educational institutions (Pakistan, 1989). In

91.

194 Cheng Kai Ming

the Philippines, where there is a traditionallystrong private sector at all levels of the educationsystem, recent policies opt to reinforce the pri-vate schools further by deregulating tuition feesand introducing an incentive accreditation sys-tem (Miguel, 1989). In Australia, Singapore andHong Kong, where government used to be theprincipal supplier of education services, recentlythere are dramatic schemes to make use of pub-lic funds to create a substantial private schoolsystem (Cheng, 1988).

Privatization is perhaps an inaccurate repre-sentation of all the policies mentioned above.Many of these schemes aim at giving parentsmore choice (e.g. Hong Kong). Others are de-signed for better-quality schools (e.g. Singa-pore). Still others are designed for diversity andflexibility (e.g. Japan) or foi a reduction of gov-ernment support (e.g. Pakistan). Only few areprivatizing in the proper sense of applying mar-ket mechanisms to schools (e.g. Philippines).However, there is an unmistakable tendency tomove away from a uniform public system and toallow independently run schools.

DECONCENTRATION

Deconcentration refers to the diffusion of schoolmanagement to more hands. Deconcentrationinevitably leads to more diffused sources of fi-nance. Involvement of employers in the plan-ning and management of education has beenone of the major means of deconcentration. Inthe Chinese reform, employers share the fi-nance, and sometimes thc design and managc-ment, of joint venture training programmes atsecondary level, and in commissioned training attertiary level. In Hong Kong and Singapore, em-ployers have virtual control of training plans andfacilities through their participation in relevantpolicy committees.

In a review document, 1INESCO/PROAP(1988a, p. 100) has identified the following asone of the categories commonly occurring in na-tional policies: 'Involving industry and the pri-vate sector in the planning of technical and voca-

2 '1

tional education, teaching and coursedevelopment (found in policy articles of l3angla-desh, Indonesia, Republ:c. of Korea, the Philip-pines and Thailand)'.

Deconcentration has enabled schools anduniversities to free themselves from total de-pendence on government finance, and makethemselves more responsive to manpower needsin the economy. However, the responsiveness tomanpower requirements may also result in a nar-row vision of educational goals and may neglectareas that are not immediately manpower ori-ented. The participation of non-education sec-tors in educational finance may also render edu-cation vulnerable to fluctuations in theeconomy. All these pros and cons have been wit-nessed by countries that have experienced &-concentration.

CO-ORDINATION

New partnership in the financing and manage-ment of education inevitably involves new actorsin decision-making. Decentralization, privatiza-tion and deconcentration may all play down therole of central government and its education de-partments, but they have meanwhile introducednew participants into the policy arena: local gov-ernments, local communities, independent (oreven commercialized) school sponsors, employ-ers, and so forth. This has led to the necessity ofnew concepts and mechanisms of co-ordination.In fact, co-ordination is another main character-istic of recent changes in the region.

In many countries or territories in the region,new types of co-ordination materialize in theform of cross-sectoral or cross-departmental pol-icy-making organs. In both Japan and the Re-public of Korea, the educational reforms are de-liberatiad by high-power committees directlyanswerable to the President (as in the case of theRepublic of Korea) or the Pnme Minister (as inthe (ase of Japan). Such committees have the ad-wattage of going beyond the traditional educa-tion autho. ities and breaking down conventionalinterministerial harriers. In both the Lao l'co-

Commonalos among diseisity 195a ie C of pi-inning and administ(ation of education in Asia

' ple's Democratic Republic and the Maldives,there are a newly established national counciland a committee, respectively, to secure inter-sectoral co-operation. In Hong Kong, an Educa-tion Commission has recently been set up to co-ordinate general, vocational and higher educa-tion and to involve non-education departments.In Singapore, a Schools' Council has been estab-iished with representatives from all relevant de-partments and head teachers from all levels ofthe school system. In China, the reform has ledto the creation of a State Education Commissionwhere all relevant ministries are represented. InIndia, a Ministry of Human Resources was set upto replace the Ministry of Education, to ensurethat education decision-making was not con-fined to traditional formal schooling.

There is a second sense of co-ordination,which refers to the co-operation of different sec-tors or departments to achieve certain education-al goals. A typical example is the APPEAL pro-

1 gramme (a UNESCO regional programme)which requires the integration of UPE (univer-salization of primary education), HO! (eradica-tion of illiteracy) and CED (continuing educa-tion for development). There is a similar patternof integration in China where the trend is to in-tegrate formal schooling, vocational training andadult education (known as 'trinity education') toimprove the educational attainment of the com-munity.

SOW, Of 111.R 0RSERVA1IONS

Apait (torn the commonalities discussed above, anumber of observations may also prove nwa-ningful to the international scene.

Changing goals of /s1?i iii ng

BroadIN speaking, there arc three identifiablecategoric's of goals for educational planning inthe region. l'irst, 111 the industrialized countriesJapan, Australia and New Zealand, apparentlysocial demand is the primary goal of educationaldevelopment, and the national resources arc able

1 to support such an approach. At the stage where

quantity goals are largely achieved, countries be-gin to contemplate improvement of quality ineducation (McKinnon, 1986; Renwick, 1986).Second, the NIEs seem to put more emphasis onthe supply of manpower in their planning exer-cises. This is very much the case in Hong Kong,the Republic of Korea and Singapore, thougheach of them has indicated signs of a re-orien-tation towards quality issues in their recentplans. China is also in this category. It emphasiz-es manpower requirements in the planning ofhigher education, but 'quality of the population'in basic education. Third, it is noticeable that inthe reform ?rogrammes of many developingcountries in the region, human-resources devel-opment goals have replaced specific goals of eco-nomic growth. This may indicate that govern-ments have now adopted a long-term perspectiveof national development and a broader view ofeducation.

There could have been a fourth goal for plan-ning: planning for austerity. This is visible else-where with a shrinking education budget, but isseldom an issue in this region. In general, educa-tion in this region still receives high priority ingovernment budgets. In other words, education-al planning in the region is mainly forward-look-ing and strategic in nature. This is explicable bythe traditional emphasis on human resources aswas mentioned at the beginning of this article.

CAPACITY I.OR TRAINING AND RESEARCII

A recent development in the region is the estab-lishment of a national capacity for training andresearch in educational planning, administrationand management. This is very much promptedby the above-mentioned tendencies of decentral-ization and deconcentration. With the adminis-tration of education moving away from a fcwhands in central government, there is a new de-niand for personnel who can independently takecare of decision-making, planning and supervi-sion in a local environment. Training and re-search in thesepolicy agenda.

areas naturally come onto the

2C3

196 Cheng Kw Ming

Such a capacity in training and research hadlong been underdeveloped in this region, verymuch because of the over-enthusiastic involve-ment of foreign institutions, and lack of local en-thusiasm to invest in such development. Thescene has considerably changed in the past dec-ade.

The most typical example was the NationalInstitute for Educational Planning and Adminis-tration (NIEPA) in India. Besides training ad-ministrators and planners at national and sub-national levels, NIEPA also participates activelyas a technical base for national policy-making.Recently, NIEPA has also developed itself into aregional centre, training administrators andplanners for the sub-continent, and sometimesfor African countries.

Similar to NIEPA are the National Institutefor Education in Sri Lanka and, to a lesser ex-tent, the Academy for Educational Planning andManagement in Pakistan. The National Institutefor Educational Research in Japan and the Ko-rean Educational Development Institute in theRepublic of Korea have also developed withinthemselves strong components in administrationand policy studies, though training is not part oftheir remit. In China, institutes such as the In-stitute for Higher Education at Beijing Universi-ty and the Institute for Manpower Developmentin Shanghai have recently played importantroles in both national and international policyresearch, and have both moved beyond the areaswarranted by their names.

Apart from institutional efforts, the last dec-ade has also seen the emergence of various non-governmental organizations active in the realmof educational planning and administration. Oneof the largest network of such organizations hasbeen the Commonwealth Council for Educa-tional Administration which has its headquartersin Australia and has very active chapters in, forexample, Australia itself, Hong Kong, India,New Zealand and Singapore. All these organiza-tions are closely engaged in training and te-search activities.

Education is culture specific. Given stablepolitical conditions (which unfortunately are notalways available in the region), recent develop-

ments will hopefully give birth to models appro-priate to the cultures of Asia and the Pacific inthe realm of educational planning and adminis-tration.

Centralization of higher education

There arc largely two models of higher educa-tion administration in the region. In the first,higher education is controlled by a ministry orgovernment department which dictates the fi-nance and management of higher-education in-stitutions. In the second model, higher-educa-tion policies are made by a university grants

itee (UGC), or its equivalent, followingthe British model. It is the second model that isat stake.

Structurally, the second model is a mecha-nism to guarantee accountability of public fund-ing, on the one hand, and to protect academicautonomy, on the other. This model exists main-ly in member countries of the British Common-wealth: Australia, Hong Kong, India, New Zeal-and, Sri l.anka, etc. Typically, a UGC comprisesrepresentatives from the universities and othermembers appointed by the government. In someUGCs (e.g. I long Kong), there are even overseasmembers to reinforce the impartial 'third-party'status of the I. In recent years, following theelimination of UGC in the United Kingdom, anumber of countries m the region have also un-dergone some restructuring which in effect hasalso eliminated their respective UGCs. Australiaand New Zealand were the first in this category.It. is not cleat how many other countries will fol-low suit.

Apparently, the elimination of UGCs was amove to inci ease accountability at the expense ofinstitutional aluonomy. Proponents of the moveaigue that the I GC model has led to too muchautonocm esulting in an abuse of public funds.The move therefore carries the undertone thateducation should siibject itself to managermlcontrols sniulai to those of the business sector.The move is prompted by the notion of 'value formoney' which is ever attractive to governments.lowevei, it is quite opposite to the tendencies of

decentralization and deconcentration in basic

Commonality among diversity 197.1 teiem. al planmiig and administration of education in Asia

education and vocmonal education as discussedabove.

Tech nico-pollucai interactions in policy-making

Politics remain a sensitive issue in many devel-oping countries and even NIEs in the region.This bas led to an over-emphasis on technicaldeliberations and lack of attention to political di-mensions in educational planning and policy-making. The latter, however, is widely observedand examined in other parts of the internationalcommunity.

On the one hand, there is no lack of enthusi-asm in the introduction of modern technologyinto educational planning, administration andmanagement. The adoption of management in-formation system in the education sector is wide-spread in both Asian and Pacific countries,sometimes at a rate disproportionate to the eco-nomic growth of the countries. The strongmathematical traditions in Chinese and Indiancultures, which are by no means confined totheir homelands, have reinforced this trend.Computerphobia, for example, is simply non-existent in the region.

On the other hand, the decentralization ofplanning and administration is not always

matched by the necessary political conditions tosupport such decentralization. As a typical ex-ample, decentralization inevitably involveswider participation, but the mechanism of pop-ular participation is seldom taken into consid-eration in the design of reforms. On the contrary,many who arc genuinely concerned about edu-cation adopt an apolitical attitude as a safeguardagainst non-professional interference. It seemssafe to predict that with further restructuring ofthe administration and policy-making systems,the political dimension will attract the attentionof both polic -makei s and policy analysts.

t.t I ['KAI 1)11-11

Recent Llevelopments in the region should at-ti act new attenoon to cultural studies. The no-non of lapan as number one summarizes the

underlying hypothesis that there is a culturalelement which explains the economic success ofJapan and the NIEs. There are therefore studiesprimarily in management science and lately ineducation (Lynn, 1988; White, 1987) which at-tempt to uncover this cultural element. I lowev-er, the recent reform in Japan's education systeminvolves a complete overhaul of the basic philos-ophy of education. There is an unmistakable in-tention to move away from collectivism towardsan emphasis on individuality, from conformity tocreativity. To a lesser extent, the reform in theRepublic of Korea follows the same route.

The shift in philosophy in Japan is promptedby the argument that given the internationalchallenge of hi-tech competition ahead, there isa demand for inventive and creative minds.There is of course still a deep-rooted orientalpragmatism which is very different from theWestern philosophies based on the value of theindividual. Nevertheless, if the Japanese reformproves acceptable to the nation and is successful,then the impact on educational thought in theregion will be tremendous.

This article has attempted to present a sketchybut valid picture of the development, planningand management of education in Asia and thePacific. It is not the result of a comprehensivesurvey of the entire region. In particular, muchless is mentioned about the Pacific than Asia. Ina vast region with marked diversity, there areamazing points of commonality. In particular,there is the unmistakable move to a more flex-ible and more decentralized system. Such pointsof commonality will hopefully provide somefood of thought not only to the region, but also tothe international community at large.

U

198 Chime Ka, Ming

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went in Asia and the Pacific. Manila, Asian DevelopmentIlank.

1988a. Annual Report, 1988. Manila, Asian Development Bank.

. 1989. Asian Development Outlook, 1989. Manila. AsianI tevelopment Bank.

K. M. 1987. Planning of Basis Education in China.Case Study of Two Counties in Liaoning. Bening, UNICEF.

-- 1988 Independent Schools in Sinagpore: Report of aStudy !long Kong, Hong Kong Council for EducationalAdministration. (Mimeo.)

CHINA. 1985. Decision of the CPC Central Commute,* Reformof China's Education Struaure. Bening, Foreign Languagel'ress.

Cin.w. mugs'. F. K.1989. Implementation of Educational Pol .icies and Reforms in Bangladesh. Bangkok, UNESCO/PROAP. (Mimeo.)

Ctiu, S. K 1988 Futures of Education in Asia and Pacific: AReappraisal. Bangkok, UNESCO/PROA P.

DE RERE1.10, D. M 1989. India. The National Policy on Educa-tion 1986: Its Implementation and Implication ThereofBangkok, UN ESCO/PROAP. (Mimeo )

IIYUNG, S. C. 1986. Approaches to Technological ManpowerDevelopment: The Korean Experience UNESCO in Am)and the Pacific: 40 Years On. Bangkok, UNESCO/ROEAP(UN ESCO/ROEAP Bulletin, 27.)

JAPAN NAPONAI COUNCIL ON EDUCA TIONA1 Ki l'ORSI 1987

Fouith and Final Report on Educational Raorm Tokyo. Na-tional Council on Educational Reform

Kiissii RA, Y.1989. Japan- National Council for 1.du,ammalReform Fourth and Final Report of Educational Reform.Bangkok. UN ESCO/PROAP. (Mimeo.)

Ml.K1NNON, K.1986. Reshaping Australian Education for theTwenty.first Century. UNESCO in Asia and the Pacific: 40Years On, pp. 81-102 Bangkok., UNESCO/ROEAP. (UN.ESCO/ROEAP Bulletin, 27.)

51.11989. Formulation and Implementation of Edu-cational Policies and Reforms in the Philippines. Bangkok,UNESCO/PROM'. (Mimeo.)

Mu in, 11.1988. Educated Unemployment in Japan l'aper pre-sented at the SI,mposium on 'Educated Unemployment', m-g:mut-Li h). the Asian Productivm Orgameation, Seoul, 14-IS Nosember 1988 (Published in Proceedings)

PARISIAN 5115151RA OF EDUCA ION 1989 IntolVeMelit eq thePrivate Sector in the Promotion of Printars'Educasion s,i l'akistan Islamabad, Ministry of kin ation

lick( it xtiol'Orl Os, G., ARR1Mi Auk, A. M 1986 1 he E.ducational Composition of the 1.abour I ot,e Internalional 1 alhaiIt, you Vol. 125, No 5. pp. 561-74

RI.SwIcE, \C. L. 191I6 Forty Years On in New Zealand Educa.lion A New Net Goes Fishing. UNESCO in Asia and the

40 Years On, pp. 103-10 Bangkok, UNESCO/ROMP. (UN ESCO/ROEA P Bulletin, 27 5

2

Rupum Is: or KOREA. KOREAN EDUCA11ONAL DEVELOPMENT IN-

SI I El I F. 1988 The Long-term Prospect Pr Educational De-relopment, /978-9/ Seo..11, Korean Educational Deselop-went Institute

PRESIDFNITAI CoxistsMSION FOR EDUCATION REFORM

1987 Korean Education Reform- Towards the 210 CenturySeoul, Ministry of Education.

SA1 IM, M 1987 Distance Education ii Asia and the Pacific.Distance education, Vol. I, pp 121-68. Man,la, Asian I level-opment Bank.

111.5K, J. B. G. 1989 Centre-State Relations in FinancingEducation in India Comparative Education Review. Vol.P, No. 4, pp 450-80

SINGAPORE. MIN1Sl fly OF EDUCATION 1987. Towards Excellence

in Schools: A Report to the Ministry for Education. Smga-poreMinistry of Education.

UNESCO. 1978 1988. Statistical Yearbook. Paris, UNESCO.UNESCO/PROAP. 1988a. Educational Reforms. Special issue

ot the PRO41' Bulletin (Bangkok), No, 29.19881> Educational Co-operation in Asia and the Pacific

Bangkok, ESCO/PROA P. (Mimeo.)--- 1989a Fthicatian For .411 in Asfa and the Pacific. A Re.

gional Wile:: Bangkok, UNESCO/PROAP (Mimeo.)-- 19891, Regional Seminar on Implementation of Educa-

tional Pohaes and Reform Draft Final Report. Bangkok,UNESCO/PROAP. (Mimeo.). 1989. First Meaing for Regional Co-ordination of .41'.PE.41 Final Report Ilangkok, UNESCO/ PROA

!NIA' (Um i Eli NA11ONS DET/F LOPMF NI PROCRAMME) 1990

Iluman Development Report, 1990 New York, Oxford Lni-vetsth Pies,

Wok! IT BANK Val mos sears. U 'odd Des elopment Report NewYork. Oxford Urns ersitv Press,

WORI COM I RI NCI ON EDUCA1 ION loR Al 1. INI RAl.,1 Nil'CT immisslos 1990 !sleeting Basic I earmng Needs A Vi-sion fin the 1990s New York, UNICEF (Baskgiound doc-

ument.)

Educational planningand management

in EuropeTrends and challenges

Ingemar Fagerlind and Britt Sjestedt

In the early I990s, the European region is in-volved in a revitalization process. Within the Eu-ropean Community cross-fertilization pro-grammes in research and education have alreadyyielded results, and more co-operation, not onlyacross frontiers, but also across institutions andacademic disciplines are planned. In EasternEurope, pronounced redefinitions of traditionalpolicies and values are not only changing the po-litical structure, but also forcing profoundc-llanges on education systems. Institutions ofhig* education and research actively look forco-opeThtion institutions in Western Eu-

Ingmar Fagerlind (Sweden). Professor of interim-uonal and comparative education, University ofStockholin. Director of the Institute of InternatinalEducation, University of Stockholm. Author ofmany publications on international and compara-(Me education as as in the field of economics ofedu:arion and educational planning.

Brat Siosiedi (Sweden). Graduate stmlent at the In-Sfatife ot International Education, University ofStockholm Employed at the Education Division,Swedish International Development Authority (SI-0.4

rope while governmental programmes are

worked out to improve the quality of education,change and modernize the curricula and pro-mote creative thinking.

New developments in information technol-ogy, including computer-aided learning, video(in particular, interactive video) and television,all offer important opportunities to improve thequality of learning. The new technologies poseenduring challenges for educational planning,and curriculum planners have to address thequestion of what understanding and habits ofmind.are essential for all citizens in a scientifical-ly literate society.

New modes of organization of work are rap-idly spreading, which demand more independ-ence and self-motivation from workers. In such asituation, it seems doubtful whether curricularreform by itself will help to improve the outputof schools without a fundamental change in thesocial environment in which learning takesplace. Educational institutions may need to reth-ink the way in which they are structured. Thenew information technologies may [ince educa-tional planners to consider alternative organiza-tional models for education.

Due to falling birth-rates, young people will

P., vol \ \ I. I I'M

200 Ingmar Fagerhnd and Brut Sfintedt

be a scarce commodity in the 1990s in most Eu-ropean countries. With this prospect, schoolsand training systems have to bring up the qual-ification level of a greater proportion of an age-group, in order to help production retain itscompetitive capacity. One solution is to raise theschool-leaving age, another might be to bringthe worlds of schooling and work closer togeth-er. Lifelong education will undoubtedly play amore important role in the future in all Europe-an countries. Continuing education, as well ashigher education, will in many cases take placein more specialized learning environments.

Major economic and politicaldevelopments

A decisive tendency within the Western Europe-an economies over the last decade has been thegrowth of cross-national co-operation. It hasbeen seen as a viable strategy to meet tighteninginternational competition not only in the eco-nomic field, but also in the fields of technologyand science. An integrated market, as opposed tofragmented ones, is seen to have vastly betterchances of making efforts and innovations com-mercially more profitable in an expanded mar-ket. This orientation has necessitated various de-grees of economic adjustment and structuralreform within the countries. In the case of theEuropean Community, trade liberalization pol-icies, removal of subsidies to domestic pro-ducers, and a degree of monetary co-operationhave been discussed and developed (Laurent,1987).

In Eastern Europe, the intensity and direc-tion of the economic reforms vary between coun-tries, but common to most Eastern Europeancountries has been an orientation towards eco-nomic co-operation with other countries, as wellas efforts to establish co-operation with the largeinternational financial institutions, such as theWorld Bank and the Internatioaal MonetaryFund (IMF). One sign of this new thinking is thefrequent mention of a 'European home', a con-

2 j

cept that reflects the increasing attention givento Europe by the USSR, referring to the com-mon cultural heritage. There has, for example,been a growing interest in participating in theactivities of the Council of Europe, which maybe seen as an expression of a hope for an alterna-tive to a purely Western European co-operativebody, particularly as materialized in the Com-mon Market.

The overall shift of weight of the economyfrom the industrial to the service sector in thepast decades is continuing in the 1990s. Thiscalls for an overall high le,tel of education andspecialization among workers, as there is an in-creasing need for them to be capable of problem-solving, working in teams, assuming greater re-sponsibility for product quality and the produc-tion process, as well as communicating viacomputerized information. A 'new set of compe-tences' is required (Levin and Rumberger,1989), which will have implications not only forwhat knowledge and competence are actuallytaught in school, but also for the way they aretaught. There will be, as Levin and Rumberger(1989) point out, a need to move away from rote-memorization, the correct-answer approach, andschool- and teacher-directed activity.

As a way of meeting increasing internationalcompetition, various co-operation projects havebeen initiated. The EUREKA (European Re-search Co-ordination Agency) project is onesuch large-scale co-operative venture withinWestern Furope, which has been designed tomeet incicasing competnion in the area of sci-ence, technology and informatics, where pro-gress is extremely rapid. Projects of this kind willhave a range of implications: they will, for exam-ple, be likely to affect the scientific and techno-logical dependence on others, to some degreeenable Europe to prevent its brain-power frombeing siphoned off, and facilitate the co-ordina-tion of efforts, so that duplication will be avoid-ed. ESPRIT (European Strategic Programme ofResearch in Information Technology) is intend-ed to group universities, research institutes andcomputer companies together primarily for re-search and development, as well as for applica-tions for marketing, since the economic viability

Educational planning and management in Europe: trends and challenges 201

of these projects has become of increasing im-portance.

In the field of education, ERASMUS (Eu-ropean Community Action Scheme for Mobilityof University Students) is intended as an encour-agement for universities in the various memberstates to co-operate with universities in othercountries through programmes for faculty andstudent mobility. Priority is also given to curric-ula and intensive programmes, as well as mutualadaptation of existing curricula. The pro-gramme has the aim of eventually providing 10per cent of all post-secondary students in Europewith the opportunity to study in another countrywithin in the Community. ERASMUS will havea considerable impact on the general direction of'Europeanization' and internationalization at dif-ferent levels of society. As regards higher educa-tion, the development of common degrees anddiplomas will facilitate the process of integra-tion, and thus have substantial structural impli-cations, though there is a long way ahead until acomplete integration could be realized.

The LINGUA Programme, reflects the con-cern of the European Community for languagelearning. In a 1983 EEC declaration the impor-tance of refreshing the knowledge of languages isstressed, and the provision of in-service trainingabroad for language teachers is claimed as a pri-ority. In response to the increasing need for lan-guage learning, several European countries haveintroduced foreign-language learning at an earlyage in compulsory education. The increasing mo-bility within the continent makes the mastery of asecond language a necessity. I lowever, in a recentsurvey, a majority of the citizens of the EuropeanCommunity reported that their knowledge of aforeign language was not sufficient to be able tocarry on a conversation m that language (Weiss et4,1989). Through the increasing interchan inthe field of education and in working life, multi-cultural and multilingual dimensions will be in-reasingly prominent features in both education

and the world of work.In order to make education and training mot e

responsive to changes within the field of tech-1 nology, COMFIT (Community Action Pro-I gt amme for Education and Trainine for Tech-

nology) has been created. COMETT directsco-operation between universities and privatecompanies, as well as the joint formation oftraining courses. It is aimed at improving train-ing at national, regional and local levels, so thatthose countries within the European Communi-ty in which the provision of training opportuni-ties is still scarce could reach a better balancewith other countries.

Social and cultural developments

The social and cultural developments in Europein recent years are closely linked to the overalleconomic development and the political cli-mate. Most European countries belong to therich developed countries of the world, and couldbe characterized as welfare societies that adhereto ideals of equity and equality. In the process ofEuropean integration and a concomitant inter-nationalization of markets and trade, efficiencyand profitability have gained importance, how-ever, and many countries find themselves in a di-lemma of, on the one hand, political objectivesof equal distribution of welfare, and equitablewages and, on the other, the need to give impe-tus for enhanced productivity by means of vari-ous economic incentives. Conflicts which haveconsiderable social implications have thusemerged, and need to be resolved.

An important development is the overall risein the level of women's work-force participation,while the male participation level has remainedconstant or even fallen. In some countries, therise in female work-force participation is largelyaccounted for by the increasing number of wom-en in part-time employment. This is, for exam-ple, the case in the United Kingdom and Den-mark, where both levels of actual participation,and levels of part-time employment arc high. In1985, 44 per cent of women held part-time jobsin Denmark, and 45 per cent in the UnitcdKingdom, according to European Communitylabour force surveys. Thus, the gap betweenwomen's and men's work-force participation isgradually closing (United Kingdom, 1989).

202 Ingmar agerlind and Brut &Awe&

In projections for the year 2000, the increasein female participation in the labour market iseven more pronounced. In the United Kingdomthe increase in the total work-force up to the endof the century is almost entirely accounted for bywomen, who will make up 44 per cent of thework-force, according to estimates made by theBritish Department of Employment. In the East-ern European countries, the rates of female par-ticipation remain high in all sectors of the econ-omy, with a marked increase in the service sectorover the last two decades. In 1980, the overall fe-male employment rate was 48 per cent, whichwas considerably higher than the average ratesfor the industrialized market economies (Pager-lind and Saha, 1989).

Growing female participation in the labourmarket has created new demands on the educa-tion and supervision of schoolchildren, and therole of men in the family has changed. A diversi-fication of family patterns, a growing proportionof single-parent families, and a d :cline in thenumber of marriages, have contrib..ned to a plu-rality of life-styles that must likewise be taken in-to account by educational planners. The tradi-tional nuclear family can no longer be safelytaken to represent the norm; and this requires aresponse by the schools, so that this social plural-ity is recognized and more individualized teach-ing methods and learning objectives provided(Weiss et al., 1989).

An overall tendency is that of a growing senseof individualism, which not least concern aspira-tions for education. Individual demands for edu-cation have become more differentiated; there isgreater awareness of equality in education, andmore importance is generally assigned to educa-tion. Parents have higher educational aspirationsfor their children, while students today demandmore say in the course contents, more freedomof choice, and show greater concern for quality(Weiss et al., 1989). The retained dominant posi-tion of traditional education tiis-a-vis private al-ternatives will depend on how well it manages tomeet the demands of parents and students.

In the context of mobility between countriesas facilitated by exchange programmes betweenschools and work-places, by the recent opening

up of frontiers together with the widening dis-semination of mass media, there has been a re-discovery of a shared social and cultural history.A growing sense of being European has evolved,and the idea of a shared central Europe has, forexample, regained expression, though these sen-timents are very different from some of the na-tionalistic currents of earlier decades (Croan,1989).

Migration and demographic trends

Major changes of the characteristics of migrationin Europe have occurred in recent years. As theeconomic gap between northern and southernEurope diminishes, the labour-force migrationof the 1960s and 1970s from southern Europe tothe major receiving countries of central andnorthern Europe has slowed down considerably.The share of southern Europeans in the total in-flow of immigrants to the traditional receivingcountries was estimated at 39 per cent in 1970-74, 30 per cent in 1975-79 and 25 per cent in1980-83 (Council of Europe, 1989).

TABU' 1. Annual aveuge intake of registeredimmigrants (thousands)

Weuern \Europe I "!. N Canada Australia Zeaiand

550 500 100 ISO 40

Sour, Counuil ot I: ur,pc. 1959

The proportion of asylum-seekers is increas-ing, and in 1985 the numbers of asylum-seekersexceeded that of workers admitted Cot exampleinto France, Germany and Switzerland. Thewaves of asylom-seekers come primarily fromAsia and Africa, with flows from Latin Americadiminishing, since several countries there ha% ebecome more democratic.

As to the estimated annual inflow of immi-grants in general, the average for Western Eu-rope in the last yeats of the 1980s surpasses thatof other traditional reitiving countries.

I din ational planning and management in I urope to.nds and challenges 203

'I'he waves of refugees entering the continenthave reinforced the co-operation between Eu-ropean countries. As more migration is expectedto take place within the European Community,there will be a continuing need for co-operationin order to combat illegal immigration as well asto co-ordinate refugee policies.

[he overall proportion of migrant children in

per cent today. In an OECD study carried out in1986, a prognosis was made for the growth of theworking-age population in Europe, comparedwith other continents. This is shown in 'Fable 2.

A parallel development is the continued age-ing of the population. At present, there are onlytwo European countries where more than 15 percent of the population is older than 65 (Sweden

the schools can thus be expected to continue to and Germany), but by the year 2000, seven other

be high in the receiving countries of Europe, European countries will experience the same sit-

which makes a multi-cultural education funda- uation. Only Turkey and Ireland will have less

mental. A number of countries have introduced than one-tenth of the population over 65, ac-mother-tongue education, but educational prac- cording to demographic projections. The devel-

tices vary between countries. Confining 'multi- opment corresponds to falling birth-rates of the

culturalism' to a separate subject, added on to a late 1960s and 1970s, and it will have consid-

full course of study has not, however, been suc- erable implications for education as well as for,:essful. There is rather a need for an overall per- the work-force. It has been correctly termed a

me,tion of multiculturalism in education (Arora 'demographic time-bomb' (United Kingdom,and Duncan, 1986), which ultimately depends 1989).

for us succ ns on the general political climate, , This development will also challenge theand CM mc-asuics that might affect the school or- education sstems of Europe. In a situation ofgam/at:on as such ;Weiss et al., 1989). The pol- relative scarcity of young people, companies may

icies of multiculturalL;rn in different countries need to recruit very young people and provide

are still in a state of flux; sveral ideological and them with training opportunities within thesocial obstacles remain to be scved and it is ; company. The selection of capable students will-

' cult to predict the general directio., of the devel- ing to stay in the company thus becomes vital for

opment. '1'he pressure will, however, ocrease on its commercial competitiveness, and companies

policy-makers to take appropriate action. are also likely to require a greater degree of iqflu-

Two major demographic developments : ence in defining the content and organization of

he observed over recent decades, both of which vocational courses in secondary schools.

are certain to have wide implications for educa- l'or young school-leavers and graduates thi!

lion To begin with, there is a !dative decrease situation means that competition for emploin the population of Europe. It is estimated that ment vi!! 'ot be as severe as when the age cohort

by the year 2000, the population of industrial- is large. It wii! be possible to take up a workiogized Europe will hat e fallen to 3 per cent of the career at a relatively early age, and there ts ill be

total population of the world. ompared with 6 less need for universit: or college education. In

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204 Ingemar Pagerhnd and arm Sp liedi

vale companies and organizations, on the otherhand, will have to compete for the recruitmentof young employees. With a decline in the abso-lute number of pupils and students, countriescan no longer afford the same number of schoolfailures as today (Neave, 1989). The quality ofeducation will thus be a fundamental issue foreducational planners.

Coombs (1985) remarks that the decline inthe number of students could provide educationwith a chance to 'catch its breath and change itsfocus from quantitative expansion to qualitativeimprovement'. At the same time, the problem ofplanning education in the context of falling en-rolment rates and declining birth rates has, formost countries, proved a problem. Even if thepupil-teacher ratios are lower in a context ofsmaller age cohorts, which may have positive ef-fects on the quality of education, education sys-tems do not adapt automatically.

In many European courrries, further educa-tion and retraining may thus be the only educa-tional sector experiencing a long-term expan-sion, in contrast to o.her sectors (Weiss et al.,1989). The decrease in the number of youngpeople, and the expected concomitant decliningdemand for higher education within the tradi-tional school system and the increasing need toupdate skills among those already employed, al-so entails that participants in further educationwill be older than today (Weishaupt et al., 1989).

Educational developments_ _

COMPULSORY EDUCA HON

In most European countries, the length of com-pulsory education is around nine years (see Ta-ble 3). I lowever, nine years of compulsoryschooling are not seen as long enough to preparefor adult and working life, particularly in a con-text of rapid technological development andchanging tequirements in the labour market.Enabling pupils to go on learning, and providingthem with the skills and motivation for contin-uing learning has thus gained importance. A

2

central body of knowledge, and basic cognitiveskills have again come to be seen as essential tocompulsory education, which is a change fromthe overall socialization perspective of the 1970s(Jallade, 1989). An additional range of optionalsubjects can be made available according to thepreferences and abilities of the individual child.

There is a shift away from focusing only onenrolment figures, in favour of a pronouncedL inphasis on quality. In particular, there is agrowing concern about low-achievers and drop-outs, who leave school with no skills or qual-ifications relevant to the labour market. Policiesof compensation for low-achievers have beenadopted, a range of methods have been devisedto combat the problem of school failure, and thegeneral orientation is towards a greater degree ofactive support for disadvantaged children (Jal-lade, 1989).

The expected increasing challenge to tradi-tional education from the private sector will, pri-marily affect the higher levels of education.Compulsory education is likely to retain its dom-inance in relation to alternative opportunities forlearning. It will, however, have to accommodateits methods and quality to adjust to the changin':context that has evolved in response to scientificand technological development. The demandsfor an overall knowledge of, for example, infor-mation processing, have resulted in the increas-ing use of computers in compulsory education.In view of the gap that threatens to emerge be-tween those who master the new informationtechnology and those who do not, the ability tocomprehend and produce information by means j

of the computer, and the gradual acquisition ofcomputer literacy will be important objectives ofcompulsory education

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giaduall adopte,1 the punople of comprehen-!Ave secondaty edit( anon Flom the rust grade,

Educational planning and management in Europe: trends and challenges 205

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children thus ewe( t to pass thiough a sequenceof school years, which they will go through with-out hindiance, at least to the end of compulsoryschooling.

In some countries, attempts at generalizingcompiehensive secondary schools have met withresistance, however. In France, opposition tocompiehensive secondaty schools was evidenton the part of many teachers; this was later ovet-come by including teachers m the shaping of thecomprehensive school model. In Austria, at-tempted whit-ins met ss oh similar resistance, oilack of co-opelation, among a iiia)oi it nI thytear hers. The iesults of an experimental phasein the 1970s were essentially posuise, bin the po-litical will to capitalize on that experience waslacking, id general compiehensive education

BEST COPY AVAILABLE

was not realized in the l980s. In Germany, at-tempts to make secondary schools comprehen-sive were likewise introuuced on a limited scaleand on a trial basis. The intention was to eval-uate the performance of the experimental coni-pt schools ovei a period of time, to com-pare it with the existing conventional system,and then decide which type of school eventuallyto adopt (Weiler, 1989). The traditional three-tier structure was not replaced on a large scalewith a comprehensive Gecamtschule, however,

and where comprehensive schools exist today,they do not constitute a sttuum al teplacementfor the traditional selective ssstem.

An increasing number of kuropean countrieshave provided for a continuation of education af-ter compulsory schooling, which has partly been

2

206 Ingemar Pagerltnd and Britt Spine&

a response to the urgent need for retrainingamong the unemployed, and a response to theneeds of those who for different reasons havebeen unable to complete secondary education;and who return to school after a period of work.Before there was provision for continual educa-tion, many students in Sweden, for example, leftschool once compulsory schooling was complet-ed, at the age of 16.

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION

The growing emphasis on vocational educationis also a response to a constrained economy, highunemployment rates and changing skill require-ments. In all Western European countries, theobjective is to provide all young people leavingcompulsory education with a minimum of oneyear of vocational education and training, whichis to be built upon further in on-the-job training.In the case of the Netherlands, the number ofschool leavers who gained a technical diplomaincreased by 80 per cent in the period 1975-85,and in France a baccalaureate professional hasbeen introduced, which furnishes students witha complete professional course, on a par withgeneral education. Thc form of vocational edu-cation and training generally reflects the tradi-tion of the education system of the country. In acountry like France, with a long tradition of pub-lic education, prolonged school based educationtends to be the prevalent response and an exten-sion of the length of secondary education hasbeen introduced. The tendency in Western Eu-rope to vocationally upper-secondary-schoollevels goes against the tendency in the UnitedStates and Japan, where community colleges andprivate conipanies, respectively, arc graduallygaining ground as the locus for vocational train-ing.

Vocational education and training need to beflexible and adaptable in order to nieet thechanging demands for specialization and profes-sionalism in the labour market, and a new set ofqualities will increasingly have to be emphasizedin technical and vocational education:

4., .1

7 he 'transferability of skills, which means thatskills are not tied to one specific occupation,but possible to use in a broader range of occu-pations.

Communication skills will be required for the in-creasing extent of team work carried out at thework-place, as well as for the communicationof information at all levels in the work orga-nization.

Work experience is of growing importance inview of the skills, attitudes and behaviour thatcan only be acquired at the work-place, asmany large companies have developed partic-ular attitudes and behaviour, which it may beas important to acquire as to master the actualskills (Jallade, 1989; I .evin and Rumberger,1989).

In addition to vocational training, many Europe-an countries have increased the opportunitiesavailable for apprenticeship, or alternate train-ing. The alternation of periods of schooling andcompany based training is likely to be the nor-mal way of entering working life. Educationalinstitutions and companies will co-operate moreclosely to cater for the needs of the companies aswell as the needs of students.

TERTIARY FDECATION--Mass higher education was introduced duringthe 1970s in most Western European cotuttries,three decades later than in the United States.The borderline between 'mass', as opposed to'elite' education is held to have been passedwhen 15 per cent of the age cohort concerned areenrolled in tertiary education (Trow, 1974). Onlya few of the European countries had reached thispercentage in 1965, while the majority of coun-tries were above, or close to a 30 per cent enrol-ment rate in 1986. However, the European fig-ures are still low in comparison with Canada (55per ccnt) and the United States (59 per cent).

In vai her decades, the dominating problemwas to expand facilities and provide places. Dur-ing this phase, there was also a tendency tomerge institutions that had earlier not enjoyed

Edikational planning and management in Europe: trends and challenges 207

full status as institutions of higher education.One example of this is the Swedish Higher Edu-cation Act of 1977, which suggested a 'compre-hensive university', an idea that was also put touse in Geimany. Quality and efficiency of theuniversities has become more and more impor-tam, however, and there is a strong demand forevaluations of the quality (Veld, 1990). The con-solidation of financial management for highereducation in the 1980s took place at the sametime as legislative attempts at power sharing be-tween academicians, students, non-professionalstaff, and reprcsentatives of the community weremade in many countries. In some countries, forexample Sweden, Hungary, and the USSR, de-centralization of decision-making has been theresponse to the demand for improved quality.

ADULI EDUCAUON

The idea of facilitating systematic learning inadult life has had an enormous impact on theprovision of general education in many Europe-an countries. Knowledge and education hascome to play a prominent role in public debate,not least in view of the prospects of internationalcompetition, and increasing challenges to na-tional industries, particularly from Japan andSouth-East Asia. In response to this, there hasbeen a rapid advance in training programmes,conducted either outside or inside the work-place which has brought about a substantialgrowth in the recruitment of individuals to tradi-tional general adult education.

Educational planningand evaluation

The manpowet planning approach of the 1960shas been profoundly reconsidered. The ap-proach reflected a distrust of market mecha-nisms and individual choices to secure the equi-librium of the labout market. However, in anenvironment where substantial technological

progress coincides with unstable economicgrowth, the feasibility of the manpower forecastshave been questioned. Consequently, the man-power planning approach has been supplantedby a supply planning approach, which has beenadopted by educational planners primarily with aview to combating unemployment among youngpeople. The supply planning approach does notfocus exclusively on manpower requirements asdictated by the economy, but rather on the socialneeds of unemployed individuals. The concernof the supply planning approach is to facilitateentry into working life by looking at the socialand educational needs that the individual mighthave, and to try to enhance his or her chances ofbeing employed. The rationale of the approachis the belief that skilled unemployed constitutepotentially available human resources, which ispreferable to unskilled unemployed.

An imbalance in growth between the supplyof educated people and the supply of jobs withthe corresponding educational requirements,created by a graduation of an excessive numberof students, leads, however, to the problem ofwl.at has been labelled over-education. In eco-nomic terms, over-education may be seen as aproblem of allotment of financial resources to aneducation system that produces an excess ofgraduates which the labour market is unable toabsorb, while at the individual level, the socialcost of over-education can be considerable, as in-dividuals who feel that their jobs do not corre-spond to their level of education, may experi-ence dissatisfaction and lack motivation (L.evinand Rumberger, 1989).

The shift from manpower planning has alsobeen accounted for by an increasing concern forthe qualitative aspects of education. Planning isconsidered not primarily to be constituted byquantitative, technical projections, but also aneffort to co-ordinate training with new require-ments and a changing organization at the work-place.

In the planning of education in Europe, it isincreasingly important to consider the implica-tions of thc rapid changes in the labour marketwhich has been brought about by the informa-tion technology (IT) revolution, as it is certain to

208 ingemar Fagerhnd and Brut Slastedi

I have important implications for planning. In thisenvironment of rapid technological progress,there may be a need for educational planning tohe more pragmatic and more operational, 'lessstandardized and more strategic . .. closer to theaction (liallak, 1989).

Tlw role of evaluation and social science re-search for educational planning differ betweencountries. The general movement towards de-centralization of the education system that is tak-ing place in many European countries has im-portant consequences. The shift away fromcentrally determined regulation of aims andgoals to decentralization of such aspects of edu-cation as the formation of the curriculum and ofschool administration means that schools andteachers to a larger degree are entrusted to real-ize the objectives of educational policies in suchways as they find appropriate.

For such divergent development to be pos-sible at the same time as avoiding inequality be-tween different schools, and to be able to deter-mine whether pupils develop in accordance withset educational objectives, a functioning systemof measurement, evaluation and monitoring isessential. As it is equally important to see wheth-er the objectives and contents of education fit theneeds and interests of the pupils, there is ideallya two-way flow of feed-back and information be-tween the input of aims and contents, and theoutput of students' achievements.

At present, it is only in thc Anglo-Saxon edu-cation system that performance evaluation is

used extensively in a context of general decen-tralization. Sweden, France, and Hungary use(or plan to use) formal output evaluation as a partof a strategy to improve the responsiveness of amore centralized education system. Most coun-tries in Europe continue to rely heavily on inputregulation of the contents of curricula, structuraldifferentiation, etc.

In the case of Sweden and France, wherethere is a tradition of centralized management, awide range of participants are involved in theevaluation process. Educational institutions, andlocal and regional authorities arc to an increas-ing extent responsible for changes in quality,and accountable for the progress of changes in

evaluation. This means, for example, that cen-tral inspectors in France will no longer have thesame role in evaluating secondary teachers (La-derriere, 1989). In Norway and Belgium there isa similar tendency to involve more participantsin evaluation, not least those local authoritieswith responsibility for the environment in whichthe young grow up (OECD, 1984). In France,the extension of the evaluation process at variouslevels of educational organization also impliesthat an extended repertoire of methods are engaged, and reports are put together at the minis-terial level on the current state of affairs in edu-cation, which draw on evaluative informationsupplied by all actors involved. The idea is tobenefit from different sources of information, aswell as different methodologies, and thus syn-thesizing both soft and hard data.

As evaluation at the level of educational in-stitutions, and school self-evaluation is gainingimportance in the process of decentralizationand relative autonomy vis-a-vis central decrees,the -e is an increasing need for schools to statetheir goals more directly, as well, as their plansfor the realization of such goals (I,aderriere,1989). In Anglo-Saxon countries, this has beendone by publishing the performance results ofdifferent schools, and the publication of similarschool plans arc now being advocated, for exam-ple, in France. The kind of information publish-ed on schools in Anglo-Saxon countries tend tohave a market-oriented approach, howevel, inthat the performance of the school is partly eval-uated by market mechanisms. The presentationof high pupil achievements becomes a determi-nant of the ability of the school to attract clients,and quality consequently also serves competitiveand commercial purposes. With this approach,primacy tends to be given to the final product,while processive dimensions, such as pupil in-teraction tend to be overlooked.

In those countries t hat by nadition have a ve-ry strong centralized administration, increasingdecentralization has itot entailed a gi ea tet re-

liance on market mechanisms to regulate andevaluate the quality of education, though schoolevaluations are published. In France, for exam-ple, information on schools circulated via certain

I &Ration:I planmng and management m I mope trt. nds and chlllenges 209

media is not intended as encouragement forcompetition between schools on the basis of pu-pils achievements. This information is rathercompiled with the intention of improving eval-uation practices. A catalogue of methods testedand in use in certain al eas has been put togetherfor use in schools, and by local and regional au-thorities. The idea is that different institutionsand levels should use the same indicators, so thata set of national educational indicators mayevolve (1.aderriere, 1989).

The need for more research on joint educa-tional evaluation has been voiced by severalcountries. The development of common metho-dologies is central to joint undertakings, but it isnot without problems. There is a general aware-ness among most European countries of the dif-ficulties in undertaking evaluations, but it is nev-ertheless considered vital to develop reliableeducational indicatois (Walberg, 1990) Severalcountries have experienced problems of inaccu-rate use of concepts, and the dissatisfaction withevaluations due to the time factor, since the so-cial impact of education only shows after sometime (OECD, 1984). hoblems of funding andcommunication of results have also been diffi-cult to solve. It has been argued that the devel-opment of a professional network, in contrast toadministtative or political networks would beable to concentrate on specific issues of Interestto all countries involved.

Educational management

Educational management in a highly centralizedcountt y, with educational policies formulated atthe national level, is clearly different from that ofa decennalized education system. A centralizedsystem normally has a range of administratorsbelow the national level, who act as representa-tives of the central governing authority and whoare responsible for carrying out the nationally es-tablished policy. In such a system, the local edu-cation authorities ate concet ned with keepingup with centrally decreed policies. Local initia-tive or 'participation' is only involved once the

educational policies are set up and are ready tobe implemented, 'and even then, the actualmethod of implementation has been establishedat a higher level.

Traditionally centralized systems increasing-ly perceive a need for a more flexible response bythe educational structure to the needs of its cli-ents, as well as a need to respond to the demandsof a more efficient utilization of resources. De-centralization is often advocated as a solution tothe ineffectiveness of a rigid, centralized educa-tion system. It implies the devolution of deci-sion-making power to the level of local author-ities, but in order for that to succeed, anadequate upgrading of local-level resources(staff, infrastructure) must be made (Chinapah etal., 1989). If these requirements are not met, at-tempts at decentralization may simply be a ques-tion of delegating functions to intermediate orlocal authorities from above. "[his may be seen asa difference 'oetween 'decentralization' and 'de-concentration' (UNESCO, 1985), where the lat-ter implies that power still rests with the centralauthorities, while the administrators and func-tionaries at the local level are in fact merely exe-cuting orders from above.

The pattern of control over curricula also re-flects the form of educational administration. Ifcurricula are formulated centrally for the wholecountry, a body of school inspectors are employ-ed to guide teachers in implementing curricula,and to supervise the work to see how well theyadhere to the national curriculum. Decentral-ized systems, in contrast, depend for their workon locally constructed courses of study, and nocentrally appointed inspectors are necessary toensure the implementation of teaching plans.

The same name of a managerial functionmay be found in several countries, though themeaning and actual power of the function maydiffer considerably between countries. School in-spectors may, for example, exist both in coun-tries with relatively centralized educational man-agement and in those with decentralliedsystems, but while in some countries they serveto ensure the appropriate implementation ofeducational policies and are authorized to applysanctions to teachers who do not perform satis-

210 Ingmar Eagerlind and Brut Slaved!

factorily, they may in other countries primarilyfunction as advisers to teachers on pedagogicalissues. Similarly, the role of principal differs be-tween countries, its functions ranging from thatof a senior teacher, to that of a manager, with re-sponsibilities for curriculum and finance, selec-tion, promotion and assessment of teachers.

Most school systems in Europe operate underthe direction of a central ministry or departmentof education, which implements nationwide pol-icies through a centrally co-ordinated manage-ment. The administrators at the local level per-form a similar managerial function in manyEuropean countries. The differences in functiondepend on the degree of autonomy that these ad-ministrators have, whether the structure of man-agement is tightly co-ordinated at a central level,and whether the curriculum has been shapedwith any degree of influence from the local level.

For European universities, the basic powerrelationships used to be that between the guild ofacademics and its chairman, the rector, or thevice-chancellor, on the one hand, and the rele-vant church authorities or government minis-tries, on the other. Until recently, in severalWestern European countries, the rector waselected by the members of the guild. Currently,however, there is a tendency towards a wider andmore politicized electorate. In some Eastern Eu-ropean countries, where university rectces wereformerly nominated politically, the trend is nowthat the universities elect their own leaders andto a greater degree run their own affairs. Since1968, increasingly more power and influence hasbeen delegated to non-professional staff and tostudents. Externally, the influence of politicians,civil servants, organized economic interestgroups, institutional and regional governingboards have likewise increased.

In traditionally centrally co-ordinated educa-tion systems, as for example in the USSR,schools are headed by directors, assisted by ad-ministrative staff. The administrators ensure theimplementation of centrally worked out direc-tives, though they are entitled to make someslight alteration of the programme of study,which must be justified in the event of minis-terial inspection. In 1988, however, a positive

2r4 d

step was taken to reduce the number of bodies inthe management structure. Three governmentdepartments responsible for public educationwere merged into a single State Committec forPublic Education of the USSR. The new com-mittee is now the body responsible for the elab-oration of strategies for educational develop-ment, manpower training and lorg-termplanning, for the system of manpower retrain-ing, and the utilization of research capacities atcolleges and universities. This dismantling ofthe barriers that had up until this time separatedthe management of secondary, vocational andhigher education also reflect the new view ofeducation that has been put forth in the generalcontext of educational reform in the USSR, of anuninterrupted and integrated process within theschool, which also requires a reformed infras-tructure of educational management. The de-mocratization of the management of educationalinstitutions, and the involvement of students incollege management is therefore high on theagenda of the current restructuring of the educa-tion system.

In Germany, the Lander (federal states) havethe responsibility for school administration, andauthority is delegated from the Land level to thecounties, and in the cases of certain large cities,to the city states. The educational managementstructure is characterized by a combination offederalism on the national level and centraliza-tion on the level of the Lander (Baumert et al.,1989). Responsibilities and competences, how-ever, are located at different levels for the variouseducational stages.

In England and Wales, which have a compar-atively decentralized system of education, thehead teacher is the chief administrator at theschool, and there is considerable variation be-tween the programme of instruction betweendifferent schools, which is a result of the autono-my of the head teacher. Most important deci-sions are taken at the school by the professionalteachers and the head teacher, or by the localeducation authorities. Together with the teach-ers, the head teacher exercises strong control.over the structure of the school, and what goeson in the classroom. The head teacher has ad-

Educational planning and management in Europe. trends and challenges

visory assistance from a board of governors in thecase of secondary schools, and a board of manag-ers in the case of elementary schools.

Future prospects for educationalmanagement and planning

As the European region undergoes considerabletransition during the 1990s, education ssstemsare likely to change substantially. While the tra-ditional role of the school was to foster nationalidentity, education in Europe in the 1990s willemphasize the importance of strengthening co-operation and convet gence, while prese:vingrich regional diversity. In the Western Europeancontext, the Commission of the European Com-munities has a medium-term plan, whose mainobjectives are:To clarify proposed reforms of one education

system by drawing on the experience of othercountries.

To promote the shared dcmocratic values of themember states and increase understanding ofcultural diversity; this involves the intioduc-tion of an intercultural dimension into theeducation and training of citizens.

To develop a 'Europe of quality' by encouragingskills, creativity and dynamism. There is also aneed to establish a 'Europe of mutual support'by promoting equal opportunities and theI ight of all citizens to have access to educationthroughout life (CEC, 1989).

In view of the guidelines for co-operation, theministers of education within the EuropeanCommunity have set up five objectives for co-operation in the next five years, which are.A multicultural Europe. Pevelopment of the Eu-

ropean dimension in teaching; promotion offoreign-language teaching; taking account ofthe variety of cultural approaches in educationand tiaini ng systems.

A mobile Europe. Development of systems forrecognition of diplomas and for the equiva-lence of quahhcations; support for youth ex-changes and for exchanges of teachers, pupils,

211

students and administrators; introduction ofprocedures providing teachers with the oppor-tunity to teach temporarily in other member:aates.

A Europe of training for all. Measures to combatfailure at school; reduction of tegional dispar-ities, appropriate training for disadvantagedchildren, equal access to high-quality educa-tion.

A Europe of skills. Improvement in the quality ofbasic education, adaptation of the training ofyoung people for economic, technological, so-cial and cultural developments; developmentof all education sectors, in particular techni-cal, vocational and higher education; adaptionof content and methods to technologicalchange; improvement in initial and in-servicetraining of education staff.

A Europe open to the world. Strengthening oflinks with other states; co-operation with in-ternational organizations; new forms of mu-tual support with developing countries (CEC,1989).

The role of the national state in educationalplanning and management can be expected tochange, as the states will gradually move awayfrom being operators to being compensators andupholders of social justice. Multinational firmsand organizations already play an important rolein setting standards for recruitment, selectionand promotion. Certification or recognition ofachievement will partly be handled by interna-tional bodies, and the national states will nolonger have monopoly in this respect (Lourié,1989).

The changing role of the state can also beseen in the trend towards decentralization ofpower within the educational structure. In thefuture, adaptation of educational program-menses and the formation of structures will in-creasingly he decided upon at the local and in-termediate levels, while a parallel developmentis the tendency to centralize decisions on stan-dards, and the assessment of results.

Formerly, the organization and managementof public education was essentially based on amodel of the factory, developed as an outgrowthof the scientific management movement of the

2 '

212 Ingmar Fat:erlind and Brut .Slostedt

early twentieth ccntury. The idea behind themodel was that if there was a science of industri-al production, there was also a science of educa-tion, and that the two could bc organized in thesame way. The teacher would be the workermanning the production line. The studentwould be the product. The principal would bethe overseer, and the superintendent the direc-tor. New modes of work-place organization will,however, require the independence and self-mo-tivation of workers, and decentralization of deci-sions to the local units and to individuals will en-tail changing roles for all levels in the educationsystems.

A profound change in the social environmentin which learning takes place will certainly bedemanded in response to this development. Cre-ating an environment that promotes self-motiva-tion and independence will be fundamental, andrather than considering how to prepare youngpeople for the future, planners might have tothink about preparing for the future with thehelp of young people, in a constructive co-oper-ative environment.

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in.RG, II 1990 I; Val/1,111-M ei EJle:titional Indicators. Prin.meton. . Edit, arional I esting Seis ice.

Will ER, 11 1989 V. h. Reforms Ead Fite l'olitics of Editealusts in I rance and the I eilvial Republic of Germans Jour-nal ( uel, Mom %Itidie. Vol 21, No 4, pp 201-40s.

WI pits!. M.11 so\ RI st. fl.Ifsii,. R 1988. Perrpekuroide r Bum!, rt ptiblik Dela., Nand BadenBaden. "soon,. S cilagsgesellsshaft

\Vitss, 51 so s. RI, i it. 11 nom, A 1988. I-, Hd, :Pi Met'llti tt Hination to Market 1.,,.,,nains

Counten of fin

SECTION III

The Future of Educational Planning

Seeking new paradigmsto plan education

for developmentthe roleof educational research*

Daniel A. Morales-Gómez

During the last two decades, educationalplanning has been unable to regain the level ofrelative confidence that it enjoyed in the past.Several factors have contributed to the erosionof the effectiveness of planning as a tool forthe development of education. These include atechnocratic outlook on development processes,a naive view of the power of education, recur-rent economic and political crises, and a growingemphasis on a neo-classical economic approachto finding solutions to social problems. This hasbeen aggravated by the theoretical and practicalexhaustion of current development paradigmswhich exacerbate the contradictions, in the roleof key social institutions such as the state andthe school, and in their relationships withthc society at large.

How much is known about the structuralnature of these factors? What arc their longer-term effects on education and development?How can such knowledge be used to re-

Dank! A. Morales-G6mez (Canada). Senior Pro-granone Officer in the Population, Education, andSociety Programme, Social Sciences Division, Inter-national Development Research Centre (IDRC). liehas taught at universities in Chile and Mexico, andpublished several articles on the role of educationalresearch in development.

conceptualize the role of educational planning?These are questions which require closer study.However, the more fundamental question, howto re-establish the linkages between researchand d.ecision-making, remains central to theanswers that could emerge.

Current development trends suggest that inthe future education will be considerably morecomplex than it has been in the past. Thequality of the information on development andeducation available to planners and policy-makers must be examined to determine whattype of educational planning will be needed inthe future, for what type of education and inwhat development context. How much doplanners know about the relationships ofcorrespondence and contradiction determiningthe development process at the international,national and local levels? How do plannersrelate such information to the framework ofeducation? How reliable and up-to-date is theinformation being used for planning anddccision-making? How and how much of suchinformation is actually utilized? How awareare planners of the most recent diagnostic andevaluative research carried out outside the

* The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarilyrepresent those of the International DevelopmentResearch Centre (IDRC).

Protp4cts, Vol. XIX. No, 2, 59119r)

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2 1 6 Daniel A Morales-Gómez

realm of their immediate spheres of influence?These arc all questions that need to be carefullyinvestigated.

This article addresses some of these issues. Itlooks at the basic assumptions in the relation-ship between planning and educational research.Using examples from the research environmentin Latin America, it discusses the spectrum ofalternatives available for re-establishing a moreeffective relation between research and edu-cational policy planning.

Broadening the scopeof educational planning

Projecting our understanding of educationalplanning into the futurc, requires examining theeffectiveness of the methods of inquiry beingused by educational planners, and the ways inwhich knowledge produced by research feedsinto policy-planning. Despite the overwhelmingquantity of information available, the gap be-tween the relevance of the knowledge influenc-ing the planning process and the concreteconditions of education in developing societiesseems to be widening. It also seems that thetransfcr of information between researchersand planners continues to be ineffective, par-ticularly in peripheral countries. In fact, it isnot unusual to find that local research effortsoften receive less attcntion than studies con-ducted outside these countries' borders.

This phenfimenon is the combined effect ofseveral factors. Research for planning purposeshas been perceived primarily as macro-analysisand empirical in naturc. It has focused on theefficiency of education as a system (its infra-structure, financing, administration, scope), onthe effectiveness of thc delivery process (teach-ing methods, auxiliary materials), or on theimpact of its content (achievement, behaviourmodification, skill acquisition). To some extent,this situation has arisen in response, first, to theneeds of central planning structure; for a broadperspective rather than focusing on specific'pictures' of cducation. Views about how edu-cation is performing in holistic terms tend to be

2r

considered more suitable to decision-makingprocesses at the national level. Second, it hasarisen in response to the demands of inter-national funding sources, which are constantlyseeking world views of the problems of develop-ment and their solutions.

An additional problem has been the concep-tualization of priorities in education by bothresearchers and policy-makers. The communi-cation gap between these two groups has ledto the identification of different areas and targetsfor research. It has also resulted in differentdegrees of importance being attached to existingresearch results.

An assumption often made has been thatresearch for planning requires a solid technicalcapacity that can be found almost exclusivelyamong large government departments or innetworks of international experts. In the midstof comparative macro-views of the developingworld, the indigenous research capacity devel-oped in these countries over the last twodecades remains largely under-utilized. This,in spite of the fact that the information producedby local researchers is, in many cases, bettertuned to the problems eroding the effectivenessand efficiency of education, and richer and moreinnovative in terms of policy recommendations.There is thus an urgent need to broaden thescope of planning in reference to its researchinput.

LOOKING AT THE MICRO-LEVEL

There seems to be a consensus that a moreprecise understanding of the socio-political andeconomic challenges that will arise over thenext two decades in the Third World iscritical in determining thc future role andimpact of educational planning upon socialchange. Reaching such understanding requiresan updating of the information base supportingour views about education. There is a need:(a) to review the limits of formal education in thecontext of the current development crisis; (b) todetermine thc capacity of impact of non-formaleducation; (c) to idcntify the lessons learned

Seeking new paradigms to plan education for developmentthe role of educAtional research 217

from community-based and grass-roots edu-cational innovations; (e) to assess the effective-ness of out-of-school technical-vocationalalternatives; and (f) to know more about therationale and mechanisms of the planningprocess in non-centralized settings. This infor-mation base could provide planners and policy-makers with the relevant, down-to-earth feed-back necessary to conceptualize, apply andcritically examine the theory and practice ofeducational planning. At the saline time, itwould enable them to deal with the limitsimposed by the lack of resources, short-termpolitical agendas, and isolation from the every-day practice of cducation.

Throughout Latin America, there is a richarray of experiences in formal and non-forinaleducation which remains outside the mainstreamof the information flows reaching the planningand policy-making processes at the nationallevel. The potential of low-cost innovations oncommunity-based pre-school education, locallyadaptcd programmes on adult basic education,new teaching practices in rural schools, inex-pensive teacher-training methods, communitymanaged skill-development initiatives, andculturally relevant teaching and learning ma-terials is seldom recognized.

Planners are often unaware of such experi-ences. Diagnostic and evaluative researchcarried out on these type of practices remainsunused or is simply not considered relevant orsufficiently technical for macro-policy purposes.However, in practical terms, these experiencesand this type of research are the sources that canprovide decision-makers with valuable infor-mation about the innovative praxis of education.How planners and policy-makers can access andutilize such information generated at the microlevel is an issue that needs to be addressed. Indoing so, the tradition of educational planningmust be taken into account.

THE WEIGHT OF A DEVELOPMENT TRADITION

The 1950s and 1960s was a period in which mostgovernments in Latin America reviewed their

development strategies. They responded pri-marily to rising internal socio-political demands.However, external pressures from bilateral andmultilateral donor countries and developmentagencies were important intervening factors.Through the funding of major developmentprojects they contributed to the consolidation ofspheres of political influence.'

Most countries at that time began to feel theeffects of modernization in the forms of rapidpopulation and urban growth.' One of theimplications of these phenomena was the growthin demands from middle- and lower-classsectors for a stronger service infrastructure. Thepolitiml emphasis on modernization, in somecountries still tinted by populist connotations,'was also a factor in rising social demand formore and better education, health services andemployment.' Development policies, particu-larly in countries with a relatively higherincome per capita, were driven by thc assump-tion that stable economic growth was attainablethrough rapid industrialization (Sunkel and Pa7,

1978, PP. 43-97).Although industrialization diversified the

productive structure, it did not reduce thedependence of Latin American economies. Nordid it result in the anticipated self-sustainedgrowth.' Industrialization only slightly improvedthe socio-economic standards of the rural andthe urban poor (Chilcote and Johnson, 1983).For them, income redistribution, employment,housing, health, nutrition, education and thegeneral level of consumption suffered littlechange. By 1970, countrics in the rcgion werespending the equivalent of only 14.5 per cent ofwhat developed countries spent on educationper inhabitant (Unesco, 1985). This situationhad not changed by the mid- 97os, particularlyin terms of expenditure on elementary edu-cation per student compared with industrializedcountries (World Bank, 1980).

In political terms, education was a panaceafor resolving some of the critical problems ofdevelopment. As in most developing countries,governments in the region wcrc convinced of thcbenefits of investing in schooling (Tilak, 1982,p. 108). In snaking these societies more modern,

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218 Daniel A. Mora les-Geenex

key assumptions were made by parents,teachers, politicians, planners and policy-makers about the 'power' of education to bringabout changes that would increase social equal-ity and participation. The school was viewednor only as a channel for transmitting knowledgeand training skilled workers and managers, butalso as a means of upward mobility for the poor.Education was to lead to the redefinition of indi-viduals' values and attitudes, and ultimatelyto change their so..iopolitical behaviour andperformance as producers and citizens (Carnoy,ct al., 1985; Zachariah, 1985; IIEP, 1985;Apple, 1982; Bowies and Gintis, 1976).

Social equality and the development ofhuman resources became central to the rhetoricof educational expansion, in the attempts tointxoduce curricular innovations, and in thedonors' rationale to financing educational devel-opment. The aim of governments was to findpragmatic alternatives to reduce socio-politicalpressures on the state, and to deal with emergingpopular projects that gave a new emphasis tosocial development and participation. In such acontext, educational planning was a means tosecure the achievement of the state's objectivesin education. A seminar organized by the LatinAmerican Institute for Economic and SocialPlanning in 1965, outlined the rationale forplanning as a tool for development that pre-dominated until the mid-197os. Planning wasdescribed as 'an instrument that operates at apure technical level'. It was believed that 'underits action the real problems of Latin Americandevelopment could be easily solved' (ILPES,1966, p. 5). As a technique, planning wasapplied as though it were independent of thepolitical ideology to which development strat-egies and policies respond.' The statc, throughits main social institutions, attempted to ensurethat individuals acquired the 'modern values'deemed necessary for these countries to achievehighcr levels of economic growth.'

However, the criteria on which the planningof education was bw,ed, the paradigms andmethods applied in the interpretation of broadersocial and economic development issues, and theoutcomes that ensued were heavily influenced

by the contradictions within the state bureauc-racies in which planners were functioning. Inpractice, educational planning was a mechanismfor political control rather than a policy tool. Itallowed, politicians to achieve short-term edu-cational objectives as well as to rationalize andlegitimize decisions, to reinforce or to gainpopular support, and to justify strategies andactions aimed at strengthening political pos-itions.'

These factors have played an important roledetermining the type and sources of informationrequired for planning. Basic diagnostic researchto identify the needs to which educational plansshould respond focused primarily on areas ofconcern to the political objectives of the govern-ment in power. Often, these were problem-areas whlzh, provided with the proper solution,had the potential to attract mass political supportand minimize dissent. Micro initiatives, usuallymore geographically focused, did not feed intothe planning process. A similar situation tookplace in regard to evaluative research. In mostcases, planners not only considered quanti-tatively oriented assessments, which couldprovide the 'hard' data to support policydecisions, to be more reliable, they were alsomore comfortable with such assessments. Thusspecific evaluations which focuscd on ethno-graphic and political economy approaches wereoften discarded.

These factors were also determinant in theselection of the sources of such information.Producers of information who were considerednot to be politically reliable by governmentwere simply not approached. In societies withpolitically repressive regimes, these criteriaexcluded the majority of institutions andresearchers related to the social sciences. Andin most countries, where the higher educationsystems have been traditionally struggling forresources, universities played little or no rolein the generation of knowledge for policy-planning.

Conceptually, educational planning has in-volved a double dynamic. First, it has been aninstrument for maximizing the 'formal rationale'of the role of education systems by optimizing

Seeking ncw paradigms to plan edution for developmentthe role of educational research

the relationships between educational devel-opment means and objectives. Second, it hasbecn a mechanism for enhancing the 'materialor substantive rationale' of development, or therelationships between educational goals and thcpolitical and economic changes required fortheir achievement. Educational planning wasexpected to bring together these two types ofrationale connecting technical and politicalfactors. Planning was perceived to be, accordingto Ahumada (r972, p. 35),

a technique for thc selection of means and cndsaccording to a norm. As a technique, that is to sayas a series of procedures for action, planning isneutral: neither good nor bad in an ethical sense.It can, though, be effective or ineffective, it mayIcad to thc achievemc it of desired objectives. Inoder to do so, it has to fulfil three pre-requisites: (a) todemonstrate that the goals are realistic, that is tosay that they are possible to bc achieved; (b) toensure that the means are the best available toachieve those goals, or at least that they are effective;and (c) t3 prove that goals and means are compatible.

This view of planning also reflects, very accu-rately, the role that indirectly was assigned toresearch. Social inquiry was not a way ofcritically looking at society and at the resultsof development plans, but rather a means toreinforce decisions made on political grounds.Activities conducted outside the spheres ofinfluence of government had the risk of beingpolitically sensitive, even if thcy had proved tobe successful at the grass-roots level. Manyinitiatives on popular education, literacy andcommunity political education fell in thiscategory. Important experimental and evalu-ative research considered too radical in itsoutlook on social equality or popular parti-cipation was excluded. Important experiences inrural peasants' education, work with Indiancommunities, and alternative ways of integratingthe school and the community seldom attractedthe attention of planners dealing with thc macro-system. In practice, therefore, the use of edu-cational planning was 'in many ways, a primeexample of a form of legitimizztion that sustainsan existing structure of political authority and

219

power not through normative principles butthrough a sct of proccdurai conventions' (Wei-ler, 1985, p. 394).

A CRISIS OF PARADIGMS

Planning has been expected to perform a seriesof tasks. Central to all these tasks has been there-assignment of human and material resourcesand the distribution of goods and servicesaccording to short-term development priorities.Planning has a role in the formulation andimplementation of sectoral policies in education,in the forecasting of manpower needs, and inthe investment and allocation of human capitalresources (World Bank, 1980, pp. 46-53). It hasalso been expected to generate a rationaldynamic of decision-making within the systtm.With such a portfolio, national planning officeshave been important actors in controlling thedevelopmental rolc of education. However,their effectiveness in providing strategic direc-tion over the long term is questionable.

The poor strategic capacity of educationalplanning became evident when some basicassumptions of the development model pre-vailing in the region until the mid-197os began tocrumble. To the traditional political instabilitywas added the breakdown of democratic systemsand the installation of authoritarian regimes.The service-oriented approach to basic needsshifted towards the glorification of the marketas a natural instrument for socio-economicequilibrium. Thc hopes of economic 'take-off'were shattered by the impact of the externaldebt and the world economic crisis. The tra-ditional role of the state, as provider andmediator, changed through decentralization andprivatization. And thc expectations about thepower of education were clouded by the realiz-ation that the gap between credentials and em-ployment remained wide for the generationsthat had gone through the education system.

All these events, appearing in a rapid suc-cession over a relatively short period of time,brought into the open the wcak foundations ofeducational planning. Planning had not been able

220 Dame! A. Morales-Gómez

to identify the earlier signs of the developmentcrisis. The flow of information reaching differ-ent levels of planning became rapidly outdated.Governments' short-term priorities, availabilityof funds, and limited in-house research capacitywere some of the factors affecting the type,quality and relevance of the information onwhich plans were built. Policy-makers acceptedthat as long as education was planned takinginto account technically reliable trends deter-mining the direction of the development pro-cess, the socio-economic effectiveness of edu-cation was protected.

In this environment, research for educationalplanning has remained diagnostic at the macro-level, forecasting thc development processwithin a framework of economic indicators(Klees, 1986, pp. 574-607). The level of govern-ment research in planning has been low, itsproduction slow, and its output costly (Prawda,1984). When decentralization of education hasbeen set as an objective, planning has becomeisolated leading to uncoordinated actions inwhich research plays a limited or no role.

The growing contradictions between theexpected results of planning and the concreteoutcomes of development show how littleattention was given to three factors critical toeducational planning. These are: (a) the assess-ment of the existing planning capacity at dif-ferent levels of government, and particularlythe quality of available means to gather, retrieveand analyse up-to-date information; (b) thecriteria used to assign a planning role to govern-ment departments vis-d-vis their capacity toretrieve and utilize the results of research carriedout by institutions outside government; and (c)thc need to establish connections with the varietyof research groups carrying out diagnostic andevaluative research at the Micro-level.

As the models of development in thc regionfaced a crisis of definition, and the gains in theeconomic arcna bcgan to disappear, educationalplanning became even more technocratic andmore strongly tied to thc neo-conservative goalsof economic development.' Scholars have arguedthat the political culture, dominated by a senseof immediacy and by a kind of raw pragmatism,

23,-2

focused on intermediate problems affecting thepolitical system while ignoring the terminalproblems affecting the social system (Matus,1987, p. 16o).

Educational planning reflected once again thecontradictions between 'speed' and 'direction'that have confronted these societies throughoutthe development process. The approaches takento education in the 1980s have lacked the long-term direction required to strengthen socio-political and economic sustainability beyondthe capacity of thc state to control socialunrest." The development of education con-tinues to take place without a popular base tosustain an expansion heavily dependent on theunequal distribution and use of available re-sources. Planning education for developmentcontinues to be divorced from an egalitariandevelopment strategy. At a timc whcn societiesare involved in the painful process of defininga basic social project and seeking mechanisms togain political democracy and economic stability,educational planning is yet one more instrumentcontributing to the transition of these societiestoward associated-dependent development.

One rescarch option to consider for makingplanning more development effective for thepoorest sectors in the 19905, is to explorealternatives by which to incorporate institutionsand groups outside government as a permanentfeedback mechanism within the planning pro-cess. If this approach appears feasible, thechallenge, then, is to determine not only whattype of educational planning is required fordevelopment in the future, but also how thecurrent planning structures can be made moreflexible and permeable to the accumulatedknowledge that exists in the society."

A framework from whichto plan the future of education

The effectiveness of the school in selecting,retaining and certifying the new generation ofworkers continues to be a central concernamong those demanding and supplying edu-cation. Formal education is still the main

Seeking new paradigms to plan education for developmentthe role of educational research

channel for strengthening civil society, recon-structing a stable and democratic politicalsystem, and developing an indigenous scientificand technological capacity. In countries witha large proportion of rural and indigenouspopulations, non-formal education and literacyhave the additional task of achieving socialparticipation among the masses.

Thirty years of planning education, accordingto a view of development that replicates mod-ernization paradigms of societies in the North,have not been as successful as expected. Objec-tives such as universal education and literacy,thc possibility of reaching a balanced patternof expenditure between different levels of thesystem, and the attempts to make educationrelevant to the world of work and to the changingtrends in science and technology have not beenfully achieved. For the poorest sectors of thesesocieties, educational poiicies have not madethe system more egalitarian in the distributionof knowledge, less discriminatory among socialclasses, morc instrumental in creating the ncwscientific and technological cadres, or moreefficient in performing thc functions that edu-cational planners and educational policy-makershad in mind.

Despite thc large amount of resources allo-cated to education, and the attempts to maintaincontrol over the changes occurring in schoolsystems, greater accessibility to education hasnot resulted in increased political participation,enhanced social mobility, or reduced tensionsbetween the state and civil society." Althougha higher number of children have access tobasic education, more teachers arc serving thegrowing number of students, morc textbooksand educational materials are available, andbetter equipment has been introduced in theclassrooms, there is still a wide gap betweenquantity and quality of education. Most of thebenefits of the educational expansion haveaccrued to children from large urban centresand from middle- to upper-income families.Schools in marginal and rural areas still facehigh dropout rates, a paucity of teachersand textbooks, poor facilities, and generalisolation."

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The expansion of primary schooling and theattempts to make basic education available to alarger number of children continue to respondfirst to political priorities seeking to reach widerscctors of the population rcprcscnting politicalclienteles. The democratic effects of educationhave been limited to access into the system buthave not reached the capacity of the school toretain students beyond the first ycars of primaryeducation, or to prepare those who survive toenter the world of work. The limited successin widening participation in society has resultedin even greater demands for thc eliminationof inequality in the distribution of educationalopportunities as an integral part of socialrcforms."

In countries like those in Latin America,characterized by strong class differences, pro-found ethnic and cultural traditions, and deepinequalities in the distribution of wealth andpolitical power, education planned for socialmodernization continues to deepen existingsocial and economic differences. The planningof education has taken place within a patternof development that, according to Gonzalez,(1987) P. 9))despite its undoubted successes, also had limitationsand problems, which were reflected in structuralunemployment and underemployment, critical pov-erty, differences in productivity and income, and anasymmetrical structure of international relationstogether with a heavy dependence on external eventsover which the region has no control.

TRENDS DOMINATINGEDUCATIONAL PLANNING

The approaches applied in educational planningin Latin America have not led policy-makersto design and strategically orient educationalreforms and innovations that are conducive toa process of self-sustained development. Thetheory, techniques and instruments of planninghave not been well adapted to operate with theresources available, and within the conditionsand circumstances determining development inthe region.

Darnel A. Morales-Gdmez

At the theoretical level, thc efforts to planeducation have been framed in a technocraticrationale of nco-classical economic efficiency(Psacharopoulos, 1986), and a naive rhetoricabout reaching and benefiting the poor, withoutlooking at the inherent ideological contradic-tions that this implies. To a large extent this ispromoted by the formal discourse of dominantlending institutions. Their influence has beenconsiderably important given the dependence ofthese countries upon external financial resourcesto plan and implement changes in edu-cation. Planning of manpower requirements,for example, has been one of the initiatives ofgovernments for securing the badly neededexternal funds to support educational changeand expansion (Psacharopoulos and Woodhall,1985, pp. 99-102). In 1980, the World Bankestimated that approximately 9 per cent ofdeveloping countries' budgets allocated to edu-cation were supported through external assist-ance." This situation continues in the 19805showing the precarious base of education in theregion. Even in the mid-198os, external assist-ance represented a major source of funds fordeveloping countries' education programmes(OECD, 1984). In many cascs, the short-termrelationships between costs and political ben-efits in the national and international arena arethe factors that determine the criteria for policydecisions.

In practice, there has been no balancedattempt to find a participatory developmentrationale simultaneously to assist governmentsin solving immediate problems and in lookingat medium- and long-tcrm challenges, whileestablishing means to integrate the most dis-advantaged sectors into the mainstream ofsociety. Those expecting to see a more effectiverole of planning in education within this frame-work have ignored two central chatacteristicsof decision-making practices in the develop-ment context. The first is that in class societies,public policy formulation in education, as inmany other development areas, responds pri-marily to priority needs for higher politicaleffectiveness. Thus, they are not exclusivelyformulated in response to demands for more

2

and better education of those who need itthe most, but rather of those holding andsharing power in the network of given socialrelations. The second is that the relationshipbetween supply and demand for education insocieties with structurally dependent economiesis not regulated by the same logic of naturalequilibrium attributed to the market as assumedby neo-conservative economics of education.

Further research needs to be done on thedevelopment rationale underlying the theor-etical framework in which planning is applied.Research is also needed on the potential long-term benefits that could result from currentpolicies advocating decentralization as a meansto reduce the burden on the state of financingand administering education. Given that thepresent conditions of widespread socio-econ-omic and political crisis in the region will remainunchanged for several years to come," it isalso necessary to examine the extent to whichthe traditional state can continue to be a viableagent for providing the resources to finance theheavy costs of social change. This implies thatalternatives that are taking place at levels otherthan those immediately controlled by the statemust he explored and evaluated.

I.ittle attention has also been paid to anothercharacteristic of planning in these countries.The state constantly seeks the means to legit-imize its mediating role under conditions ofpolitical instability and economic dependence.Thus, the formulation and implementation ofpolicies in education respond to immediateeconomic objectives rather than to the rec-ommendations of social research. This explainsin part why after years of investment in edu-cation, the urban poor and the rural populationstill remain marginal to the benefits of formaleducation, while non-formal alternatives outsidethe scope of the state show higher rates ofsuccess.

The way in which educational planning hasbeen applied, following in many cases the nar-row technical expertise of institutions financingeducational development, has provided thctechno-political elites with a vehicle to legit-imize political positions and maintain conditions

Seeking new paradigms to clan education for developmentthe role of educational research 223

of hegemonic ideological control. Planning hasbeen useful to regulate the functioning of edu-cation systems, determine the process of human-resource development, and maintain controlover distributive policy directions associatedwith the capitalist mode of production. Edu-cational planning has served to justify as techni-cally sound, decisions to accommodate educationto the changes in the economic and politicalstructure. It has failed, however, in developinga flexible pool of human resources to form astientific and technical infrastructure. It hasalso failed in building a system of education thatcould rapidly adapt itself to an evolving worldeconomic environment within which the regionis today one of the larger net exporters offinancial resources in the developing world.

Planning has been instrumental in legitimiz-ing a view of social change as an aseptic processof social evolution linked to the growing capacityof the most dynamic sectors of the economy butunaffected by the contradictions in equality,equity and participation in the society at large.Educational planning has been understood asan end in itself, a rationale which results froma mechanistic, problem-solving approach tosocial and economic conflicts. Planners haveignored the fact that the technical assessmentof a given development situation, estimatesabout its possible evolution, and the identifi-cation, design and implementation of alterna-tive solutions to development problems are allprocesses deeply rooted in social conflict.

This view of development issues has beenreinforced by international organizations 'play-ing safe' by emphasizing a separation betweentechnical solutions to social problems and thepolitical circumstances surrounding them. Plan-ning, in this regard, has viewed developmentand social change as a phenomenon that canbe externally influenced, oriented and stimu-lated, rathcr than as a dialectical processresulting from local socio-political dynamics.Research on the political economy of educationfocusing on these issues is urgently needed.

This understanding of the role of planning isalso reinforced by a view of education as aprocess intended to guide thc socio-psycho-

logical growth of children, rather than as ameans of transmitting and reproducing a domi-nant ideology. In the technocratic approach toplanning education for development two keyfactors have been overlooked. The first is thatplanning is an organic technical tool. That is tosay, the logic of educational planning as a tech-nique, and its use in the context of the politicalstructure of the state, serves primarily to directthe evolution and role of education according tothe dominant ideas at a particular point in time.The second is that the primary purpbse ofplanning as an instrument of the state is tohomogenize the rationale determining the econ-omic and political practice of the power struc-ture in the achievement of its developmentobjectives.

Connecting researchto educational planning

Throughout this article reference has beenmade to the lack of cohesion that exists in theregion between educational research done out-side the state's spheres of influence and themainstream planning process. This sectionbriefly reviews some relevant cases. Thesereflect to a large extent the national conditionswithin which the main actors in the rearchprocess are operating. They have in common,however, the fact that although they have beenrelatively successful they are still largely ignoredby policy-makers (Lewin, 1987).

LOW-COST INNOVATIONSIN PRE-SCHOOL EDUCATION

One of the areas in education perhaps mostoften overlooked in planning education fordevelopment has been pre-primary education.In most cases, although the political importanceof pre-school education is repeatedly recog-nized by governments, in practice its effectiveimplementation is costly and politically sensitive.

The Centro de Eswdios y Atención del Nifioy la Mujer (CEANIM), a non-governmental

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224 Daniel A. Morales-Gómez

research institution in Chile, has developed andtested over the years a community based pre-school system that relies on parents and com-munity participation (Kotliarenco et al., 1988).The research carried out by CEANIM comprisestwo main stages. The first was a comparativeanalysis of alternative models of pre-schooleducation. The second focused on an evaluationof the experiences of the Centros Comunitariosde Atención al Pre-escolar (CCAPs). The latterare community managed pre-schools developedand implemented by CEANIM in marginalurban areas of Santiago.

The CCAPs are community pre-schools whichhave as a main feature the integration of thechildren's mothers in the management andadministration of the school as well as in theeducational activities. In such a context, mothersplay a key role in the teaching-learning processtaking place at the classroom level, with theassistance of pre-school teachers. The aim isto involve the families more directly in chil-dren's cognitive and socio-affective develop-ment.

Following a quasi-experimental design, theresearch assessed the effectiveness of differentmodels of pre-school education, including thcCCAI's, using groups of children from lowsocio-economic backgrounds. Several aspectswere highlighted by the study. Alternativesthat directly involve mothers in the educationof their children are substantially less expensiveand morc effective in the overall administrationof the programmes compared with regular pre-school models. This was reflected in the man-agement of the schools as well as in thc numberof children per adult (teacher). At the level ofclassroom communication, it was also foundthat thc CCAPs present advantages over othertypes of pre-school approaches, in terms ofrelationships between parents and teachers, andbetween parents. With regard to child develcp-ment, it was found that children whose motherswere directly involved in their education showed

a higher level of psychomotor and ernotionaldevelopment when compared with children inother types of pre-schools.

Following this experience, CFANIM has

continued experimenting to improve the CCAPmodel. The number of CCAPs has been in-creased, thus reaching other marginal com-munities in the country. Efforts have also beenmade to disseminate information about thisexperience throughout the region.

SEEKING ALTERNATIVESIN EDUCATION

FOR INDIGENOUS POPULATIONS

The emphasis of planning on the state-of-practice of the formal education system in itsdifferent modalities often results in little atten-tion being given to research on basic primaryeducation for children and adults of ethnicminorities. In most cases, it is assumed thatthese important sectors of the population areserved through the regular formal system.However, existing evidence indicates that thesesectors are the most severely affected by edu-cational inequality in terms of access, attritionand quality.

The Centro Andino de Acci6n Popular(CAAP) in Ecuador, the Centro Paraguayode Estudios Sociológicos (CPES) in Paraguay,and the CorporaciOn Educativa MACAC,also in Ecuador, have madc important con-tributions to the research on the bilingual edu-cation of indigenous communitics. These non-governmental research centres have carried outextensive work on formal and non-formal edu-cation being delivered to these sectors of thepopulation. They have examined the ef ts

of mouolingual Spanish primary cducation onstudent achievement, social integration andcultural development. They have also studiedthe effects of indigenous languages on thecapacity of children and adults to communicateand to integrate the traditional and modernculture in their everyday lives and the impactof education upon this capacity (Sanchez-Parga, 1988).

Particularly important is the research doneon adult literacy by the CorporaciOn EducativaMACAC in Ecuador. Extensive studies havebeen done on Quechua-speaking communities


and the relevance of developing educationalmaterials that integrate the traditional cultureinto the educational processes. After severalyears, this work is beginning to receive recog-nition and is now expected to play a key rolein the new literacy campaign being implementedby the Ecuadorian Government.

INTEGRATING EDUCATION AND WORK

Despite the fact that research on technical-vocational education has been perhaps one ofthe areas that has traditionally received themost attention in terms of education planning,such research has focused primarily on large-scale, national vocational-training programmes.Research on more focus-specific alternatives tointegrating education and production has notenjoyed the same success in reaching policy-makers.

The Consejo de EducaciOn de Adultos deAmerica Latina (CEAAL), based in Chile, hasdone pioneering research in education in co-operatives. A regional organization, CEAALhas carried out comparative research in fivecountries in Latin America to study the con-ditions that exist in co-operatives for the edu-cation of their members. These studies haveprovided aailt educators concerned about basicprimary education and vocational training withan overview of the advantages of integratingeducation and work at the workplace. Althoughthe research has found that co-operative organ-izations are often plagued by economic andpolitical constraints, in those cases where mini-mum conditions for their operations take place,they offer an effective environment for theimplementation of educational innovationswhich respond more directly to the needs oflow-income sectors of the population and thetraining needs of low-skilled production workers.

This research has been successful in docu-mcnting an arca which has retvived littleattention from educators. It has also shown theneed to further explore educational alternativesthat could be participatory in nature andcommunity based.

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PROVIDING BASIC INFORMATIONTO PLANNERS

It has been argued that at the corc of therelationship between educational planning andresearch is the flow and quality of informationrcaching policy-makers. Thc experience indi-cates that in some countries there is a richaccumulation of knowledge and informationthat seldom reaches planners.

Thc Programa Interdisciplinario dc Invcs-tigacioncs en Educación (PHE), in Chile, is inthe process of developing a mechanism thatwill not only gather information through re-search on issucs relevant to education policy,but w:ll also be capable of organizing and pre-senting such information in a format that canbe easily retrieved by policy-planners. Thisexperience involves the creation of a system bywhich the prioritics and concerns of policy-makers and planners can be transmitted toresearchers, and by which the results of researchcan be fed back into the planning process in aform that docs not obstruct their utilization.

This is one of the few attempts in the rcgionof a non-government researzh institution toassume as one of its priorities the implemen-tation of such a system. If successful, thisexperiment could serve as a model for otherinstitutions in the region.

The relationships between development andeducational planning in developing countrieshave been analysed from different perspectives.These views show that educational planningrests on the belief that the correlation betweeneducation and development is positive. Edu-cation is considered to have a direct influenceon the socio-cconomic well-being of low-incomesectors, economic efficiency and productivity,and political development and participation.However, no single approach in education orthe social sciences has been able to generate areliable theoretical framework so as to under-stand how these relationships take place in thecontext of underdeveloped social formations, orto identify thc most effective strategics that can

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226 Daniel A. Mara les-Gdmee

be used to control the contradictions takingplace between education and development.

Latin American societies are no exception. Asa result of the predominance of different andconflicting development tendencies, the devel-opmental role of educational planning has re-ceived a variety of social, political and economicinterpretations. The core ideological base ofeducational planning has been influenced bythe economic rationale regulating the functionsof the capitalist mode of production. The dif-ferences in approaches to planning educationhave been the result of both the indigenousunderstanding of the process of national de-velopment, and political strategies that haveemerged in response to changes in the relation-ships between developed and developing so-cieties at the international level.

Educational development in these societiesover the past four decades, and the emphasisgiven to schooling as a central pillar in theprocess of modernization, have not taken placeindependently of the cyclical political and econ-omic crises affecting these countries. At theeconomic level, governments have directed theireducational strategies towards achieving indus-trialization and technological modernizationthat could lead these societies towards a morestable process of economic growth opening thedoors to self-reliance.

At the social level, changes in education havetaken place as part of a global effort to reducemarginality among large sectors of the popu-lation. At the political level, the attempts tochange education have been led by hopm oftransformation of traditional channels for pol-itical participation. Two questions usually be-come central to the process of policy formationdirected towards changing the role of educationin society: Who should be the primary targetto receive the benefits of education? and Howcan the statc design, implement and controlthc political and economic role of educationwithout jeopardizing interest sectors and with-out deepening the conditions for potential socialunrest?

Answers to these question have traditionallybeen found in thc use of educational planning

as a technique that ensures efficiency, provides asense of order, and reduces educational andsocial inequality to an apparently neutral ground.Two assumptions have been central to thisapproach. The first implies that educationalplanning is a non-ideologicai technique basedon scientific principles that are neutral andindependent from the political and economiccontradictions in society. The second assump-tion implies that planning is not affected bythe relations of contradiction and correspon-dence that exist in the society, and that plannerscan function independently of the power struc-ture to which they belong. Both assumptionsdeal with planning as an aseptic technocraticinstrument detached from the developmentconflicts that exist in society.

The succtss or failure of educational planningin the future will be not only an outcome of theways in which planning is conceptualized as atechnique, but also the results of the inherentproblems of economic and political stabilitythat the region will continue facing. Politically,the processes of policy formation in LatinAmerica will continue suffering from the con-flicts of power characterizing the structure ofthc state in the region.

Given current development trcnds, both re-gionally and internationally, the chances arethat the process of public policy planning will befar more complex and contradictory in thefuture. This responds in part to a variety ofinterests which governments will be forced toreprment to minimize social conflicts. In thesesocieties, the ideological diversity among thepower groups competing for the control of thestate, both in economic and political terms, isgreater than those found in developing societies.Thc development of education, the formulationof policies and the planning process in the caseof the latter, tend to represent a more uniformspectrum of interests. It also tends to maintainthe status quo rather than to polarize contradic-tions and produce radical changes in the dis-tribution of power and wealth.

Because developing societies do not evolveaccording to this paradigm, the process of policyformation becomes a conduit between extreme

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political alternatives aiming at sometimes op-posite development goals over relatively shortperiods of time. In such a context, developingsocieties are oftcn faced with profound changesin the development role of their basic insti-tutions, including the state and the educationsystem, in order to achieve short-term devel-opment objectives. Research in documentingthese changes helps to project planning into thefuture. Without an effective link between plan-ning and research, planning education becomesa limited exercise, which responds to the mostimmediate pressures facing those formulatingand implementing policies.

Notes1. At the time, many countries of the region were feeling

the impact of development strategies heavily depen-dent on foreign aid. Among the strong modernizationvalues of these strategies were the emphases onincreasing social participation and democracy. Thesepromoted a slow shift of national political strategiestowards more liberal reforms. This was not the case inBrazil and Chile before the military interventionsin 1964 and 1973 respectively.

2. During this period, only seven from among twentycountries in the region had an urban growth of lessthan to per crnt, while five others had a growth ratebetween 25 and 32 per cent.

3. Touraine (t987) presents a systematic analysis of thetrends and conditions affecting the development ofthe region, particularly in terms of the power relationsaffecting decision-making.

4. Public expenditures on education alone, grew from3.4 Per Cent of gross national product in 1970 to4.2 per cent in 1980 (Unesco, 1985).

5. Scholars have argued that over the years these trendsshifted modernization towards the model of associated-dependent development that exists today in countriessuch as Argentina, Mexico and Brazil (Chilcote andEdelstein, 1974, PP. 1-87; Evans, 1979; Bonilla andGirling, 1973; Cardoso, 1973).

6. Jorge Ahumada, former member of the IMF andDirector of the Economic Development Division ofECLA at the time, argued that 'a planner cannotdetermine by himself social objectives. Ile alwaysworks for an economic system, for a form of socialorganization and for a political structure. Planningthus has a purely technical character, neutral, and itcannot be considered as attached to a given political,economic or social system' (Ahumada, 1972, P. 4).

7. The modernization theory was 'based on the notionthat there is a direct causal link between five sets of

8.

9.

10.

12.

13

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variables, namely, modernizing institutions, modernvalues, modern behaviour, modern socicty andeconomic development' (Fagerlind and Saha, 1983,p. 16).An example of the use of educational planning as anintegral political tool were both the educationalreform implemented in Chile in the late 19605 duringthe government of Eduardo Frei, and the planningof the Escuela Nacional Unificada (ENU) during theadministration of Salvador Allende.Countries like Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguayare a prime example of these changes. An illustrationof the implicit assumptions of neo-conservativeeconomics is to be found in Foxley (1983).Government approaches were influenced by politicalpressures to maintain economic growth under adeepening economic crisis produced by a growingexternal debt. The effects of the region's debt on theefforts to achieve rapid growth, modernization andcontrolled social mobilization have been devastating,and the attempts to reduce the gap between developedand developing societies at the international level, andbetween lower and upper classes in the nationalscenarios, have been largely unsuccessful. Despitethese facts, development and the expansion of socialservices, including education, continue without thepolitical and economic base to sustain an expansionheavily dependent on the unequal distribution anduse of resources.The problems presented by the 'crisis affecting LatinAmerica in the 19805 have been profusely discussedfrom the point of view of its economic implicationsassociated to the external debt problem (Foxley,1983). For an analysis of the effects of the crisis on thesocial sciences, see Morales-G6mcz (1986).A prime example of this situation is found in the roleof university and secondary-school students in Chile.Despite the strong intervention of the military statein education, the government has not been able toobtain political support, and the universities andsecondary schools are becoming, once again, import-ant agents for the expression of demands for socialchange.

. A recer.t report prepared by the Centre for EducationalStudies in Mexico argues that between 198o and t986only 52 per cent of primary-school children suc-ceeded in the school system, and that over the last tenyears the drop-out rate has increased from 10.3 percent in 1976 to to.6 pet cent in 1986.

. Between 1970 and 1982, public ezpenditure oneducation in the region grew from 3.4 to 4.4 per centof the gross national product. However, at thc endof this period, that still remained 1.7 per cent belowthe expenditure of the developing world. Althoughpublic expenditure per inhabitant in 1982 in theregion was three times higher than the average furdeveloping societies, it was still 4.7 times lower thanthat of developed countries. In fact, public expendi-ture per inhabitant in primary education in the region

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228 Daniel A. Morales-G6mez

fell approximately 45 per cent in real terms between1970 and 1978 (World Bank, 1984).

15. This situation did not change during the first half ofthe 1980s. Today external assistance still represents amajor source of funds for developing countrics' edu-cation programmes (OECD, 1984). At the same time,the larger proportion of funds being allocated bydeveloping countries for research in education orig-inates in donor agencies.

16. Norberto GoaLilez, the Executive Secretary of theEconomic Commission for Latin America, indicatedin Ids opening remarks to the International Col-loquium on New Directions for Development Plan-ning in Market Economies, that 'we are currentlyexperiencing the most severe and prolonged crisis ofthe last fifty years, which has forced us to undertakea thorough reassessment of many of our long-standingassumptions concerning development. This reassess-ment covers both long-term development strategiesand short-term economic policies on the one hand,and the role of the economic agents and the mannerin which they operate, on the other' (Gonzilez,1987, P. 9).

ReferencesAHUMADA, Jorge. 1972. La PlanificaciOn del desarrollo.

Santiago, Ediciones Nueva Universidad.APPLE, Michael W. 1982. Cultural and Economic Repro-

duction in Education. Essays on Class Ideology and theState. Boston, Rout ledge & Kegart Paul.

BONILLA, Frank; GULLING, Robert. 1973. Stracturet OfDependency. Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press.

BOWLES, Samuel; GINTIS, Herbert. 1976. Schooling inCapitalist America. New York, Basic Books.

Cramoso, Fernando E. 1973. Associated-DependentDevelopment: Theoretical and Practical Implications.In: Alfred Stepan (ed.), Authoritarian Brazil, pp. 142-76.New Haven, Yale University Press,

CARNOY, Martin; TORRES, Carlos, ct al. 1985. Economiapolitica del financiamiento educativo. Mexico City,Ediciones Gernika.

Cstts..com, Ronald H.; EDELSTEIN, JOel C. 1974. LatinAmerica: The Struggle with Dependency and Beyond.New York, John Wiley.

CHILCOTE, Ronald H.; JOHNSON, Dale L. 1983. Theories ofDevelopment. Mode of Production or Dependency?Beverly Hills, Sage Publications.

EVANS, Peter. t979. Dependent Development. Princeton,N.J., Princeton University Press.

FARGERLIND, Ingermar; SAHA, Lawrence J. 1983. Edu-cation and National Development: A ComparativePerspective. Oxford, Pergamon Press.

Fox.LEY, Alejandro. 1983. Latin American Experiments inNeo-Conservative Economics. Berkeley, University ofCalifornia Press.

Go/r2Autz, Norberto. 1987. International Colloquium on

New Directions for Development Planning in MarketEconomies. CEPAL Review (Santiago, United Nations),Vol. 31, pp. 9-31.

IIEP (INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE oF EDUCATIONAL PLAN-NING). 1985. Educational Planning in the Context ofCurrent Development Problems. Paris, UnesconIEP.

ILPES. 1966. Discusiones sobre plaruficacion. MCII CO

City, Sig lo XXI.KLEES, Steven J. 1986. Planning and Policy Analysis in

Education: What Can Economics Tell Us? ComparativeEduzation Review, Vol. 30, No. 4, PP. 574-607.

KorumteNco, M. Angelica; DAVILA, Anamarfa; FutrrrEs,Ana; MENDEZ, Bernardita. 1988. La comunscacidn en elproceso de aprendizaje. Una expenencia pre-escolar.Santiago, CEANIM.

LEWIN, Keith M. 1987. Education in Austerity: Options forPlanners. Paris, Uncsco/IIEP.

MATUS, Carlos. 1987. Planning and Government. CEPALReview (Santiago, United Nations), Vol. 31, pp. 153-69.

MORALES-GOMEZ, Daniel A. 1986. La situación dc crisisy el papel de las ciencias sociales en el desarrollo deAmerica Latina. David y Golsen (CL.ASCO), Vol. XVI,No. 5o, December, pp. 60-6.

OECD (ORGANIZATION FOR ECONOMIC CO-OPERATIONloon Davatoohturr). 5985. The Development AssistanceContrnittee (DAC) Review 1984. Paris, OECD.

PRAwDA, Juan. 1984. Teorla y praxis de la plantacuineducativa en Mexico. Mexico City, Grijalbo.

PSACHAROPOULOS, George. 1986. Planning Education:Where Do We Stand? Comparative Education Review,Vol. 30, No. 4, PP- 560-74.

PSACHAROPOULOS, George; WOoDHALL, Maureen. 1985.Education for Development. An Analysis of InvestmentChoices. New York, Oxford University Press.

SANCHEZ-PAROA, Jose. 1988. Aprendizaje, conoomientocomunicacidn en la Comwsidad Andina. Quito, CAAP.

SUNKEL, Osvaldo; PAZ, Pedro. 1978. El SubdesarrolloLatinoamericano y la Teoria del Desarrollo, 2151 cdMexico City, Siglo

TILAK, Jandhyala B. C. 1982. Educational Planning andthe International Economic Order. Comparative Edu-cation, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 107-21.

TOURAINE, Alain. 1987. Actores sociales y ostemas politicosen America Latina. and ed. Santiago, PREALC.

UNESCO. 1985. Public Expenditures on Education sn theWorld: Regional and Country Trends, 1970- 1982 Paris,Unesco, Division of Statistics on Education.

WEILER, Hans. 1985. The Political Economy of Educationand Development. Educational Planning in the Contextof Current Development Problems, Vol. II, pp 382-96Paris, Unesco/IIEP.

WORLD BANK. 1980. World Development Report, to8oWashington, D.C., World Bank.

-. 1984. World Bank Development Report, 1984

Washington, D.C., World Bank.ZACHARIAH, Mathew. 1985. Lumps of Clay and Growing

Plants: Dominant Metaphors of the Role of Educationin the Third World. Comparative Education Review,Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 1-21.

Educationalplanning problems,

decision-makingand communication

Dan Inbar

Any discussion of a whole educational planningand implementation process will comprisean interactive analysis of the pertinent sys-temspolitical, economic and socialand sincethere is no clear end to educational plans, theanalysis must continue indefinitely. Hence, forall practical purposes, any discussion of edu-cational planning is partial and bascd onarbitrary decisions about the criteria andcomponents. The validity of such decisionswill be tested according to their rationale, totheir eventual contribution to the understandingof the planning-implementation process, andaccording to their ability to improve the plan-ning-implementation practice.

The link between educational planning andimplementation can be considered the Achilles'heel of the educational planning process. Thisarticle is an attempt to develop a conceptualframework that might increase our understand-ing of (his link, and serve as a basis for thc

Dan Inbar (Israel). Head of the Division of Edu-cational Planning and Administration, School ofEducation, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.Fortner director of in-service teacher training at theHebrew University. Author of numerous articles oneducational planning and book; including EducationalAdministrative Deliberations; Israeli National Plan-ning and Policy-Making; Responsibility.

formulation of propositions for interconnectingplan contents with the decision-making andimplementation processes, and suggestions ofbasic outlines for future research. The concep-tual framework is based on three basic compo-nents: (a) the problem, which focuses on aspecific educational planning process; (b) thedecisions, which have to be taken into consider-ation in choosing among alternative actions;and (c) the social message, for change inherentin the educational plan.

By focusing on these three components wehave of course had to sidestep many othersthetypc of leadership making the decisions, thesuitability of the administrative machinery,budgetary constraints, national development,and social structurc are among the most im-portantbut these have been treated frequentlyelsewhere. Thc rationale behind emphasizingthese three components is the necessity for theactive involvement of all concerned. Put dif-ferently, the implementation of educationalplanning is never a purely technical process;it involves behavioural change in teachers,parents, studcnts and administrators as well aspoliticians.

This is essentially in line with thc reasoningof the IIElys Medium-tenn I'lan 1984-I989,iwhich encourages those involved 'to examineplanning in the context of decision-making . . .

Prospect!, Vol. XIV, NO. 4. t954

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230 Dan Inbar

in the light of thc specific responsibilities ofteachers and educationalists' (paragraph 40),prescribes 'definition of the "zones of inter-action" between planning and decision-making'(paragraph 46), and recommends focusing'above all on the reality of planning, gaininginsight into thc practice of planning and itsdysfunctions' (paragraph 77). Our analysiswill take thc Israeli Educational Rcform as acase in point.

The educational reform approved by thcKnesset (the Israeli Parliament) in 1968 hadtwo declared purposes: to raise the level ofacademic achievement, particularly of disad-vantaged children, and to encourage the inte-gration of students of different ethnic originsand scholastic backgrounds within the frame-work of the school. In Israel that means inte-grating students from high achieving NorthAmerican/European backgrounds with thosefrom Asian/African backgrounds. Structurallya changc from 8/4 to 6/313 (elementary highschool to elementary/junior high/high school)took place. Unselective admission to an inte-grated district junior high school was guaranteedto all pupils who had completed the sixth gradein a neighbourhood elementary school. Bysetting new school districts, we intended tomake these schools heterogeneous in terms ofsocio-cconomic status (SES) and ethnic originsof thc students. A four-year comprehensivefollow-up study was conducted to evaluatethc Reform.

The problem

It is realized today that one of the difficulties infinding a scientific basis for confronting prob-lems of educational planning is that of locatingthe problem, defining and identifying the de-cisions and actions that might effectively narrowthc gap between reality and desirability. Fol-lowing Rittel and Webber,' planning problemswill be distinguished as 'wicked' and 'tame'.The distinction should not be seen as aneither/or situation or a dichotomy, but ratheras a continuum. Hence, each question will be

2,

answered in tcrms of degreehow 'wicked' orhow 'tame' each problem is. Ten distinct

asscsscd below in these terms,end with profiles of planning

properties areand wc thusproblems:Can the problem be definitively formulated?

The more 'wicked' the problem thc lessdefinitively it can be formulated, since inorder to understand a problem it is necessaryto have an idea of all its conceivable solutions.The goals of the Israeli Educational Reformwere defined, but there was no direct defi-nition of the problem. Several problems wereimplied: the academic achievement gaps be-tween different groups of students, generallow academic achievements, the danger ofsocial tension, etc.

Is there a criterion, an end rule, which tells uswhen a solution has been found? Again, thevaguer the criterion, the more 'wicked' thcplanning problem. The end rule of the Re-form is a structural/teclmical one, i.e. whenall schools in the country have been re-structcd. However, the attcmpt at socialintcgration, as well as the improvement ofscholastic achievement, has essentially noend rule.

Are the answers to the problem true or false oron a good-or-bad scale? 'Wicked' problemsarc based on value judgements rather than onobjective criteria. Indeed, the Israeli Edu-cational Rcform was accompanied by a com-prehensive evaluation which submitted sev-eral interim reports and a final one. Eachwas followed by a nationwide socio-politicaldiscussion of its results and implications.AlthoLgh the reports wcrc based on quanti-tative results, the discussions around them,even between the researchers themselves,were mainly value-based.

Do wc have immediate and ultimate tests toevaluate solutions? For 'wicked' problems,solutions arc hard to appraise, since im-plementation itself will raise waves of on-going consequences. The evaluation of theIsraeli Educational Rcform continued forfour years; it has now formally ended, butits demise was an arbitrary decision based on

Educational planning problems, decision-making and commumcation 231

political expediency and budgetary con-straints. There is today a continuing processof evaluation, where data is gathered forfuture analysis, on the assumption that theproof of this nationwide reform lies far inthe future.

Is the solution a 'one-shot operation', or acontinuing trial-and-error learning process?Every implementation solution to a 'wicked'planning problem is consequential. Everytrial counts. One of the big debates about theIsraeli Reform concerned the fact that it isan irreversible act; it cannot be tested on atrial-and-error basis. And even if it werereversed in the future for this generation ithas been a 'one-shot operation'.

Do we have a fully-exhaustive set of poten-tial solutions? For `wicked' planning prob-lems, definable solutions are not possible.The Israeli Reform essentially followed thcAmerican educational structure (6/3/3), but,the comprehensive schools, which includevocational streams, and the continuing devel-opment of separate vocational schools, arepatterned after the British and French sys-tcms. This is mainly a structural consider-ation, but for the unique ingredient of theneeded curriculum development, teacher-training and parcnts' involvement, no set ofpotential solutions exist.

Is the planning problem unique? Here, despitemany similarities between 'wicked' plan-ning problems, each is essentially unique.Although many attempts were made tocompare the Israeli Educational Reform toother rcforms, such as those in the UnitedKingdom, Sweden and the contcmporary onein France, it was found that in the lastanalysis, in spite of many similarities, it isunique. Experience from other cases maybe applied only in very general terms, andvery little about the implementational processitself is applicable.

Arc planning problems a symptom of otherproblems? 'Wicked' problems tend to bcsymptomatic because of our inability todevelop full causal explanations. Obviouslythe planning problem of the Reform reflects

other historical, socio-political problemsforinstance, the basic gaps between social groups,the relatively segregated neighbourhoods andpublic prejudices.

Can the planning problem be explained in differ-ent ways? The importance of this criterion liesin the assumption that choosing the expla-nation wi'.1 determine to a great extent thenature of the solution. If, indeed, the problemis a symptom of a combination of many fac-tors, which is quite common in education, thechoice of explanation is arbitrary. Actually,the planning system will tend to choose thoseexplanations for which implementation seemsmost feasiblein other words, the 'tamest'explanation. It is well known that social in-tegration, increasing scholastic achievementsand narrowing the achievement gaps betweenstudents from different backgrounds are verycomplicated processes, and there is no oneexplanation for thcm. It is also well knownthat they are the result of many and diverseinteractions. However, it is found again andagain, as in thc Israeli Educational Reform,that the main effort of planning is investedin one aspectin the Israeli case, the struc-tural one. In this case, structural change wasconsidered necessary, but obviously not suf-ficient. It was to serve as a catalyst, trig-gering off new proccsses. However, as always,when the main effort is put on the 'tame'part of the problem, the 'wicked' parts, whichmight also be critical, arc neglected.

Does the planner have the right to be wrong?If it is a general principle of science thatsolutions arc only hypotheses to be refutedlater, 'wicked' educational planning problems,which arc not intended to fmd the truth butrathcr to solve practical social problems, arcnot immune. The succcss of the Israeli Edu-cational Reform is often considered a politi-cal issue, and is discussed more frequently inpolitical rather than educational terms.

Once implementation of the l dorm, which isa long-range change, has begun it can no longerbc considered solely as an attempt to fulfil itsobjectives; it is conceived as the best solutionavailable. Hence, an analysis of the Israeli Edu-

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232 Dan Inbar

cational Reform clearly points to the 'wicked-ness' of the planning problem. Moreover, pro-files of social planning problems in general, andeducational ones in particular, tend to be rela-tively 'wicked'. This fact has, of course, directimplications for thc decision-making and im-plementation processes which will bc discussedbelow.

At this point three things should be empha-sized. As stated above, rarely will a problembe clear-cut 'tame' or 'wicked' and the resultingprofiles established with each criterion analysedas a continuum might provide a better tool toget at the nature of the problems and improveour understanding of the necessary planningstrategics. Second, all aspects of any plan, acomprehensive plan in particular, should bcanalysed separately and a separate profile estab-lished for cach. For instance, the structural sideof the Educational Reform discussed here hasa much 'tamer' profile than thc facets whichdeal with teaching heterogeneous classes. Itshould not be surprising that the structuralaspects received the most attention, were thefocus of thc Reform, and only later was em-phasis placed on the educational process itself.This brings us to the third po:nt. Since 'wicked'planning problems are characterized by a highdegree of uncertainty, it is inevitable that intranslating them into action, efforts will bcmade to 'tame' them. This might be relatedto conflicts, and might raisc unforeseen conse-quences, since the decisions will bc, in the lastanalysis, political in nature.

The decisions

March and Simon distinguish four basictypes of decisionsthose of acceptability, unac-ceptability, incomparability and uncertaintybased on the ability to identify preferredalternatives as a function of the different prob-abilities of a choice resulting in positive ornegative results.The acceptable alternative, which among the

alternatives of action is clearly better thanall others, and good enough to be accepted.

Under such ideal conditions decision-makingcan bc expected to be quite routine. Howeverconsidering thc 'wickedness' of educationalproblems, the situation in educational plan-ning is not often ideal. The other three situ-ations arc thus more relevant.

In the unacceptable casc the probability dis-tributions of outcomes associated with eachalternative arc known, and a preferred alterna-tive can be identified without difficulty, butthe preferred alternative does not meet anacceptable standard. Unfortunately in edu-cational planning decisions in such situationshave to be made, whether or not thealternatives arc satisfactory. It is often acase of choosing the least of several evils.Consequently, implementation will bc con-tinuously challenged.

In educational planning, the situation of incom-parability seems to be a frequent problem.Here, the probability distributions of out-comes arc known, but there is no way toidentify the preferable alternative. Differentalternatives of action may involve equallyexpected outcomes, or, more commonly, thealternatives themselves arc very likely to pro-duce both positive and negative outcomes.In turning back to the Educational Reform,it seems that thc alternatives the decision-makers were faced with were best charac-terized as incomparable. Indeed, the longsearch for thc best alternative produced sev-eral, and in the end, the decision was apolitical one, obtruded by a strong politicalfigure. In such a situation it could be pre-dicted that no evaluation project on a givenreform will end up with unequivocal results.

In a situation characterized by uncertainty, theprobability distributions of the outcomes ofthe various alternative actions arc not known.This situation, together with thc precedingone, is characteristic of most educational plan-ning situations.

If, indeed, educational planning problenis havea 'wicked' profile, incomparability and uncer-tainty will be unavoidable. Plans may be de-veloped on the basis of expertise, but the de-cisions to implement them will he politically

Educational planning problems, decision-making and communication

determined, that is, on the basis of subjectivepreference. Successful implementation of edu-cational plans cannot bc based solely on com-pliance and administrative machinery, but hasto be widely accepted and based on broadinvolvement and participation. Thc problem ofcommunicating thc plan is thus brought intofocus.

Communicating change

Diez-Hochleitnerl defines planning as an atti-tude reflecting the desire for orderly hangeand the formation of a strategy by which thechange can be brought about. Along this lineof thought, planning can be seen as a messagestating the process of change, and implemen-tation is the message's formal expression. Aplan is a set of symbols embodying some ar-ticulated attitude. Educational planning can beconsidered as a proccss through which thecommunication of shared symbols createsintent.

As states above, educational plans tend to becharacterized by a 'wicked' profile, with nodefinitive formulation, no ends to causal chainsand there are no immediate or ultimate tests forsuggested solutions. Hence, educational planscan never fully convey the contents of theirmessages. They vary with the way in whichthey are perceived. Educational planning is notonly an expression but an impression, and thesuccess of thc whole planning implementationcycle will depend greatly on the interactionbetween the two.

Educational planning is always interrelatedwith the socio-political sphere; the question isto v. hat degree the plan takes this fact intoaccount. Indeed, onc of the main weaknessesof many of the 'blueprint' development plansis their negligence of unique socio-political con-texts Practically speaking, far less emphasisshould bc placed on the plan code, that is,Its professionalized language and rationales, andmore on the specific addressee of the plan, andthe contacts between people, groups, adminis-n ative units and organizations. Unfortunately,

233

today there is a need to appear to be advocatingrationality, which is highly prized and rewardedand has an almost magical quality of truth andobjectivity, and effort is invested in developingmodels, rathcr than contacts, involvement andcommitment.

Educational planning should be considereda mode of action, a negotiating process. Fromthis practical angle, the evaluation of the plan-ning process, cannot wait for its output analysis,but will have to rcspond immediately to suchquertions as 'Is it or is it not opening newchannels of communication?' or 'Is it or is itnot stimulating new dialogues?'.

A good deal of attention svas given to theopcning of dialogue channels in the Israeli Edu-cational Reform. It was long debated, analysed,discussed and approved by Parliament itself.The committee heard the views of the teachers'unions, experts, parents, administrators andpoliticians. Thc list in thc Parliament CommitteeReport' seems to include every conceivableinterested party.

The implementation of the Reform still metwith some public opposition (and several Su-preme Court Appeals), but the main messageof the Reform went through. The public debatewent from 'integration, why and if' to 'inte-gration, how'.

Because planning has a 'wicked' profile, andthe alternatives in decision-making arc incom-parable, its test is limited to how well it explainsthe difficulties of implementation, en the onehand, and how well it indicates ways to improvethat implementation on thc other. When thcplanning process is in practicc identified withthe political process, an attempt is made to makesure that the implementation process will itselfbe perceived by the public as a success. Herean interesting point emerges. Planning is be-coming increasingly accepted and essential tothe decision-making systems, but it is only itscontribution to implementation that is con-sidered; it is disregarded in the actual selectionof alternatives. The distinction between feasibleand possible is blurred, and the planning processfocuses on thc implementation phase. The prob-lem is that thc implementation process itself

Bh6i (Milt AVAILABLL 2,,

git

234 IMn Inbar

often modifies or moulds new educational goalsin trying to justify implementation and itsoutcomes.

Towards linkage planning

Since there is no way to build a comprehensiveand iational strategy of educational planningin decision-making situations of uncertainty,incomparability and 'wicked' profiles, a 'linkageplanning strategy should be developed. Linkageplanning would be based on several plans, eachfairly independent in its implementation, andeach comprising a relatively controllable unit.Supporting systems would be provided for eachlink, which should be based on a developedcommunication network.

However, we need to keep in mind the factthat comprehensive plans are technically dividedinto stages or phases, which are dependent partsof a more comprehensive plan, whereas linksshould have a common orientation but be rela-tively independent. For such links it is easierto build a communication network, and to in-volve and demand commitment from those uponwhom implementation depends.

In many of the educational planning pro-cesses described above, there is no way to avoidthe exploratory nature of implementation. Thechallenge is to build an implementation networkthat will be flexible enough to accommodatethe dynamics of such an exploratory process.Undoubtedly in such linking planning strategy,it will be necessary to develop and establishco-ordinating mechanisms for the interchangeof information to activate the supporting sys-tems, to synchronize the actions of thc variouslinks, and, in some cases, to try to tie thc linkstogether. But it is clear that linkage planningstrategy is not based on linear sequences ofactions, and overlapping is unavoidable. In away, the strength of the chain is in the over-lapping of its links.

Pitfalls in implementation

Every planning problem has its characteristicpitfalls, its hidden dancers and snares, and noanalysis of educational planning is acceptableunless it recognizes them. The following pitfallsmight serve as suggestions for research on theimplementation process:The process leading from the initial formulation

of the planning problem to the recommendedimplementation sti ategy is very complex, andthere are several pitfalls for which to look.For example, such complexity might re-inforce the tendency to compromise and toemphasize feasibility.

Since many educational planning problems are'wicked', thc choice among definitions, bound-aries, and alterratives for tcatment are notestablished on objective bases, and are vul-nerable to pitfalls. Perhaps the more 'tame'aspects arc preferred, and there may be atendency to focus on marginal questions, onthe more feasible aspects rather than thcmore important oncs.

Most educational planning decisions have to betaken in situations of incomparability, un-certainty, and therefore stress, which maylead to the delay pitfall, or to pitfalls ofcompromised dccisions.

The complexities of educational planning mightlead to the development of over-sophisticated(abstract) plans, open to qualitative bias, andto thc pitfall of status at thc price of non-communication.

As far as pitfalls in communication are con-cerned, several questions should be askedhere. First, i educational planning orientedtowards a multiple audience, or to a mono-lithic one (i.e. thc pitfall of the addresser)?Second, are contact nctworks of implemen-tation takcn into consideration (i.e. the pitfallof inner strength and rationale)? Third, hasthe tneaning of the plan changed during theprocess of communication (i.e. the pitfall ofperception)?

Costs arc of course central to all these consider-ations. 'Tame' aspects arc easier to be trans-

Educational planning problems, decision-malung and commumcation

lated into costs and benefits, and this fact,as we have pointed out, may bias decisions,thc costs of solving 'tame' problems arcdifficult to compare with the benefits ofsolving the 'wicked' ones, and pitfalls areunavoidable. Concentrating on overcomingthem might even discourage creativity. Butthe recognition and understanding of pitfallsinherent in educational planning and im-plementation arc important.

Notes

International Institute for Educational Planning,Alediumt.rm plan 1984-1989, Paris, lIFP, 1984

(11E1' INI. 84 A2 II X. Rotel and M \Vebber, 'Dilemmas III a

Ceneral l'heoiv of Planning', l'olny S,1,11... Vol 4.

9-1, pp I CCI)3 I March and II A Sim,,n, Ness York.,

Wiles , tos8

4 K Diva -Hos Wenner, 'Educattonal planning'. Eionomicand So, hit Aspc,tr of Educational Planning, p Parts,

Unesco, 19114

rhe Report of the Parliament Committee for Examiningthe Nementai y and Secondary Israeli Educa tumal

Structure, Jerusalem, The Knesset. See also M. Chen,A. lesey and C. Adler, Process and I hacorne, inEdmauenal l'racrue. to the Evaluation of the MiddleDivision of the Educational System, Hebrew Univer-sity of Jerusalem, 1971; D. Inbar, 'The Israel, Edu-cational Reform The Paradox. of Feasible Pbnning',COmparatit e kdu,aflos Ret ICW, Vol. 25, No. I, 1981,

PP 13- 27

235

Integrated developmentof human resources

and educational planningVinayagum Chinapah, Jan-Ingvar Löfstedt and Hans Weiler

The nature of the task

The principal objective of this article is to draw some conclusionsfrom the critical assessment of educational planning in which theauthors and others have been involved over the years (cf. Weiler,1980; Levin, 1980; Chinapah and Löfstedt, 1983). This criticalassessment has focused not only on the process and outcome ofeducational planning itself, but on some of the broader assumptionsand premises about education and the dev. 'vment of humanresources on which the theory and practice of educational planning

Vinayagum Chinapah (Mauritius). Associate Professor of Education and DeputyDirector of the Institute of International Education, University of Stockholm. He hasworked as a consultalt to Unesco, the Swedish International Development Agency( SIDA ), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)and the International Development Research Centre (1DRC) in a number of countriesin Africa and Asia. Author and co-author of numerous books and articles on ediscationalevaluation and monitoring, student achievement, human resource development, andeducational planning, administration and management.

Jan-Ingvar Lafstedt (Sweden). Associate Professor of Education at the Institute ofInternational Education, University of Stockholm. Ile has worked as researcher andconsultant to the World Bank, Unesco and the Swedish International DevelopmentAgency (SIDA ) in a number of countries in Asia and Africa. He has published bookson Chinese education (Red and Expert, Chinese Educational Policy) and articles oneducational planning, human resource development, and Chinese education.

Hans Weiler ( United States). Professor of Education and Political Science andDirector of the Stanford International Development Education Committee (SIDEC)at Stanford University. Ile is former Director of Unesco's International Institute forEducational Planning (IIEP ) in Paris. Author of numerous articles and publicationson educational planning and reform.

Prolpecn, Vol. XIX, No. I, 19892

2 38 Vinayagum Chinapah, 7an-Ingvar 1.3fstedr and Hans Weiler

has been based. In other words: The shortcomings of educationalplanning are seen as having their roots not just in the process itself,but also in the conditions under which, and thc context in which,it operates.

The main argument of this article is that, for educational planningto become a more effective tool in the development of humanresources, it will have to re-establish its linkages with a broaderrange of human competence beyond what is needed in the world ofwork, and become part of a wider array of social and educationalinterventions both within and beyond the formal education system.

'The conceptual key to this argument lies in a re-interpretationof thc notion of human resources and their development. Thisre-interpretation recognizes the need for thinking of human resourcesdevelopment as encompassing a much wider range of human com-petence, that is, not only the kinds of competence that are relevantto productive work in the economic sector, but also those that humanbeings need to protect and improve people's health, to keep popu-lation growth within reasonable limits, to sustain and developcultural traditions and identities, to enjoy recreational activities, toput nutritional resources to the best possible use, to preserve a lesshazardous and endangered environment, andlast but not leasttoassume and play an active role as a citizen. All of these kinds ofcompetence constitute, in the aggregate, a society's 'human resources'.To develop these resources presents a major challenge for a societyand for those agencies which, like the education system, have aspecial mandate to contribute to this development. At the same time,this re-interpretation of the notion of human resources needs torecognize that the entire burden of this encompassing task cannotbe carried by the formal education system alone, but is being, andhas to be, shared by a numbcr of other mechanisms and institutionsas well: various 'informal' educational activities, literacy programmes,grassroots movements of various kinds, community developmentprogrammes, the family, various training programmes and the media.

it is along these two dimcnsions, broadening the range of humancompetence with which human resource development would concernitself and expanding the range of strategies or 'interventions' fordeveloping such competence, that we shall need to construct a newmatrix of human resource development. This article will show howsuch a new conception of human resource development will lead:(a) to a new form of planning, 'human competence developmentplanning', which would guide, co-ordinate and integrate the differentsubsectors of human resource development; ()) to a new meaning of'education' as one of the key interventions in the development andimprovement of human resources; and (c) against the background of

Integrated development of human resources and educational planning 239

both (a) and (b), to a more appropriate and effective notion ofeducational planning.

Before moving to the task of developing a new matrix of humanresource development, this first part will review and summarize theevidence on the inadequacies and problems of a notion of educationalplanning that is predicated on an overly narrow conception ofhuman-resource development. This evidence is of two kinds: first, aset of observations and conclusions on problems internal to thestructures and processes of educational planning, to be followed thenby an analysis of the problems and, indeed, crises that have emergedin the environment of educational planning and policy.

EDUCATIONAL PLANNING:THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM

The empirical basis for the problems identified in this section isderived from surveys conducted in recent years in African and Asiancountries in a project supported by the Swedish Agency for ResearchCo-operation with Developing Countries (SAREC) bascd at theInstitute of International Education at the University of Stockholm(Chinapah and Löfstedt, 1983, 1985). For purposes of this diagnostic,we treat separately a number of aspccts, such as the various imbal-ances of educational planning, the problems in the informationsystem, participation and decentralization in planning, mismatchesin the supply and demand of manpower, and the major problems ofeducational financing.

Imbalances in educational .planning

In its institutional infrastructure, educational planning tends to sufferfrom major vertical and horizontal imbalances in terms of resources,responsibilities, and functions. Along the vertical dimension,educational planning is often highly centralized and hierarchical,which leads to the less than optimal utilization of human andmaterial resources and effectively creates a substantial cleavagebetween planning and the base of the education system. Decision-making authority and control tend to be concentrated at the top,with very little delegation of authority, whP often makes officersat the centre overburdened with relatively minor decisions whichcould have been taken at lower levels and for which they also lackadequate information. Shortages of sufficiently qualified staff atlower levels arc another reason why decision-making is referredupwards and away from the actual implementation situation. Many

4.

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240 Vihayagum Chinapah, lan-Ingvar Ldfstedz and Hans Weiler

governments have tried to compensate for lack of qualified staff byproviding rules and regulations to guide the work at lower levels,which tends to create a rigid climate and to stifle the initiative andjudgement of individual officers.

At a horizontal level, a growing bureaucracy with ever morespecialized functions has also led to the increasing compartmental-ization of administration and decision-making, which makes inter-ministerial and inter-departmental co-ordination even more difficultthan before.

As a result of socio-economic bias in the recruitment for civil-service positions, the educational planning and policy-making systemtends to bc staffed predominantly by members of the upper socialstrata. It is usually also dominated by men. Lower-status socialclasses, castcs, ethnic and religious groups as well as women tendto be grossly under-represented among planning and policy staff.These socio-economic, cultural, ethnic and gender imbalances helpsustain, in turn, biases in staff recruitment, the definition of problems,the identification of priorities and the design of solutions. Theseimbalances also may be related to a lack of awareness of existing socio-economic biases in the provision of education across social, ethnic andregional groups, and of the lack of sex equality. The planning staffthus fails to monitor the system properly and to develop appropriateindicators (for example, student achievement by socio-econornicstatus, ethnicity and gender), which would be needed to eliminate orreduce existing imbalances. Large reserves of human resources amongthe poor and among women thus remain under-utilized in thcplanning, management and delivery of education, and most cdu-cation/training development projects lack an orientation towards theparticular situation of women and the poor.

A related dimension of imbalance in educational planning andpolicy manifests itself in the failure to achieve a rational distributionof staff both vertically and horizontally. Many highly qm.ifiedofficers arc conccntrated at the top and thc centre, which is the mostattractive, and the result is a shortage of adequately trained staff atlower levels of the administration and in outlying areas. Anotherreason for this maldistribution is the promotion and transfer practicein most planning organizations, which tends to lead to a brain drainfrom lower to higher and more central levels in the system.

As will be discussed below, the heavy involvement of many devel-oping countries in external assistance programmes leads to a situationwhere, among the central-level officers, an inordinate number ofqualified staff arc absorbed by the planning and implemeatation ofexternally funded projects at thc expense of non-aided projects andprogrammes. In many countrics, large numbers of expatriate special-

251

Integrated development of human resources and educational planning

ists tend to be involved in central-level planning, thus blockingpromotion avenues and delaying the 'focalization' of staff.

Shortcomings in the information system

The information base and the data for educational planning are ofteninadequate in terms of both the present state of the education systemand the tendencies and projections for its future development. Evenin such seemingly 'easy' tasks as projecting the need for teachers onthe basis of student demographics, planners have been frustrated bytheir failure to take into account such factors as migration into andout of the teaching profession or the shifts in the role of womenvis-à-vis the teaching force. The reasons for these shortcomings haveto do not only with lack of facilities or technical training and withthe difficulties of predicting socio-economic trends, but also withissues of orientation and approach. The collection and analysis ofinformation for educational purposes is subject to a variety of biasesin terms of methodology and the definition of what is and is notrelevant information. There is usually more emphasis on quantitativethan on qualitative data, and more stress on easily measurable criteriaand indicators even though they are less significant. Dropout andretention rates may bc registered, but without their socio-economic,ethnic, linguistic and gender correlates. These various informationbiases reflect in many cases both the dominance of particular researchand information paradigms, and the socio-political imbalances in thecomposition and deployment of planning staff.

Participatory planning and decentralization

Devolution of planning tasks and more participatory planning areseen (or at least professed) by many governments as ways to reducethe central bureaucracy, promote democracy and equity, adjusteducational provisions to the needs of users and mobilize localresources. In order to be successful, however, they must meet anumbcr of requirements which arc often overlooked or neglected.Devolution is seldom accompanied by a corresponding upgrading oflocal-level resources (staff, infrastructurc, etc.). The delegation ofdecision-making power and even the transfer of material resourcesmay be of no avail if there is no adequate capacity at the local level.

Decentralization also presupposes improved co-ordination in orderto avoid undcsircd effects such as increased regional disparities dueto an uneven distribution of resources. Decentralized dccision-makingand planning also require familiarity with, and commitment to,democratic procedures and praxis to allow different local interests afair chance to exercise their influence. Thc experience of many devel-

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24 2 Vinayagum Chinapah, Yan-Ingvar Lofstedt and Hans Weiler

oping countries suggests that socio-economically more advancedregions and elites tend to benefit the most from decentralization anddevolution. Decentralization thus tends to be implemented on theterms of the strong and to the detriment of the weak.

Educational planning, manpower needs and employment

Very few education systems in developing countries arc truly success-ful in providing the right types of qualification in the right quantityto the right people at the right time. Reasons for this mismatchinclude both technical inefficiencies in thc education system and inthe planning structure, and the imbalances referred to above. How-ever, there is also a political problem of distribution since a largenumber of people in a given society compete for relatively scarceeducational services and opportunities. Political pressure inside andoutside the education system is common and may take many differentforms. Funds allocated for the expansion of primary education, forinstance, have been known to be diverted to secondary and tertiaryeducation as a result of political pressure from the urban middleclass. Other well-known problems include the relative oversupplyof highly trained manpower as a result of rapid expansion of highereducation, and the increase in the percentage of unemployed andunderemployed school-leavers in many areas. Common deficienciesin the provision of manpower have to do with: (a) the undersupplyof middle-level manual/technical manpower; (b) an oversupply ofmiddle-level white-collar manpowcr; and (c) an oversupply of high-level manpower, especially of graduates of the arts and humanities,combined with a simultaneous shortage in certain other areas suchas agriculture and forestry.

Many developing countries face great difficulties in achievingoptimal horizontal distribution of manpower across different sectors,both within the modern sector and between the modern and tra-ditional sectors. Equally difficult seems to be the problem of thevertical distribution of manpower, or how to gear educational outputto the optimal structure of the labour force by skill levels. Policy-makers and planners in many countrics seem to lack thc propermethods and techniques to assess correctly the ratios betweenhigh-, middle-, and low-level manpower, given the existing level oftechnology. Obviously, the problem of correctly projecting thesupply of manpower vertically or horizontally relates not only tothe output capacity of the education system, but also to existingvocational guidance and labour-exchange services which tend to berather inefficient. As a result, the problem of providing employmentto graduates in relevant fields seems to be considerable in both

Integrated development of human resources and educational planning

socialist and free-market systems. A Chinese study found that out ofabout a million graduates from colleges and vocational schools in theearly 19S0s, less than half were actually working some years laterin the fields they had been trained for (Löfstedt, 1986, p. 14).

Finance and planning

The effective integration of budgeting and planning has alwaysbeen one of the more difficult parts of the policy process in education.While the lack of such integration is serious enough under the bestof circumstances, it becomes a matter of grave concern in periods ofincreasingly severe resource constraint (Lewin, 1987). The followingare only the most prominent manifestations of the problem whichmany developing countries encounter:A lack of recognition of the importance of educational development

resulting in inadequate allocations of financial resources to edu-cation.

Late disbursements by central agencies causing delays in programmeimplementation.

Ad hoc reallocations of funds during the plan period (as a result ofchanged priorities, demands, political pressure, etc.) causingdisturbances in programme implementation.

The difficulty of managing and co-ordinating funds coming fromdifferent sources (public, private, external, local, ctc.), which leadsto the ineffective and haphazard distribution of financial resources.

A lack of central funds which may tempt governments into under-taking premature decentralization (to encourage local fund-raising)or into promoting the privatization of education (which may solvesome financial problems but at the same time create new problemsof co-ordination and planning).

The inventory of problems presented in this section is by no meansexhaustive, but suggests the range of problems which the practiceof educational planning in many developing countries has encoun-tered. Some of these problems are of a more 'technical' or organiz-ational nature, and could be seen as resulting from deficienciesin existing structures and processes which, at least in theory, could beremedied. Other problems seem to bc of a more functional or'organic' kind in that they reflect conditions and cleavages of thewider socio-cconomic and political system of which educationalplanning is a part. Sonic of the staffing patterns discussed aboveseem to be of this kind. Whatever strengths or weaknesses edu-cational planning may have cannot be adequately understood withoutunderstanding the dynamics and constraints prevailing in its

environment.

'4)

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244 Vinayagum Chinapah, Jan-lngvar Lofstedt and Hans Weiler

PROBLEMS AND CRISES IN THE ENVIRONMENTOF EDUCATIONAL PLANNING

As the previous section has shown, educational planning has had agood share of its own problems, problems that have to do with theway in which thc process of educational planning is conceived,organized, structurcd, carried out and evaluated. If these were theonly problems, however, they might be remedied by somc internalreforms of the educational planning operation itself; indeed, therehas been some improvement over the years in such mattcrs as theinformation base for educational planning, the quality of planningstaff, the sophistication of projections, ctc. (see Psacharopoulosand Woodhall, 1985).

While such reforms in the internal workings of educationalplanning have helped, they fail to address the full nature of theproblem. For educational planning, just as education itself, isdeeply affected by its environment, by the kinds of problems andcrises that have emerged in the social and political context of edu-cation systems. It would carry us beyond thc scope of this article toengage in a more detailed discussion of this environment and itscrises, but of particular significance for our argument here are:(a) the crisis of thc state: (b) the crisis of thc production and utiliz-ation of knowledge; and (c) the crisis of the system of internationaldevelopment co-operation.

The crisis of the state

To put the issue in the shortest possible form, the modern state,in developed and developing societies alike, is 'overloaded' (Rose,I980). The demands placed upon the state arc constantly increasing,while its capacity to respond adequately remains at best constantand often declines as a result of declining real resources, greatercomplexity of its tasks, and greater controversy about both the endsand the means of the policy process (Habermas, 1975; Wolfe, 1977;Weiler, 1978). The implications of this 'crisis of legitimacy' foreducational policy and planning are of two kinds. As the socialdemand for education continues to play a powerful role in the socialdynamics of most countries, the delivery of education servicesbecomes an important indicator and symbol for thc state's willingnessand ability to respond to the needs of it% people, and thus plays acritical role in the overall strategy of the state to retain both itspower and its legitimacy.

2'60


The crisis of knowledge production and utilization

It has always been an article of faith, at least at the level of rhetoric,that knowledge and research were an integral and indispensableelement of the policy process, in education as elsewhere, and thatgood planning needed good- research just as healthy children needgood nutrition. The reality of that relationship between knowledgeand action, between research and planning has always been prob-lematic. In the special case of educational planning, the relationshiphas been particularly problematic, at a number of different levels.First of all, the knowledge and information base of educationalplanning has been notoriously poor.

At a second level, educational planning has generally found it verydifficult to absorb and utilize such research as does exist on therelationship between education and work, on the determinants ofeducational outcomes, on the nature of decision and rcsource allo-cation processes in complex organizations.

Finally, educational planning has not functioncd at all as a stimulusor a catalyst in a world of research which, as far as education isconcerned, is badly in need of stimulation and re-thinking.

The crisis of international development co-operation

Aid under both bilateral and multilateral auspices has p.2yed quitean important role in the development of education in the ThirdWorld. Although limited in quantitative terms (roughly to per centof total educational expenditures), the association of educational aidwith technical assistance and expertise and the 'model' character ofmany aid-supported projects have helped to make the impact of aidsignificantly larger than the mere figures would suggest.

But the resource issue is only one, and not even thc most critical,aspect of what looks like a serious crisis in international developmentco-operation. At least as important arc: first, a considerable deterio-ration in the relationship and interaction between donor agency andrecipient countries, particularly over issues of tied aid and overconditions and modalities of aid agreements; second, the increasingdebate over whether the existing system of international developmentco-operation makes any sense; and, finally, the role of external aid asa vehicle for importing alien cultural elements.

THE GAP BETWEEN EDUCATIONAL PLANNINGAND THE INTEGRATED DEVELOPMENT OF HUMAN RESOURCES

The preceding sections have provided a brief overview of some ofthc major shortcomings, fallacies, and crises in educational planning.

246 Vinayagunt Chmapah, Yan-Immar Ltifstedt and Hans Weiler

These shortcoming , have been seen in part as a function of weaknessesand inadequacies 'n the internal functioning of educational planning,and in part as a i efiection of much broader problems which pervadethe political, economic, research and international environmentwithin which educational policy is being made. In this section, wcwill return to one of the claims made at the outset, namely, thateducational planning is predicated on, and tends to reinforce, anoverly narrow conception of human resource development.

Inspired by human-capital theorists and economists of education,the conceptual, methodological, and empirical 'classics' on edu-cational planning have tended to concentrate on purely economiccriteria for ascertaining the roles and functions of educationformalschooling as a source of skills, qualifications and certifications relevantto the domain of production (see, Shultz, 1964; Psacharopoulos,1973; Blaug, 1968). Educational planning had to be geared towardsthe manpower required for the economic growth of society, humanbeings wcre to be madc more productive and educational planningwas seen in this context as a vital instrumcnt for gearing educationaldevelopment towards the economic needs of society. Althoughsevere doubts and criticisms were raised on the limited roles andfunctions attributed to educational planning in the process of humanresource development, evidence shows that thc application ofcconomic rationales for hum in resource development rcmains up tothe present a powerful maxim in thc theory and practice of edu-cational planning (see Youdi and Hinchliffe, 1985; Lourié, 1985).

Notwithstanding attcmpts in different directions, the fact rcmainsthat a primarily economic analysis of education has tended to distortthe very conception of the human element in the process of develop-ment. Recognizing this limitation, efforts were made in the 1970s toredefine human resource development in terms of a strategy forsatisfying basic human needs (Chinapah and Fagerlind, 1979). Thcwhole purpose of development was not to be to develop things butto develop man. In this context, educational planning was seen asinstrumental in thc process of an all-round development of humanbeings, intellectually, socially, politically, morally, aesthetically andphysically. It seems fair to say that this earlier effort at re-conceptualizing the notion of human resource development awayfrom a purely economic construct has had limited impact on thereality of educational policy and planning.

t


Concepts and policiesfor the development of human competence

This section of the article addresses the task of rethinking not justof the nature, thcory and practice of educational planning, but ofour conception of development altogether, and of the ways inwhich human beings relate to it, by generating, against the back-ground of the diagnostic performed in the previous section, a con-ception of development based on the notion of human competence.This conception will, in turn, lead to a new and different understandingof the role of planning in the development of human resources aswell as the role of educational planning for the development ofhuman competence.

THE HUMAN FACTOR IN THE DEVELOPMENT MATRIX

The concept of development underlying the notion of human com-petence is predicated on the role of people as autonomous participantsin the process of social change and improvement, capable (com-petent) of both understanding the complex dynamics of developmentprocesses and of affecting and influencing the direction of theseprocesses (Gran, 1983). Just as 'development' has many facets, thchuman capabilities and competencies required to participate activelyin these different facets range as widely. Once we understand devel-opment as no longer limited to the realm of economic production andconsumption, but as also including such things as the sustenanceof cultural traditions and identities, the quality and ease of inter-personal and intergroup communication and action, the inculcationand growth of active and critical citizenship, the possibility forrecreation and creative uses of leisure time, and thc achievementand preservation of good health, the range of 'human competence'required to sustain this wide array of development objectives expandscorrespondingly. To achieve this range of human competence in aconcerted, coherent fashion thus becomes a major policy challenge.To plan for this concerted effort gives a new and both more ambitiousand exciting meaning to the old notion of human resource develop-ment. Inasmuch as education plays a role in bringing about this ncwrange of human competence, educational planning would become anintegral part of this new overall effort at the planning of humancompetence development, and we shall deal later with what this willentail for the future of educational planning as We know it.

But let us return for a moment to thc overall concept. One of thc

o r

248 Vinayagum Chinapah, Jan-Ingvar LOfitedt and Hans Weiler

Intervention

Generaleducation

Vocationaltraining

On-the-jobtraining

Familyupbringing

Communitydevelopment

Litcracymovement

Massmcdia

Areas of human competence

Work Study Health Culture Polity Environment Peace

Culturalinstitutions

FIG. 1. Types of intervention and areas of human competence.

elements of the new concept of development is the multiplicity anddiversity of human competence that is required to sustain the idealof the autonomous, active participant in the development process.In Figure t, the most important among these areas of human com-petence are indicated across the top of the matrix. While these do notnecessarily cover all the capabilities that would be needed, theywould seem to represent the most significant ones. They are probablyself-explanatory, but it may be important to emphasize oncc morethat, while many of these capabilities are related to one another, theyalso represent objectives in their own right. For example, it is obviousthat poor health and nutrition will have a detrimental effect on aperson's ability to participate in the process of economic production.At the same time, however, there is absolute and independent valuein sustaining peoples' health and physical well-being regardless ofits impact on their productive abilities.

The point of the matrix in Figure t is precisely to visualize thiscomplex relationship between, on the one hand, the objectives ofdeveloping competence across the full range of human activity and,on the other hand, the array of strategies that are available to achievethose objectives. These strategies can be identified in terms of their

0 r, J't.)


institutional source (family, school, media, etc.) or in terms of thekind of intervention (resource allocation, literacy training, regulation,publication, etc.). For purposes of illustration, the matrix in Figureincludes examples of both. Each 'cell' of this matrix represents amore specific instance of intervention; for example, the productionof a nationwide magazine for newly literate people would appropri-ately represent an intersection between the 'literacy' strategy and theobjective of better social communication competence; similarly, onemight think of the combination of different strategies for achieving aparticular objective, as in a combined media and educational cam-paign in favour of ccrtain family planning programmes; the devel-opment of competence regarding nutrition may involve regulatorymeasures by a government (for exemple, the proscription of certainfoodstuffs) as well as media and community development programmeson the better use of local products.

HUMAN COMPETENCE DEVELOPMENTAS A CHALLENGE TO POLICY

The notion of human competence as a key issue in development, andthe complex set of social interventions involved, present a majorchallenge to the world of policy. At the policy as well as at the concep-tual level, some of the simplifications of conventional and overlynarrow models of human resource development will have to giveway to more complex and comprehensive policy strategies. Thesestrategies will have to be cognizant of both the broader range ofcompetencies that form the objectives of human competence devel-opment, and of the richer set of social interventions that can bemobilized to achieve those objectives. As a result, policy will need toadopt a posture of much greater cross-scctoral concertation. Thischange in policy posture will, in turn, affect at least three differentdomains of policy: planning, the organization and structure of thcpolicy process, and the role of knowledge and research in the makingof policy.

Planning the development of human competence

The kinds of human competence that have been defined in theprevious section are delivered through more or less formalized andinsfitutionalized agencies according to more or less clearly definedintervention strategies. A task of such complexity requires carefuland comprehensive planning in order to maximize the contributionof each intervention or set of interventions to achieving the desiredcompetence. This kind of planning can only succeed on the basis of:

250 Vinayagwn Chinapah, Jan-Ingvar Ldfstedt and Hans Weiler

(a) a thorough examination of the kinds of competence people haveor lack with rcgard to the different areas of human activity; (b) aconception of human beings as autonomous and dynamic agents ofchange; and (c) a consistent and well-defined policy of developmentthat is predicated on (b). In this situation, those responsible forplanning the development of human competence face a number ofspecific tasks, such as: (a) assessing the strategies, institutions, modesof delivery and target groups in the present human competencedevelopment system; (b) identifying gaps and overlaps in delivery;(c) predicting future competence needs; (d) considering alternativestrategies and modalities; and (e) designing and implementingevaluations.

Human competence development and the organizational structureof the policy process

To conceive of a policy of human competence development does notnecessarily call for new and different structural arrangements. Severalof the policy and planning functions required by such an approachcould quite possibly be executed through already existing adtninis-trative structures. Making use of existing structures would certainlyavoid the creation of additional bureaucratic machinery which, as wehave shown, is one of the reasons for the dilemmas which the modernstate faces. What the 'human competence' approach to policy willrequire, however, is (a) a restructuring of tasks within existing organ-izational entities, and (h) a major rethinking and revision of thelinkages between the various organizational and administrative unitsinvolved in one or another aspect of the development of humancompetence. An example of (a) would be the restructuring of boththe agenda and the organization of a Ministry of Education (or aMinistry of CommunicRtion) to reflect more adequately the full rangeof human competence to which the education system should begeared. The linkages mentioned in (b) should be such as to facilitateand ensure concerted action between, say, Ministries of Health,Education, Community Development, and Communication in theinterest of a joint programme towards more adequate family planning.The precise naturc of thc linkages to be established will bc a functionof specific conditions and traditions in a given country; thcy couldbe in the form of inter-departmental councils or national networks,might involve public and non-governmental agencies or represen-tatives of the groups who are to benefit from a given policy, etc.

26j

Integrated developmem of human resources and educational planning 251

Knowledge needs and the role of research

The nature and complexity of policies for the development of humancompetence places great demands on the supply and management ofappropriate information. Given the cross-sectoral quality of thesepolicies, this information will have to come from different domainsof knowledge (health sciences, communications, food research, socialpsychology, etc.), and will have to be carefully integrated to providean adequate knowledge base for decisions, planning, and implemen-tation. The design of an ongoing evaluation of policies for humancompetence development is particularly important as a means toadjust the 'mix' of intervention strategies in the light of accumulatingexperience. The structures and organizational arrangements for thistask of producing, processing, and disseminating appropriate know-ledge will again be a function of each country's specific conditionsand, especially, the existing infrastructures for the generation andutilization of knowledge. The important thing seems to be thcrealization that: (a) research and development form a particularlyindispensable prerequisite of successful policy where the developmentof human competence is concerned; (b) that the identification andimprovement of the kinds of competence needed at the grassrootslevel will require a particularly and serious research effort; and(c) that the effort to generate the knowledge needed has to reachacross conventional disciplines, schools of thought and methodologies.

The role of education and educational planning

Moving from the narrow confines of the conventional notion ofhuman resource development to the concept of human competencethat has been developed in the previous section opens up a wideand complex field of policy ideas and action. Moving beyond purelywork- and productivity-related capabilities towards the full range ofcompetence for the development of human potential provides a firststep towards a more integrated policy framework for attending to andsupporting the human element in the development process: Health,cultural traditions, citizenship, nutrition, and recreation arc no longerseen as more or less isolated 'sectors', assigned to the responsibility ofseparate governmental or non-governmental agencies, but becomeat least potentially part of an overall strategy for the comprehensivedevelopment of human competence and of human resources in awider sense.

At the same time, thc matrix developed above (Fig. t) allowsus to accommodate conceptually thc multiple strategies that are

252 Vinayagum Chinapah, 7an-Ingvar Lofstez It and Hans Weiler

available for the purpose of developing human competence in itsvarious realms. Some of these 'strategies of intervention' may well bemore appropriate for certain kinds of human competence than forothers, but each strategy has a potential role to play in the overalltask of improving human competence as a development objectivein its own right. It is this 'orchestration' of different strategies whichlies at the heart of the planning effort that the previous section hasdescribed: 'Planning the development of human competence' is atask that not only has multiple objectives, but also employs multiplestrategies, and thus requires a very special effort of co-ordinationand equilibration.

It would carry us beyond the scope of this article to map thisentire area of policy and planning for human competence devel-opment in any more detail than has been provided in the previoussection; we see this comprehensive mapping as a major theoreticalas well as political task, and recommend it to the attcntion of ourcolleagues in the field of development studies as well as policy analysis.We are struck, for instance, by the possibilities that a more integratedconception of human competence development would open up for amore concerted use of traditional learning systcms, literacy work,and community development programmes for strengthening com-petence in such arcas as health, nutrition, cultural awareness andsocial interaction.

While education, as we have shown, is only one of several strat-egies for intervening in the development of human competence, itcontinues to attract particular attention because of: (a) its extensivepresence throughout a society and across most regional, social andcultural cleavages; (b) its susceptibility to being re-directed ormanipulated, more easily than many othcr social institutions, by thestate and/or powerful social and economic forces in thc society;(c) its critical role in providing, through its certification function,access to a variety of social statuses and rewards; and (d) its consider-able cost to a society in terms of both material and human resources.

IMPI.ICATIONS FOR FORMAL EDUCATION,PI.ANNING AND ADMINISTRATION

As a strategy for the development of human competence, the formaleducation system has at least the potential of making a major contri-bution. Whether or not it will make that contribution depends in nosmall measure on whether our thinking about formal education canmove beyond the exclusive or dominant preoccupation with preparingpeople for the world of work. Once this limited focus has been

ojor -,e-

Inugrated development of human resources and educational planntng 253

overcome, there is a widc range of policy initiatives that wouldenhance the contribution of formal education to developing variouskinds of human competence, and that would have obvious impli-cations for how much of what competences are provided when andhow in the context of the school system. Regarding these impli-cations, we will concentrate on curriculum and the tcaching andlearning activities in the school system, and the planning and man-agement of school systems.

The notion of competence refers to a broad set of physical andmental qualities and assets that human beings need to deal auton-omously and effectively with various life situations in order to createbetter conditions for themselves in constructive interaction withothers. Competences thus include knowledge about various importantaspects of human existence, the skills to handle mental and physicaltools in a creative way, and the ability to interact with other peoplein a variety of contexts, including conflictual ones.

Curriculum development and the teaching-learning process

Curriculum development thus becomes a case in point. It wouldstart by identifying the main areas of competence that could best bcdealt with in schools, rathcr than by other agencies such as healthservices or co-operatives. The most important task, however, wouldlie in constructing a curriculum that recognizes the radical redefinitionof the relationship between school and the rest of socicty that thenotion of human competence development implies. Such a curriculumwould relate more directly and explicitly to the various realms ofhuman and social activity where competence is needed. The know-ledge and skills imparted cannot be artificially fragmented andpresented in small portions according to some inner logic of thesubject. The teaching-learning proccss cannot be arbitrarily cut intofragments of time called 'lessons'. The role of the teacher wouldhave to be redefined into that of not only transmitter of knowledgeand skills but of active intermediary between the learner and situ-ations where competence of a given kind is generated, delivered andapplied.

This kind of teaching-learning process will require multiplelinkages between the school and the classroom, on the one hand, andpeople and institutions active in the respective area of humancompetence (for example, (a) in culture, theatres and actors; (h) inpolicy, political parties and government authorities; (c) in work,employers and employees in enterprises). The different rows in ourhuman competence matrix, in other words, constitute meetingpoints for different agencies involved in developping the same or

251 Viriavagum Chinapah, Yan-Inroar Lôfstedt and Hans Weller

related sets of competence. In this interactive mode, it will bepossible for competences to be acquired in real-life situations wherethey arc applied and demonstrated by people who have masteredthem; theory and practice can be integrated in a way that is not onlypedagogically and cognitively sound but also conducive to a moreconcerted development effort.

Planning and management of school systems

In discussing the role of formal education in the development ofhuman competence in the previous section, somc necessary changesin the construction of the teaching-learning environment and otheraspects of the education system have been discusscd. These changeswill have implications not only for the classroom, but for thc widerissue of planning and managing education systems, such as adminis-trative and organizational structures, personnel, research, informationuse and information management, and evaluation and monitoring.

The existing administrative and organizational structures foreducational planning, in developing countrics as elsewhere, cannotacccramodate the planning of an education system which seeks tocover the wide range of human competence required i:a differentdomains and sectors, and which also aims at much closer interactionwith a wide variety of other agencies in a morc integrated effort ofhuman competence development. At present, the administrative andcrganizational structures for planning are tightly linked to the man-dates of different ministrics (health, education, arts and culture,manpower, human resources, youth and sports, social services,women's affairs and information). In the context of human com-petence development, however, educational planning must be part ofan intersectoral approach to the public administration of humanresource development. These intersectoral arrangements arc vital atministerial, departmental, and institutional levels so that the flowsof information and communication across the sectors of humandevelopment may facilitate the educational planning processes, andin particular, the resource allocation and distribution procedure.

An improvement of the organizational and administrative struc-tures for educational planning within the context of human com-petence development requires new roks and functions of the planningpersonnel. Educational planners have to play new roles and assumetiew responsibilities that are rather different from their conventionalprofessional profiles. So far, the main concern of educational plannershas been to estimate the inflows and outflows of studcnts andteachers in the formal cducation system, the planning of schoolfacilities, and rather technical projections for the allocation and

2 C


deployment of resources. Their training was orientcd towards thelimited functions of formal schooling in a more restricted concept ofhuman resource development. By contrast, the new tasks set forplanning within a new and more holistic approach to human resourcedevelopment place new demands on the skills and understanding ofeducational planners. This means that both the pre-service and thein-service training of educational planners is to be readjusted to theirnew roles, functions and professional identity. These training andstaff-development programmes need to have a multidisciplinarystructure, content, and orientation so as to enable educationalplanners to understand and cope with their new tasks.

The nature of the knowledge needed for a successful implemen-tation of strategies for human competence development will requirea special research effort. This research would be multidisciplinaryand flexible in terms of design, methods, and analysis. Performanceindicators would no longer be school achievement alone but alsoinclude psychological and biophysical indicators. The quality ofresearchers and the nature of conceptual frameworks, instruments,and methodology would be oriented towards the diversitY of inputsand effects envisaged in the areas of human competence develop-ment, including the expansion beyond primarily work-related kindsof competence. A range of methods will probably have to be used,including both experiments and quasi-experimental methods forcomplementing each other.

The information base for educational planning in the context ofhuman competence development has to be improved in both quan-titative and qualitative terms. Beyond educational data and statistics,information from other sources (health registers, records on culturaland social activities, household surveys, ctc.) will become of criticalimportance for the planning effort. Besides expanding the sources ofinformation, the information management system needs to beimproved and a systematic dissemination procedure has to becreated in order that different actors and beneficiaries may be prop-erly informed about the innovations, policy changes, and rcformstaking place in all areas of human competence.

The evaluation and monitoring of thc extent to which educationalplanning accomplishes its different tasks in human competencedevelopment will dcmand not only a larger data base but also anintegrated system of evaluation and monitoring. This system willhave to take into account the organizational and educational inno-vations proposed, the heterogeneity of aims and objectives and theresulting value conflicts, and the diversity of different clienteles.Thc interactions among various actors and beneficiaries and at variouspoints in the implementation process call for a participatory system

26u

256 Vinayagum Chinapah, Jan-Ingvar Lafstedt and Hans Weiler

of evaluation and monitoring with continuous dialogue, inter-ventions, and feedback from a wide range of personnel involved in theoverall educational effort. In keeping with the principle of linking andconcerting interventions by different agcncics, joint evaluation andmonitoring teams with representatives of different agencies would beparticularly desirable.

Just as planners and other types of personnel, evaluators andmonitors would require a mix of analytical skills and competencesin order to fulfil their roles and functions properly in the contextof human competence development.

The principal objective of this article has been to rethink the notionof human resources not only in the sense of human beings as resourcesin the development process but also in the sense of mental andphysical resources or competences available to human beings.Against the background of an analysis of internal and externalproblems relating to educational planning we have suggested areinterpretation of the human element in the development processand reflected on the kinds of competence that human beings necd inorder effectively to cope with the multiple challenges of life. We haveseen these challenges as relating not only to the world of work andproductivity but also to the need for a whole range of life-relatedcompetences in the areas of health, family management, culture andrecreation, political participation and citizenship.

It is the need for this broad range of competences that necessitatesa new agenda in the development of 'human resources' in thc sensesreferred to above. We have sketched this new agenda conceptuallyin a matrix of human competence development which brings togetherthe competences needed and the various interventions required todevelop and improve them.

As the third section of this article has shown, re-thinking educationalpolicy along the lines of thc notion of human competence has anumber of important implications for educational planning andadministration. The most important of those have to do with theneed for a more integrated and concerted approach to planning soas to take into account the comprehensive nature of human com-petence development. This need for integration implies in turn anumber of changes in administrative structures and procedures, inthe training and orientation of personnel, and in the nature of theinformation base on which planners and administrators have to rely.In addition, shifting the perspective of educational policy morc in thedirection of issues of human competence gives a new meaning to therole of evaluation in educational planning and administration. Notonly does evaluation become more important and, given thc com-

Integrated development of human resources and educational planning 25 7

plexity of the task, more difficult, it also acquires a new set of criteriathat are directly derived from the notion of human competence asdeveloped earlier in this article. As a case in point, it becomeseminently important to assess the extent to which education systemsare effectively able to transcend conventional and narrow meaningsof 'outcome' to include a much wider and fuller range of competence,including those needed to function not only in the economic, butalso in the cultural, political/civic, bio-medical, environmental, andrecreational realms of human activity.

References

BLAUG, M. 1968. Economics of Education. London, Penguin Books.CII1NAPAH, V.; LCHITEDT, J.-1. 1983. Theory and Practice of Educational Planning: A Critical

and Comparative Assessment of the Role of Educational Planning in Developing Countriesand in Relation to International Developme it Assistance Programmes. Work in ProgressReport No. 4. Stockholm, Institute of International Education, University of Stockholm.

. 1985. Educational Planning--Theory and Practice: Selected Findings from a Study in

Six Developing Countries (Bangladesh, China, Nepal, Botswana, Ethiopia, and Mauritioss..Paper prepared for the SIDEC-CIES Conference, Stanford, Calif., 1985.

CIIINACH, V.; FAGERLING, 1. 1979. The Role of Educational Planning in the Basic HumanNeeds Strategy. Research Report No. 39. Stockholm, Institute of International Education,

University of Stockholm.GRA?: 0. 1983. Development lv People: Citizen Construction of a just World. New York,

Praeger.11ABERMAS, J. 1975. Legitimation Crisis. Boston,1.ENIN, It L. 1980. The Limits of Educational Planning: Can Science Triumph over 'Irrational

Factors' in Society? In: Hans N. Weiler (ed.;, Educational Planning and Social Chanre,PP. 15-47, Pans, Unesco' I I EP.

lAVIIN, K. [987. Education in Austerity: Options for Planners. Paris, Unesco'llEP. (Funda-

mentak of Educational Planning, 36.)LCHTTenT, J.-I. 1986. Educational Planning and Human Competence Development in Nation-

building. Paper presented at the International Symposium of the Central Institute forEducational Research, Beijing, China.

Louatt, S. 1985. Education a diveloppement. Strategies a decisions m Aniirique ,entrale.Paris, Economica 'Unesco.

NACHAROPOULOs, (3. 1973. Returns to Education: .4n International Compariton. San Francisco,

Jossey-Bass.PsAcitAitoriouLos, (3.; WOODHALL, M. 1985. Education for Development: An Analysis of

Investment Choices. New York, Oxford University Press.Rost', R. (ed.), 1980. Challenge to Governance: Studies in OverWded Polities Beverly !fills,

Sage.SCHULTZ, T. W. 1964. The Economic Value of Education. New York ,I.ondon, Columbia

University Press.WEIL1114, 11. N. t978. Education and Developrnent Erom the Age of Innocence to the Agc

of Skepticism. Comparative Education, Vol. 14, No. 3, October, pp. 179-98.

---- 198o Educational Planning and Social Change Paris, Ilnesco.Wol.irr, A 1977. The Limiti of Legitimcv.y: Political Contradictions of Contemporam Capttaltim.

New York, Free PressYoupt, R. V.; IIINCHIntr, K tett% . 1985. Forecasting Skilled Manpower Needs The I. spat-

once of Eleven Countries. Paris, Unesco,IIEP.

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BibliographyAHMED, M.; COOMBS, H. P. Education for Rural Development: Case Studies for Planners.

New York, Praeger, 1975.BAUER, P. T. Equality, The Third World, and Economic Delusion. London. Methuen, i981.CHINAPAiI, V.; FAGERLIND, I. The Design and Elaboration of the Evaluation and Monitoring

Techniques for the Implementation of Educational Policies. Paris, Division of EducationalPolicy and Planning, Unesco, 5986. (Reports/Studies: S. 123.)

COOMBS, P. H. The World Education Crisis: The View from the Eighties. New York, OxfordUniversity Press, 1985.

DAvis, G. D. Planning Education for Development: Issues and Problems in the Planning ofEducation in Developing Countries, Vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass , Center for Studies in Edu-cation and Development, Harvard University, I980.

FAGERLIND, I.; SA/LA, L. Education and National Development A Comparative Perspective.Oxford, Pergarnon Press, 1983.

HAWES, H., et al. (eds.). 5986. Education Priorities and Aid Responses in Sub-Saharan Africa(Report of a Conference at Cumberland Lodge, Windsor, 4-7 December 5984). I.ondon,Her Majesty's Stationery Office, for ODA.

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LEVIN, H. L. The Identity Crisis of Educational Planning. Harvard Educational Review,Vol. 51, 1981, pp. 85-93.

2Ci

Does company strategyhave any lessons

for educational planning?Alain Bienaymé

During the 1960s and 197os, educational plan-ning generated great hopes as its techniquesbegan to spread. There were several reasons forthis enthusiasm. Economic analysis, borne alongby the wave of growth in the West, was dis-covering thc role of human capital and claimedto be able to gauge its contribution to nationaleconomic performance and its role in individ-ual careers. School enrohnents, thc number ofgraduates and R&D expenditure became growthvariables on a par with physical capital stockand labour (Denison, Malinvaud et al.). Thedeveloping countries saw educational planningas a means of asserting their national Identityand allocating resources rationally in a form ofinvestment which was held to be decisive fortheir future.

In the last fifteen years, enthusiasm haswaned. This is certainly not because the quali-fications of the working population are no longerconsidered a valuable asset: indeed, there hasbeen a semantic shift from the concept of'manpower' to that of 'brainpower' as the mov-ing force behind growth today. But educational

Alain Bienaymd (France). Professor at the Universityof Paris-Dauphine; President of the Societe d'iiconomiePolitique; Iknorary Member of the Economic andSocial Council; Trustee of the Intermit:owl Councilfor Educational Development; former Member of theAdministrative Board of the International Institute forEducational Planning I11:13). Author of: Entrcprise,marches, etat and L'enseignement supericur vi rid&d'universiti.

planning has not escaped the harmful effects ofthc world economic crisis, first, because of thcimpact of that crisis on budgetary restrictionsand the employment of young people and,second, because of the shortcomings in boththe methods and the overall approach of a cer-tain kind of educational planning. In particular,the idea of gearing training programmes tothe specific requirements of career outlets hasproved illusory. But this new awareness is con-fusing to those anxious to have practical pre-scriptions.

Education cannot make progress in the dark,and one idca to have emerged recently is thatthe experience of companies known for thequality of their strategic thinking and the lastingsuccesses resulting from it might provide in-spiration for a renewal in the management of theeducation system. Can national education poli-cies, faced with an environment which hasbecome constricting, critical and demanding,find inspiration in the exercise in forecastingrepresented by strategic thinking and action andthus emerge from the cul-dc-sac which a certainkind of planning has been unable to avoid?

In order to answer this question it is firstnecessary to show that strategy is not really atodds with planning, but, rather, that it altersits approach. The next step is to identify thechallenges, the major difficulties confrontingeducators in their classrooms, schools and uni-versities, and, indirectly, their administrators.Nothing, however, could be more dangerousthan to cherish the fresh illusion that the stra-

Nolpectr, yol. XIX, No. 2, 19R9

260 Alain Bienaymi

tegic approach adopted in industrial competitionby a handful of companies offers a panacea.Just as the best plans have often provided anexcuse for inactivity cr conservatism in unfore-seen situations, so there are particular problemsassociated with strategic thinking: naturally, ithas its own methods; which are somewhatdisconcerting for seekers of certainty, in thatthey set out hypotheses in a relatively informalmanner. But the nub of the matter is the corn-patibility between the content of a strategic de-cision and the range of measures which schooland university organizations feel able and will-ing to put into effect.

The virtue of a strategic plan resides, strictlyspeaking, in its educational value, which de-pends in turn on the extent to which it can makeeducators more efficient. The work that theyare expected to perform will therefore dependon how emphasis is placed in the structures andtasks of the educational machine, and the systemof rewards and recognition of abilities and skills.

The crisis in educational planning

It is generally held that the time-scale in indus-try is a long one. The time taken by productioncycles in heavy investment sectors and theperiods of transition to new technologies forcecompanies to base their decisions on time-scalesvarying between two to five years and fifteento twent} years. These times do not fit in withthe political calendar, nor do they correspondto the daily, monthly or annual schedules forthe routine operations of company life.

Educational cycles also fail to correspond topolitical cycles. The amount of time needed foran educational reform to take effect is greaterthan that available to the political authoritiesresponsible for the reform. On average, thirteenyears of schooling and six years at a universityare needed to produce a high-level graduate.Even more timc is needed '3 enable the new-style teachers, who arc thc product of edu-cational reform, to demonstrate their talents tothe full Can a plana set of procedures andorganizations enjoying relative administrative

stabilitycope with phenomena which the pol-itical authorities cannot assimilate or still lessevaluate? That was once the belief, but peoplearc now less certain. Why?

The weight of thc past, the pressure of thcestablishment at national level and lack of fundsgreatly limit the scope for manoeuvre and theinnovative capacity of education systems, evenwhen such systems are planned.

Plans are now less successful than they usedto be in promoting the role of education in so-ciety. The world is in turmoil, and its com-ponent societies arc uneasy, unsettled andconstantly bombarded by information fromoutside. The spread of cducation does notincrease social cohesion in all cases: it oftendivides people intellectually along the lines oftheir areas of specialization and levels of skill.The increase in the total volume of knowledgeproduced by rapid scientific progress has raisedthe threshold of illiteracy and hence the numberof illiterates. Frustration, violence and disinte-gration are therefore at work.

Educational plans cast in a conservativemould, with prescriptive procedures and a con-cern for exact figures, often fall victim to theirown inability to come to grips with social reality.Exact figures are no substitute for an accuratediagnosis, as may be seen from the followingtwo examples.

School education worldwide generally suffersfrom four deficiencies:It is qualitatively unsuited to the task of pre-

paring young people for adult life.It lacks overall funding, in the light of popu-

lation pressure or simply in the light of theneed to improve teacher-pupil ratios.

It lacks redeployment capacity, owing to thespecialization of teachers and equipment andalso to hardened attitudes.

It is difficult to reconcile traditional valuesinherited from the past, the bedrock of thccountry's distinctive character, with thc morcuniversal, standardizing values introduced bythc scientific and industi ial revolutions of thcWestern world.

A similar upheaval is also taking place in thenarrower, but rapidly expanding, contcxt of

Does company strategy have any lessons for educational planning? 26 I

European higher education. For the first sixtyyears of this century, the university-based cul-tural model by and large meant that giftedyoing people knew that by undcrgoing theinitiation rites of university, thcy could obtainmuch sought-after positions at the top of thesocial hierarchy, positions usually similar tothose occupicd by their fathers. A good uni-versity could be easily identified by a single andeasily verifiable criterion, namely, academicexcel knce.

The attraction of these well-paid and pres-tigious careers and the high selectivity of school-leaving examinations matched the authoritarianstyle of business management and the Taylorianorganization of factory work. In the days whenmost of the labour force worked 3,000 hours ayear for forty to fifty years of their lives, therelationship between higher (i.e. non-compul-sory) education and economic growth could bedefined as follows: (a) highcr education is a wayof increasing thc pool of qualified personnel;(b) more engineers, managers and qualifiedtechnicians help to boost the country's pro-ductivity gains; and (c) those gains arc com-patible with full employment so long as growthis harnessed to demand, spurred on by a generalfeeling of scarcity.

This pattern is now bcing challenged in theindustrialized countries. A large proportion ofthc population in the Wcst is now less affectedby scarcity. The growth rate therefore dependsmuch more on the effectiveness of marketingand technical innovation. Full employmentis now merely a pipe-dream. Leisure time,whether voluntary or enforced, has greatly in-creased, particularly in Western Europe, andthere is now a mass demand for the right tohigher education arising from thc desire to wardoff unemployment, not by acquiring oncc-and-for-all qualifications to last a lifetime, but byclaiming the right to kccp up to date in a worldawash with information, technological advancesand knowledge. Singling out 'good' universitiesis much more difficult nowadays in our moredemocratic, less hierarchical societies, becauseof thc explosion of knowledge, thc profession-alization of research and the desire to make

higher education pay off. All universities mustexpect to be judged by a range of criteria.Consequently, management of education sys-tems is becoming a much morc complex affair.

The two examples quoted above, concerningthe education of the majority of children in allcountries and the teaching provided in Europeanuniversities, illustrate the limitations of a plan-ning technique concerned only with numbersof students and teachers, geographical break-down and spread of subjects and the doling outof financial resources.

Add to this the fact that, in expanding, theeducation sector has lost its status: the teachingprofession is no longer shrouded in mystery andprestige (Lesourne, 1988). The natural conse-quence of the increasing number of graduatesis that they are to be found everywhere in thcworld of production and administration. West-ern companies are even coming to think ofthemselves as education systems. Teachers arcno longer the only repositories of knowledge;they are the victims of their own success. Forthat reason, the remobilization of the teachingprofcssion has now become a major concern.

How can the strategic approach give edu-cation policy a new lease of life?

Application of the strategic approachto education policy

The aim of this section is to pick out thosegeneral properties of strategic decisions whichmay offer guidance in the world of education,not in order to eliminate planning, but to changeits approach.

As Ohmac (1982) (Dircctor of the BusinessConsulting Group McKinsey in Tokyo) pointsout, a company with no competitors can affordto go ahead and plan its decisions. The conceptof strategy, on the othcr hand, implies that thecompany feels challenged by competition. In in-dustrial economics, competitors challenge eachother in three ways, in a triangular pattern asin Figure I, which shows that: (a) the marketis segmented; (b) companies differ in terms ofthe quality of thcir products and services and

262 Alain Bienaymé

of their cost-benefit ratio; and (c) companies sellvalue along with their products and services,which is appreciated by customers, not by sup-pliers.

There arc many objections to the applicationI of such a scheme to the education system. But

at least it highlights somc of the problemsinvolved in keeping educational machincry run-ning smoothly when it is insufficiently fired bythe spirit of competition.

Indeed, in the absence of official competitors,companies in monopoly situations find it intheir own interest to invent compctitors so as toprotect themselves from the dangcrs of com-placency. Many over-confident monopolies havesuddenly lost their privileges when by-passedby technical advances or changing habits.

Companies which fail to satisfy the latentdemand within their reach arc usurped by theircompetitors and threatened with the desertionof thcir customers. Similarly, the private sectoris energetically involved in schooling and vo-cational cducation, and schools arc not immunefrom a falling-off of a portion of their clientele(IIEP, 1988). Schools have no absolute right

, to a monopoly on education. Does anyone, need reminding that in the West, for example,

mothers attended to early childhood educationlong before schools took over that task?

It may, of course, be objected that a nationaleducation system is an expression of politicalchoices stemming from thc desire to draw aradical distinction between schools and busi-nesses. But thc educational budget of somccompanies is more impressive than that ofcertain prestigious institutions: thc educationbudget of ATT is more than three times thatof MIT. Moreover, in the United States, thebusiness sector allocates for further trainingmore than two-thirds of the national resourcesspent on funding universities proper (offeringfour or more years of study). Part of this expen-diture is intended simply to make good the gapsin basic schooling, particularly in the case ofrecent ininsigrants (Eurich, 1985).

Moreover, there is a need to review thc mono-lithic nature of the state education system. Thcuniform nature of the regulations imposed on a

Value // Value

Price

Companies Competitors

Costs

FM i Competition irt industrial economics.

N.B. The market is segmented; companies differ in termsof the quality of their products and services as well as anterms of their cost-benefit ratio; companies sell value alongwith products whose services are appreciated by thc cus-tomers, not by the suppliers.

whole population in the name of equality leadseither to resistance to change or abrupt generalreforms. Uniformity and routine are spatialand temporal expressions of the same lack ofstrategic thinking. When the state seeks toescape from the deadlock and from academicfailure by imposing a radical and comprehen-sive overhaul of thc system, it usually encountersincrtia and a general lack of understanding.

The strategic thinking at work in the bestcompanies tries to picture the institution'sfuturc in thc light of the real or potentialcompetition to which it is exposed. Schools toooften see themselves as having a captive clientele.

At the level of thc education system as awhole, strategic thinking approaches thc futurein a different way from straightforward planning.

To begin with, the strategic thinker tries tounderstand, to 'anticipate the present'. usingmonitoring devices drawn from a large numberof disciplines and technical branches. Thestatistics representing the past on whiLh plan%

Does company strategy have any lessons for educational planning? 26 3

are usually based are in fact too conservative,and averages tend to conceal new phenomenawhich will later command attention. However,it is essential to identify 'sunrise developments'(Masse, 1965) and ' weak signals' (Ansoff, 1975) inorder to influence decision-making in good time.

A strategic approach also readily accepts thefact that the future is uncertain and that notechnique can establish conclusively the conse-quences of future decisions. The strategicapproach is more concerned with mapping outmajor areas of uncertainty, introducing coherentsets of hypotheses, constructing responses onthe basis of these scenarios and identifying inevery case the steps which, whatever thecircumstances, must be takcn to keep movingtowards the main objectives.

What is the relevance of these strategicanalysis concepts to the management of theeducation system? Their message is that, goingbeyond the false certainties of rational calcu-lation, resource allocation and extrapolationfrom enrolments, it is essential to determinewhat tasks education should perform and toensure their relevance. Costs cannot, of course,be disregarded, but efforts to reduce (at anyprice!) the conspicuous costs of a system,namely, those recorded in the accounts, do notnecessarily make thc system work with maxi-mum efficiency. If we drive with our eyes gluedto the dashboard, wc arc unlikely to reach ourdcstination. Low cost is not primarily whatmakes good education policy, even if wastagemust be eliminated. It must be defined firstand foremost in terms of its purpose, thequality of the services IO be provided, and onlythen in terms of the best possible price. Theunexamined extrapolatims that -reep into eventhe most complex planning models no morcguarantee the planners' credibility than a

straight advance through a minefield guaranteesthe safety of a foot soldier. All this goes toshow that the strategic approach predisposesthe organizations drawing inspiration from it toadopt a more flexible response to both thethreats and the opportunities thrown up bythe changes in society.

It may, of course, be objected that education

should be a part of the sacrosanct core ofessential duties that all countries must performeven if they are going through a crisis. Unfor-tunately, this assertion is too general and toocategorical to bc taken literally. Fluctuationsin the gross domestic product, the burden of acountry's foreign debt, changes in its exportincome, the size of the national debt and therequirements for survival in the event offamine are just some of the variables whichmay curb the resources anocated to education.How far can the continuity required by theeducation system be recondled with the necess-ity to keep expenditure consistent with avail-able resources? Some educational activities areindeed inviolable, but there is also a grey arcathat is subject to review. The quantity of realresources available for each pupil or studentvaries too much from one country to another,from one educational level to another and fromone decade to another, for governments not totackle this question openly. It is better to discussit than to rely on a blind power struggle or tomake proportional resource cuts when thecountry has to weather a financial crisis.

Lastly, education needs to be changed in twocomplementary ways as a result of the pro-liferation of the ncw occupations and skillsgenerated by development and the ongoingindustrial revolution. Hitherto, cducation sys-tems have simply juxtaposed 'vertical' coursesof education, that is, courscs organized andcompartmentalized solely on the basis of assimi-lating knowledge or techniques for vocationalpurposes. These courses are not usually in-tended for the same groups of people. Trainingtherefore beLomes the surest way of creating adivided society. In future, those starting workearlier should receive morc general education,even if industrial training has to take overwhere schools leave off; conversely, literary andscientific courses should foster greater aware-ness of world developments, careers and thevalues of communication.

I astly, the content of all strategic decisionsin business may be reduced to one of the fivecategories summarized in Table t.

Common to all these decisions, which are very

264 Alain Bienayrni

TABLE I. Strategic decisions applicable to education

What are we building? Investment, new recognizedcourses of study, recruitmentof teachers

What shall we keep? Maintenance, operatingresources, quality control

What shall we sell? Abolition of coot ses, closure ofestablishments, recyclinghuman re4c,urces

What shall we buy? Documentation, software, etc.Who are our allies? Local and regional :uthorities,

educational institutions bothupstream and downyream,business enterprises,international co-operation

familiar to companies, IS the fact that theyinvolve a lasting future commitment. Whenthey have been duly anticipated and thoughtout, and have not been imposed by the force ofunforeseen circumstances, they give companiesa certain amount of freedom to manoeuvre.Should not the officials responsible for edu-cation policy perhaps take a leaf out of thisbook when the need is felt to reorganize schoolmapping or to rejuvenate syllabuses and courses?

The state education system remains a poten-tial prey to the dangers mentioned, while asubtle erosion of its funds may weaken itsability to act. For example, the different groupsof teachers linked by discipline or by status allexert pressure in defence of their groupinterests. Torn between the claims of one sideand the inertia of the other, the political auth-orities respond by taking their own measures,namely political tradc-offs. The compromisesmade often favour new regulations or statutoryrcforms without always solving the underlyingproblems. Political pragmatism is seldom thekind needed in the educational field.

Strategy cannot replace planning. A studybacked up by figures must be carried out toconfirm that decisions, some of which aresimultaneous and others staggered, are inharmony. A plan without a strategy runs therisk of resting on inaccurate and incompletefoundations; a strategy without a plan runs therisk of expressing nothing but dreams and idle

talk (Quarre, 1988). Clear-sightedness andflexibility are the qualities that give plans theirproper rigour.

The strategic problems of education

Three categories may be distinguished: cnds,means and management.

THE ENDS OF EDUCATION

Throughout the worldin the United Stares, asa large number of reports have revealed inrecent years, in Europe and also in thc ThirdWorldthe content and organization of cdu-cation arc running into tremendous difficulties.These arise not only from the evolving natureof transmitted knowledge, but also from thecomplexity of relations between knowledge andcconomic and social development.

New knowledge has been accumulating anddividing at an unprecedented rate sincc theSecond World War. This has had severalconsequences: syllabuses have become weightierand courses longer; there is uncertainty aboutthe most appropriate pace at which new infor-mation should be introduced (for example, therather less than satisfactory results of intro-.ducing the new mathematics, new methods ofteaching history,`look-and-tell' reading methodsor computer science for all); the need to sacri-fice part of the heritage of knowledge previouslyhanded down; the rise of a new type of illiteracyresulting from thc raising of the minimumstandard of know!edge that young people re-quire to find their place in society and to leadindependent lives.

Time is limited, however; neither the exten-sion of life expectancy nor thc increase in leisuretime is sufficient to offset the restricted amountof time that individuals can spend on makingprogress in their special subjects, keeping upwith the changing pattern of daily life insociety and cultivating their minds in a 'dis-interested' way.

Moreover, relations between education and

Does company strategy have any lessons for educational planning? 265

society have also developed considerably sincethe time when society's progress through edu-cation was held up as the ideal. The price tobe paid for the increase of knowledge is a

division of labour which accentuates special-ization and builds walls of mutual incompre-hension in societies suffering from a lack ofcommunication. In the industrialized countrics,overturned as they have been by a scicntificrevolution whose impact is tremendous, sinceit affects people's thinking, a superficial studyshows how information and knowledge havefound thcir way into the smallest workings ofcompanies, machines and products. Individuals,however, in no position to mastcr all this in-formation find themselves obliged to put theirtrust in sccond- or third-hand knowledge.What a contrast to the intimate, but empirical,knowledge of peasants in the Mrican savannahor on the plains of Thailand, who have first-hand, personal knowledge of every aspect oftheir working environment! Industrial civiliz-ation, on the other hand, compels individualsto believe much more than to know, and tobridge the gaps in their knowledge by trustingin collective beliefs which they find plausiblerather than in observations whosc meaningescapes them. In such circumstances, thosewith a little more knowledge than others willbe at an advantage, unless and until the expertsystems of artificial intelligence steal that ad-vantage (Sowell, 1980; Woo, 1984).

Relations between education and society arcnow less harmonious because progrcss in know-ledge and technology devalues the rulturalheritage and accentuates the generation gap.Young people are no longer trained for thesame occupations as their parents. Schools,which formerly sprang from the initiative ofparents, today separate young people from theirelders. The part of the emotional and financialheritage that used to be handed down fromparents to children in the shape of an occu-pation is thus lost. The school is therefore afactor of crisis and a key clement in the 'scandalof development' (Austruy, 1965).

In addition, schools and universities produceso many graduates today that they are widely

distributed throughout the working population.In France for example, some 12 per cent ofthe working population has a higher educationdiploma. The ivory-tower university and theschool, which used to have a monopoly onknowledge or to be its uncontested leaders, nowhave to deal with a far more highly educated,and consequently more critical, society (Benda,1927, Bienayme, 1986).

As a result, there is much controversy, es-pecially on the theme of educational objectivityor the moral values which, through the specificcharacteristics of the subjects taught, should behanded down to young people (Martin et al.,1981).

The essence of strategy consists in turningthreats into problems, and problems into oppor-tunities for action (Ohmae, 1982). It is truethat the demand for education is experiencinga crisis, as IIEP (5988), Lesourne (1988) andothers point out. In some cases, that crisisquestions the pace at which school and uni-versity enrolments are progressing. The pro-portion of adult students with specific require-ments is on the increase. The very transitionfrom an elitist type of higher education to masseducation and then to almost universal edu-cation calls for a much closer analysis of whateducation is required to do, rather than im-posing on everyone standard curricula leadingto guaranteed national degrees.

The strength of the links which is assumed(and somewhat overrated) between knowledgeactually acquired, qualifications held and theabilities that employers expect of young recruitstends to encourage training in the narrowest ofprofessional branches, to the detriment of otherforms of education that rapidly fall out of favourbecausc they are deemed classical and tra-ditional.

Educators have not yet succeeded in org:ai-izing their dialogue with society, though thatdialogue seems to have lost its ideologicalvirulence in recent years. The problem is howto prepaic young pcopic for working life asadults without sacrificing general education. Itis more a matter of attitudes than of subject-matter: a specialist in medieval history, for

266 Alum Thenayme

example, can use his specialized knowledge,going beyond pure erudition, to make today'sworld easier to understand. In managementdisciplines, there is a great demand for finance,marketing, auditing and accounting techniques,which, unless corrective measures are taken, willoust basic subjects like economics altogether. Itis up to economists to make the world under-stand that their discipline has the great virtueof strcssing human solidarity, showing howtrade brings benefits and is a messenger ofpeace, and preparing students intellectuallyfor an extraordinary variety of activities andprofessions.

FUNDS FOR EDUCATION

The crisis in educational objectives is com-pounded by a funding crisis, which is due to acombination of factors.

One is the difficulty in fully appreciating thecost of education. There are many differentreasons for this, the relative importance ofwhich varies from country to country. Coombs(1985) has drawn attention to the disparity inunit costs per student according to the level ofeducation. These differences in turn vary con-siderably from one country to another (Eicher,1987). Is it widely known, for example, that inFrance the average cost of a university studentis slightly lower than that of a secondary-schoolpupil, whereas elsewhere it is, sometimes dis-portionately, greater?

Deadlock situations prevent resources frombeing redeployed. For instance, the humancost of experiments in renovating the first twouniversity levels in France, affecting half of allstudents in the past two years, has provedhigh in comparison with the results achieved.Again, the closing down of a school in an arcawith a dwindling population will meet withstrong resistance and the central authority'spowers of coercion are restricted. Moreover,when for reasons of economy the state cutsback on teacher recruitment, the number ofteachers drops, but the steady ageing of the

2

teaching profession pushes up the overall salarybill (Bienaymé, 1987).

A more recent phenomenon to have emergedin some countries is that, because of the dwin-dling prestige and purchasing power of themembers of what is now a less glamorousprofession, there are fewer and fewcr peoplewishing to take up teaching as a career, es-pecially in thc subject areas most sought afterin the working world. It will not be possibleto deal with this recruitment CTisis withoutfurthcr financial sacrifices for education, or per-haps by personalizing teachers' salaries.

Lastly, although it is theoretically simpleenough to forecast trends in the number ofenrolments in compulsory education, errorscreep in as soon as the forecasting becomes moredetailed, because it is more difficult to anticipatethe drop-out rate, the distribution of pupilsaccording to option and their geographicallocation.

Other categories of public expenditure com-pete with spending on education. This appliesto defence spending, which is contingent onthe vicissitudes of state security. It also applies,albeit for different reasons, to welfare expen-diture, which is on the increase due to theexpansion of benefits by virtue of acquiredrights and also unforeseen variations in expen-diture-generating factors such as illness, unem-ployment, poverty and pensions. Some inter-national comparative studies (Wilenski, 1975)on Western countries have even shown thathealth spending is negatively correlated witheducational expenditure in terms of their rela-tive share of the GDP. Thc more people spendon health, thc less they spend on education.

The situation in many education systemstoday is, therefore, one of crisis as regardsboth the goals pursued and the financing ofeducation, while the overall climate is itself lessfavourable than in the 196os.

One of the lessons to be learnt from anobservation of business strategy is that theingredients of success that prevailed during theboom years are no longer a guarantee of successtoday. However, before discussing thc sweepingchanges dictated by 'crisis management', wc

fr f

Does company strategy have any lessons for educational planning?

should turn our attention to some of tile manage-ment constraints in the public education system.

THE MANAGEMENT OF EDUCATION

Typically, except in countries with a federalstructure (usually very large countries), statemanagement of education features bureaucraticrules, a top-down flow of information, com-partmentalization of responsibility and slownessto react to far-reaching changes in society. Theindustrial groups that have copied this modelarc handicapped by such characteristics when-ever markets or technology become turbulentor hostile (Emery and Trist, 1965; Lawrenceand Lorsch, 1967; Bienaymé, 1982).

Oddly enough, at a time when business enter-prises have gained by moving away fromFordism and Taylorism towards other formsof labour organization, public education sys-tems are persisting in thc error of centralismand across-the-board decisions. These decisionsoverrate the advantages to be gained from econ-omies of sle, and their supporters over-ratethe equalities they think should be preserved.Finally, dccision-making is too far removedfrom the actual situation at hand. For instance,there is something wrong with a proposal thatan identical allocation of funds for runningexpenses should be granted to two establish-ments which, though similar in all other re-spects, have to operate under different climaticconditions, on the grounds that equality must

At a time when education has come underscrutiny and its relations with society arc chang-ing, planning offers inadequate technical sol-utions. Planners have gradually become slavesto ritual and routine, sinking eventually into arut. Educational planners arc not the only onesto have run into troublethe same is trueof those responsible for centralized economicplanning, who underestimate environmentalchanges, the inertia of social groups and theworkings of international competition. In thecircumstances, and taking due account of thedifferences between countries and individual

267

cases, is it possible to come up with any broadlines of action that may alter the coursc ofeducation policiesand hopefully improve thcirresults?

Suggested strategic guidelines

Contemporary thinking ,n educational policy(for example, Cerych and Sabatier, 1986;Debeauvais, n.d.; Husén, 1988) focuses ontwo questions: How, and to what extent, canchanges bc effected without reform? Underwhat conditions can a reform actually bringabout the desired changes? Generally, there arctwo types of guidelines.

One series is provided by educational policyspecialists with detailed practical knowledge ofthe field. One example is Husén (1988), whowhile refuting the view that a single paradigmcould be universally valid, nevertheless spellsout a handful of general rules which, if neglected,will lead reformers to ccrtain failure. Accordingto him:A properly designed educational reform requires

a grcat deal of timetime measured, not inyears, but in five-year spans or even decades.

To be carricd through in full, it requires theactive involvement of educators right fromthc outset. All too often, educators feel leftout of the decision-making process whichnevertheless depends heavily on thcm forimplementation.

No educational reform can bc content to sctobjectives without identifying the resourcesto be harnessed for this purpose and thesacrifices that It is going to entail.

Any educational reform needs to be designed .

with a view to changes affecting other sectorsof society. Educational reforms cannot beused as a substitute for other reform% insociety: school and the university cannot ad-vance democracy single-handed, or improve !

the general climate of inthistrial relations.A reform can only succeed and take shape after

a tong experimental phase and after thelessons to b. drawn from that phase havebeen assimilated. Consequently, the am-

2 6 8 A la I n Ihenaymi

bitions and rapidity of the changes soughtthrough educational reforms arc not in them-selves a guarantee of success. The strategicoutlook demands greater humility, more re-alism, and morc perseverance on our part.

Another series of replies has been formulatedin recent work on business strategy. Lentz andLyles (1986) stress the need to mobilize every-one concerned by taking problems of implemen-tation into consideration when formulating tasks,goals, objectives and timetables. In line with thisthinking, we would suggest three guidelines.

The first entails sctting the quality of edu-cation as the first priority for action. Thestrategist's cast of mind seeks to turn threatsinto concrete problems capable of respondingto operational solutions. Whereas the planneris too readily reassured by thinking in termsof aggregates and the statistical averages con-tained in his model and remains the prisonerof norms and ratios, the strategist seeks toextricate himself as neatly as possible if hesenses that the situation is bccoming dangerous.When a company runs into serious difficulties,which may have been occasioned by an unfor-tunate combination of circumstances, it needsto distinguish thc symptoms from thc causesof these difficulties. The stratcgist's character-istic approach is to seek ways to turn hisexperienced difficulties into a concrete problemfor which practical solutions may reasonably bedevised (Ohmac, 1982). The problem here isless to try to calculate the optimal solutionthan to devise more satisfactory complementarymethods of action. This is a question of obser-vation, relevant information and common sense.

Absenteeism among school pupils, uncom-pleted studies, rejection rates and repeater ratesamong students, the crisis of motivation andstaff recruitment in education are commonlycited indicators of the difficulties encountered,even if their acuteness varies from one establish-ment to another.

A fairly new theme is now emerging, bothin the literature on business competitivenessand in studies on education. This i the themeof quality. Wc are now discovering that am-bitious goals of democratizing society and pro-

2';

moting social justice cannot be achieved over-night simply by increasing thc number of peoplein school. The reasons arc: (a) the goal isbcyond the rcach of educators; and (b) edu-cators ought to give practical expression tothese goals in thcir own actions, by improvingthc quality of their teaching, of their coursesand of their teaching methods.

Education is not merely a matter of cohorts,flows and stocks. Well-run companies also cat-egorize their customers, segment their marketinto groups of customers having more or lesshomogeneous behaviour patterns, and adapttheir products to the specific tastes in evidence ineach segment. Product differentiation, selectiveaction and operational flexibility arc some ofthe secrets of successful businesses. Quality isnot just a question of seeking excellence interms of a single scale of performance or asingle criterion (e.g. academic erudition). Qual-ity is also defined by the extent to whichproducts meet customers' expectations: safe-guarding acadcmic excellence is one indispens-able element in a good education policy. Butthere is another consideration too, namely, therelevance of activities in terms of curricula,teaching methods, and the type of evaluationof knowledge and abilities. This relevance needsto bc assessed in the light of thc expectationsof the public with whom educators have todeal.

Lastly, in the strategist's own specific heu-ristic approach, the cducator must develophis ability to listen to his clients (parents,schoolchildren, professional circles, regionalbodics, etc.). Teachers who realize how oftcntheir imagc is dcntcd will win back the respectof their fellow citizens by their willingness tostep outside the framework of their specialityin ordcr to communicatc and exchange concreteproposals with their natural partners in thefield.

Qualitative progress in education calls forgreater involvement on the part of the keyplayers, who happen to be in school classrooinsand university lecture theatres. This can beachieved by means of genuine decentralizationof power, which mean.; giving school heads

Does company strategy have any lessons for educational planning? 269

and university vice-chancellors or presidentsgreater control over thc utilization and allocationof resources. Decentralization should not be asubterfuge allowing the state to divest itself ofresponsibilities that the school is incapable ofdischarging itself for lack of the necessaryresources.

The resulting stratcgic autonomy ought toenable institutions to 'hug the terrain'. Instrategically important areas, they will be ex-pected to adapt 'proactively'. It will no longerbe enough for them pas3ively to apply the regu-lations. Intermediate bodies such as regionalassemblies may be able to facilitate negotiationswith the central administration and sct in mo-tion a genuine process of self-reform.

Thc decentralization of power to institutionlevel will entail new obligations for their heads.A recent survey of industrial corporations hasshown that their success depends on their styleof management and command. Their managerssubmit to a clear and universally accepted codeof ethics in their decision-making, and theycommunicate the message defining corporatepolicy to their entire staff. Skilful exercise ofpower entails observance of a set of ruleswhich preclude the risks of arbitrary decisions(De Woot and Desclees dc Maredsous, 1984).

According to thc headmaster of the AmericanCommunity School of Abu Dhabi (Ambrose,1988), some of the criteria of excellence definedby Peters and Waterman (1982) apply also tothe running of a school. For example, the tastefor action, close relations with pupils andparents, the spirit of innovation and enterprise,the search for greater productivity throughpersonnel motivation, clear awareness of thevalues and goals of the establishment, and so on.

Closer links between establishments and theirlocal environment, productive activities, electedofficials, etc., should make it easier to diversifysources of financing. This is the best way tolighten the burden of central governmentfinancial tutelage and interest potential part-ners from other sections of society in the smoothworkings of scholastic institutions.

Decentralization should, in the last analysis,make it possible to appraise institutions in

terms of the quality of their strategy, in otherwords, their capacity to define their identityand their long-term goals. Tnis presupposesthat thc following conditions are met: (a) aleadership capable of listening and of creatingappropriate conditions around a collective ideainspired by a vision of the future; (b) a de-veloped and ongoing system of internal andexternal communication; and (c) regular evalu-ation of thc scientific and strategic content ofeducation.

Finally, thc decentralization programmemeans that administrators will require train-ing in strategic thinking. The teaching of plan-ning may have the virtue of teaching people abetter understanding of the dynamics of theestablishment, with 'planning to learn' thustaking precedence over 'learning to plan'.

The role of the state raises one last question:by devolving broad responsibilities upon insti-tutions, steering the education system as awhole will become a far more delicate andcomplex task, particularly for thc state, whichis the supreme guardian of the national intcrcst(general cultural, social solidarity, etc.). Mini-mal standards will thus have to be laid downin the form of common core curricula ofgeneral knowledge. Steps also need to be takento ensure that certain institutions do not sys-tematically skim off thc best pupils and students,leaving the less tractable categories to fend forthemselves, in the name of selection.

Selection can be reconciled with democracyin education by diversifying streams, curriculaand institutions. It is up to the state to announceits prioritiesnotably through its pay policyfor teachers--even if regional or local com-munities may have to contribute in order tomake some adjustmcnts.

It is also up to the state to plan for staff train-ing and recruitment, avoiding the excesses ofregional nepotism on the onc hand, and theseesaw trends on thc other, which are so preju-dicial to teachers' morale due to resulting un-evenness in their careers. Lastly, the dynamicsof self-reform need to be guided, advised andinspired with thc aid of procedures for self-evaluation and for evaluation by bodies of

sr).

270 Alain I3ienayrni

acknowledged impartiality and competence.To conclude, whcn educational planning is

conceived as an essentially quantitative exercise,and when it remains in the hands of specialistsaccustomed to thinking 1,1 nationwide terms, orin terms of broad masses, its limitations becomeapparent. The planning expert's advice to theprince is still useful. But institutions will viewthe resulting plans as too abstract, too restrictiveor too far-fetched for the person on the spot.That is why plans arc destined to serve ; ad-,ancts to the strategic function with whichestablishments ought to be invested.

Comparisons of companies enjoying long-term prosperity with ones in difficulty leads tothe conclusion that the search for profit is lessdecisive than the quality of their managers'strategic outlook. Obviously a firm needs tomake profits, just as a living organism needs air;but the goal of the living organism is net tostore up as much air as possible. Similarly, thebest way to bring about change in educationalinstitutions is to give responsibility for definingtheir goals in accordance with the resources thatthcy can reasonably hope for, to people with asense of initiative rather than to thosc whoseprime concern is to administer the applicationof regulations. Educating the young is aboutguiding them firmly towards autonomy. It is

up to thc central administrations to take thismessage to heart by firmly guiding schools anduniversities to a condition of autonomy.

A well-designed educational reform plan canhelp a country to avoid costly collective mis-takes. But it is not enough in itself to define acommonly agreed order of social realities (pri-orities?), nor to convince educators to work forits fulfilment. A society's future belongs neitherto educators alone nor to planners. All thedifferent sections of society, adult communities,the political authorities, the influence of localauthoritiesall ought to have a say in the matteralong the way and, in the process, help educatorsto discover the prospects for progress.

If, as Rivarol said, `Kings will go on losingthcir heads for as long as they wear their crownsover their eyes instead of over their brows', thenplanning is neither the only, nor even the most

2 c

important, means of putting the crown backon the brows: strategy is less an instrument or aset of technical recipes, than a state of mind.

References

AMBROSE, J. M. 1988. Excellence in Schools. Neuss Links,April.

ANSOFF, I. 1975. Managing Strategy Surprise by Responseto Weak Signals. Cahforrua Management Review, Winter.

AUSTRUY, J. 1965. Le scandale du diveloppement. Paris,Marcel Riviere.

BENDA, J. 1927. La trahison des &res. Paris, Grasset.BIENAYME, A. 1982. Entreprises, marchi, eta:. Paris,

Presses Universitaires de France.. 1986. L'enseignement sup&ieur et Enke d'universue.

Paris, Economic:a.. 1987. La mesure du probleme umversitaire francais.

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Does educationneed strategic piloting?

Sylvain Lourié

Why the question?

By looking at the substance of the radicalchanges which have affected educational de-mand and supply this article attempts to under-stand why the very foundations of educationalplanning must be designed and constructedfrom a new point of view.

CHANGING DEMAND

In the past twenry years, the nature of the edu-cational phenomenon as a reflection of 'socialdemand' has changed radically. This is particu-larly obvious in three areas.

First, there is an increasingly clear-cut contra-diction between education seen as a strictlyindividual act, in the sense ascribed to it byPiaget in terms of genetic epistemology, and

Sy lvain Londe ( France ). Entered Unesco in 1965and held among others the following posts: Co-operativeProgramme World Bank; Director Educational Policyand Planning; Untsco Special Educational Adviser tosix governments in Central America; Adviser attachedto the Assistant Director-Genera: for Education re-sponsible for studies on educational futures and co-ordination of Unesco's Major Project on Education inLatin America and the Caribbean; Director, Inter-national Institute for Educational Planning. Since 1988,he has been Assistant Director-General for Planning,Budgeting and Evaluation, Unesco. Author of numerousarticles in professional journals on economics of educationand educational policy and of a book. EducationalDevelopment: Strategics and Decision-making inCentral America,

the standardized, bureaucratic, collective re-sponse which states have now been providingfor nearly a century and a half.

Second, the demand by individuals (and notjust schools) for education reflects aspirationsof various kinds, which may be social and civic(inclusion of marginal or minority populationgroups in the mainstream of national society),economic (ongoing adaptation to changing em-ployment structures), or cultural or ethical(creative participation within a society, whichpreserves its cultural and historical roots whileat the same time keeping up with the race forscientific and technological development).

Third, from the standpoint of the state, re-spect for, and in some cases even the strength-ening of, the traditional role of the school as aninstrument of national identity conflict withmajor international trends which shape uni-versal patterns and structures of thinking,behaviour and even values.

One of the consequences of this diversity ofdemand is that the clientele for education,that is, thosc demanding an 'educational prod-duct', is no longer restricted to the children andyoung people for whom school was originallydesigned and has sincc developed. Today, itincludes not only thc children and young peoplerejected by the education system but also adultsof all ages from every social class. Lifelong edu-cation is thus a very real demand. As a result,this new clientele is much more heterogeneousthan before. A time factor comes into play here(education for all at any time of life) and also aspace factor (since there is a tendency for edu-cation to comprcss space by attempting to atten-uate differences and regional or internationalantagonisms).

Progucti, Vol. XIX, Ho. 2, 1989

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274 Sylvain Louri4

CHANGING SUPPLY

Five factors seem to have helped to change thenature of educational supply, which has hithertobeen confined mainly to formal school systems(schools per se), designed and regulated by thestate.

The statc monopoly of education is beingseriously eroded. For one thing, the mistakes oreven dangers resulting from a uniform bureau-cratic response to different individual needshave gradually come to light and been noted.For another, the time frame of national politicallife (the electoral process, a government's expec-tations, etc.) does not coincide with that of theeducational process, espetially wh:n the latter isno longer confined to the period of education atschool, which itself is very much longer thanany political lifespan. In short, disregarding thequestion of resources, the state is not really ina position to offer a personal education serviceand provide all .eitiZens with the opportunity ofentering or leaving a variety of educational andtraining systems at different times throughouttheir lives.

Any changc in educational provision dependson the tension between the strands of the rel-evant 'social fabric'. In other words, as in-termediary bodies and group structures havegradually assumcd greater weight and responsi-bility within the social order, it May be saidthat the threads of the social fabric have becomemorc tightly woven, since a greater number ofneed: arc expressed by a greater number ofsocial actors. For example, in a highly struc-tured country, if the education provided by theschool system needed to be radically altered, itis highly unlikely that such a change wouldactually comc about, for it would meet withresistance from professional groups and unionswhich sec their social role not only as a means(to serve education and society) but as an end(to defend their own interests). In the devel-oping countries since decolonization, and also inthe industrialized countries, history has shownthat the fabric becomes progressively moreclosely knit with thc gradual development of a

more participatoryor, to put it more simply,more democraticnational society. Any changein educational provision becomes relatively moredifficult to bring about as social structures andactors become more effective in defending theestablished order.

Thc productive private sector is playing anincreasing part in education and has come upwith alternatives to formal education systems.In the United States, for instance, the outlay onhigher education by private business enterprises($4o,00o million annually) equals the amountspent by all higher private or public educationalestablishments concerned solely with providingsuch education.

At a time of economic crisis, where there is nochoice but to adopt a policy of austerity in publicspending, the funds needed to cover social-sector spending (health, education, social secur-ity, housing, etc.) arc increasingly channelledtowards the productive sectors and nationaldefence; of late, we have even witnessed com-petition within the social sector between socialsecurity and health needs, and educationalrequirements.

The technological explosion has intensifiedthe emergence of an alternative to the conven-tional state education systcm in the shape ofdistance education nctworks, computerized in-formation and communication systems, satellitecommunication across frontiers, and so on, acombination of which makcs possible per-sonalized teaching based on self-learning, aswell as teaching systcms organized outside tra-ditional systems.

These changes in educational supply havegiven rise to a variety of structures and actorsthat no longer come under the sole authority ofthe state, indeed far from it; and also to a varietyof educational 'products'. Generally speaking,what we have here are not uniform, standardizededucational materials and teaching methods, butspecific responses to demands from a variety ofpopulation categories whose social, cultural andeconomic requirements may frequently differ.

Does education need strategic piloting?

RADICAL CHANGESIN THE BASIC PREMISES

OF PLANNING

In 1982, in a publication entitled EducationalPlanning in the Context of Current DevelopmentProblems; the International Institute for Edu-cational Planning (IIEP) noted that thcre werein fact two different kinds of planning:

tone] is effectively integrated into an overall politicalproject, duly accompanied by the necessary meansof direction, implementation and control; thc other,whose connection with development planning is par-tially theoretical, nevertheless tends to defme itselfas a whole in relation to the ends of the contemporaryworld as it perceives it. On the onc hand we have asystem, on the other an 'attitude'.

Today, we find that planning is no longer basedon the foundations which in the early daysenabled it to play the role of direction, im-plementation and control. Instead, we are wit-nessing thc disappearance of the certaintieswhich made it possible to identify factors thatwere stable and relatively easy to extrapolate.Thus, for instance, starting out from a demandfor school places for a given age-group and fol-lowing a sequence that was invariable through-out the systcm, from gm level to the next, itused to be possible to determine the budgetaryresources needed for school 'flows' reflecting arelatively undisputed demand matching the costof what was practically a single source ofsupply.

But as the nature and size of supply anddcmand evolved, it followed quite naturallythat the role of national planning, which mightbe centralized or non-centralized, directive ormerely indicative, but was intended to be decis-ive for conventional school education, was inturn radically altered in both meaning andscope.

We have raised thc question chosen as thetitle for this article (Does education needstrategic piloting?) because it suggests a newapproach (a comprehensive one, of course,since we are talking about a policy or strategy

275

on the scale of a whole society) which would beneither directive nor even indicative. The factis that, in a context in which all the componentsof an overall policy are mobile, the only realisticeducational strategies arc differentiated strat-egies, no longer rooted as before in theory,which is planning-oriented, systematic, pre-dictable and linear, but in a precise knowledgeof the factors which are vectors of change andarc characteristic of any society studied indepth. The range of these strategies is de-scribed below.

Identifiable trends

If, therefore, educational planning, like anyother prospective process, must no longer bebased as in the past on theoretil, analyticaland deductive models, but on a knowledge ofan existing situation, it is essential to pinpointthe factors that can be identified today andforeshadow the shape of education in the future.We shall endeavour to single out two groupsof factors, the first relating mainly to thecontemporary socio-cultural and political fac-tors which already outline the shape of things tocome, and the second to 'technical' factorswhich also give an idea of what the education oftomorrow might be.

SOCIO-CULTURALAND POLITICAL FACTORS

There appears to be a growing demand forcollective participation, not only in the indus-trialized countries but also in the developingcountries, however far advanced they are oathe road to industrialization. This observationwill be the starting-point for looking on theone hand at trends regarding the attitude to thepower of the stile, and on thc other the trendsto be found in industry and the 'consumers' ofeducation.

276

The role of the state

Sy Ivain Lourié

Soviet experience seems to demonstrate thatinflexible planning decreed by the state, itselfseen as the sole source of authority and action,had reached its limits during the 1980s.Whether measured in terms of economic growth,employment policy, the mobilization of theresources needed to finance social needs orinnovations reflecting the changing require-ments of the economy and society, thc state'sability to release the creative forces of a com-munity eventually reaches limits which areclearly perceived by the public at large.

An example of this in the educational spherehas been the over-production of graduates inthe Soviet Union as a result of the theoreticalvision of a monolithic, centralized society,embodied by a state unable to adjust to thefluctuating demands of the individuals andgroups for which it is responsible. In LatinAmerica, the organization of society is hetero-geneous, due to a lack of co-ordination betweenthc social actors, political forccs and the stateitself. This situation may give rise either to aconsiderable weakening of thc actors or to adisorganized expansion of the state, whichgives the impression of resorting to a widevariety of different approaches according to thesectors or mechanisms it is meant to becontrolling.

These two examples suggest that as histori-cally structured, the state, whose original pur-pose was to ensure a balance of social forceswhile acting as custodian of the nation'sindependence and sovereignty, has become anend in itself. Abandoning its instrumental andsupportive role, it has become a be-all and end-all, first for its own public servants and ulti-mately for the population as a whole. By way ofillustration, some school and aciidemic systemsrespond less to the demands of the communitythan to those of the 'servants' of the state, whomay be politicians or government officials andwho exert a decisive influence when it comes todetermining the tzchnical and st,cial objectivec,means and functions of these systems. Frombeing originally a service to society, education

2

has bccomc an cnd in itself for the planners,teachers, administrators and politicians who areresponsible for it on behalf of the state. Thestate is supposed to be acting on behalf of thecommunity, which in fact is at no stageassociated with the decisions conccrning it.

Some people believe that thc response tothis all-powerful and to some extent irrespon-sible state authority lies in some form ofdecentralization. With the opening up of ncwprospects in the Soviet Union, for instance, amove is envisaged towards 'root-and-branch'decentralization to stimulate individual initiat-ive and so involve everyone in the economicprocess. In education, the aim henceforth is toinvolve users in any decision-making concerningthem. Thus the democratization of the manage-ment of educational institutions and establish-ments should entail student participation. InFrance, where the problem is of a differentorder, decentralized state structures are takingon an increasing share of responsibility formanagement.

But does this response to the all-powerfulstate in the form of a policy of decentralizationgiving local communities and users a direct sayin fundamental choices really provide a uni-versally applicable solution to thc problem? Itappears that it is not necessarily possible,particularly in Latin America, to establish acorrelation between a high degree of decen-tralization and the democratization of society.In many Latin American countries it has beenthc centralizing function of thc statc that hasenabled it to guarantee independence, develop-ment and opposition to other morc particularistforccs such as, for example, the Church.

Conversely, decentralization does not necess-arily provide a 'relevant' response to pupil,and students' needs, or greater economic et-ficiency, or more appropriate teaching methods.In fact, would-be decentralization might well dothc reverse and give risc to action by certainforces at thc local level to the detriment of theinterests of the majority. Since thc finan ialautonomy of local authorities (piovinces ormunicipalities) is more often than not an il-lusion, what happens is that under the banner

40.0

Does education need strategic piloting'

of decentrahzation, thc private sector takesover the school system without a minimumguarantee of social justice, because in somecases decentralization may actually accentuatesocial and political control. Under the guise oftransferring responsibility, it is in fact theproblems that are delegated, without thc necess-ary resources to solve them.

It cannot therefore be claimed that thcanswer to the dominating role of thc state isnecessarily to be found in a transfer of authorityto intermediate or local structures, in caseswhere the local and national set-up does notprovide the guarantees of social justice andcultural development that arc needed if decen-tralization is to become an instrument ofdemocratization and participation. It is conse-quently thought by some that decentralization,seen in Napoleonic terms as a form of decon-centration of the central authority, or in moresubtle terms as a genuine transfer of authority,cannot be advocated as a universal panacea. Therole of the state must thcrcforc be viewed as afluid one, passing through different historicalstages according to the extent to which anation and its society arc organized. In somecases, state power might be counteracted at thecentral level by thc establishment of represen-tative structures which also operate on anationwide scale (tradc unions, students' as-sociations, consumers' organizations, etc.), inpreference to contemplating some authority atthe subsidiary territorial echelons which mightconceivably take over certain public activitiessuch as education.

It is therefore not possible to propose an arbi-trary, universal model for responsibility- andburden-sharing between thc state and localauthorities according to which the state alonewould be entrusted with the power to establishnational standards or rules and to er.sure theirapplication while leaving the local authoritiesto control management methods. It would bemore realistic to acknowledge that the establish-ment of national rules, which is part of thestate's legitimizing role, and the assessmentof results (nationwide examinations), which isone of thc statc's prerogatives, can probably

277

not be delegated to intermediate authorities. Bycontrast, the adaptation of educational pro-grammes and methods, and even local orintermediate structures will depend on howwell equipped the local social and politicalstructures arc to take on such new responsi-bilities. In some cases, it is obvious thatintermediate educational structures arc per-fectly capable of doing so, whereas in others,only the central organization will be able to givethe regions and districts the necessary dynamismto establish a common system throughout thecountry. In India, for instancc, although therearc locally debated issues which go right up tothe central authorities, it is the latter whichformulate the policies approved by Parliamentand which lay down a programme of action.This programme docs involve a measure ofstructured &centralization and participation inthe form consultative bodies at all levels, butthese dc not have any direct authority, suchauthority remaining centrally in the hands ofthe state.

i'he diversified educational fieldand those involved in ir

Alongside the state and its structures, whichmay or may not adapt to the requirements ofcollective participation, a 'diversified edu-cational field' has become increasingly im-portant in recent years. This covers, in additionto school systems directly administered orcontrolled by thc central state authority or itsdecentralized structures, a wide variety ofeducational and training programmes whicharc very often set up, managed and controlledby employers in thc production and servicesectors. Both in thc countries traditionallythought of as industrialized and in some newlyindustrialized countries, we ftnd an increasingpart played by firms in providing basic trainingas well as technical and even cultural vocation,i1retraining for their employees. This actionon the part of productive sectors has alreadygiven rise to networks not only for the exchangeof information hut also for the mutual recog-nition of certificates betwern firms providing

278 Sylvarn Lour:I

training and retraining programmes These'parallel networks' of specialized training andeducation are often based on the standards ofgeneral knowledge provided by the formalcducation system itself, and partly also on thegeneral qualifications acquired within thc formalsystem.

In addition to the direct role of firms, whichmay provide specific training for tlieir ownstaff or even offer services to the community atlarge, there has been the rapid development ofdistance education systems. These arc intendednot only for students in higher education butalso for those in secondary education, andtoday provide an opportunity for people livingin remote areas and also those who arc not ofthe usual school-going agc to join in information,cultural and even vocational training pro-grammes. Systems of recognition and certifi-cation have been introduced, enabling self-learning to be acknowledged as a legitimate anduniversal method of education and training.Very often, thc certificates awarded are not astate initiative, but meet the criteria of aparticular firm, sector or occupational branch.

This 'diversified field' is not necessarilymade up of converging forces. While businessenterprises arc playing an increasing part ineducation and training, this is primarily forpurposes of productivity and efficiency, whereasmany distance-education and self-teaching pro-grammes respond more to criteria of 'relevance'or of personal satisfaction which, though it is insome cases rewarded by a certificate, may besolely a response to individual aspirations. Thistype of cducation is therefore diversified, notonly as regards available means and tools, butalso as regards the aims sought.

There is also a rising tide which invitescloser scrutiny. This represents thc growinginfluence of thc 'consumers' of education overthe choice of thc 'products' offered them,either by official institutions or through privateor special programmes. Whereas administrativereforms nearly always envisage student orparent participation on school committees orvarious advisory bodies, thc functioning ofdistance education systems reflects the dy-

2

narnics of a fr-e-market economy For instance,the Indira Gandhi Open University in Indiaconducts thorough and costly market researchbefore deciding on the 'product' to be put onsale. The reason for this is that, as the pro-grammes offered by distance-education systemsare fee-paying, they must meet precise require-ments in respect of personal satisfaction orvocational training. Thc quality of thc productwill determine the market's response to it.Alongside these commercial systems, edu-cational and training exchange and partici-pation systems have grown up, prompted bypurely personal considerations. These motiv-at'ons have a considerable effect on the natureof the relatiunships and exchanges which shapeeducational and training programmes. It is likelythat they herald the ultimate doom of educationsystems designed centrally and dictatorially fora public which has never been considered as aclientele but rather as raw material to befashioned into a shape preconceived by thosewho prepare and produce official programmes.

Apart from these standing factors, whichcarry within them the seeds of change and arcalready to be found in the educational situationas it is today, there arc others which affectdecision-making and whose origin is to besought in the progress or setbacks of thescientific and technological organization ofcontemporary societies rather than in themotivation of individuals or institutions. It isto this second category that we shall now turnour attention.

DECISION-MAK1NG FACTORS

As of now we can discern three trends whichmay modify, if thcy do not already do so, therole of education and, i o an even greater extent,the forecasting of its development by means ofconcepts for new strategies. Our starting-pointwill be the impact of financial uncertainty oneducation policies, the availability of infor-mation giving a clearer understanding of thcpotential changes in supply and demand, andfinally the ncw factors which may affect the

Does education need strategic piloting)

very nature of decision-making, either in gen-eral or specifically as regards education.

Financial constraints

In a situation of regular economic growth, wherethe resources of the state, regarded as the maineducational agent, may be presumed to berelatively stable, an instrument such as aneducation plan is obviously entirely justified andlegitimate. But in a situation of sharply fluc-tuating resources, in which economic growth isno longer the order of the day, thcre is littlesense in a regulating system based on un-changing premises.

For example, in France today the idea of astate plan has replaced that of a national plan,with the state laying down general policyguidelines rather than specifying actual acti-vities. Accordingly, in the French system, theplanning role of the state is to lay down pro-gramme laws which give rise to contractsbetween the state and the regions, with noreference to the traditional framework of thefive-year plan. The 'plan for the future' (planpour l'avenir) proposed in 1987 by a Ministerof Education was not related to a nationalfive-year plan, but was more like a politicalplatform mapping out a strategy for educationalchange.

If we look closely at the development ofplanning, it can be seen that plans arc meaning-ful only at the local or 'micro' level, and thattheir time-span is limited to the short term.They have become a means of implementationrather than the reflection of a process forforecasting action and mobilizing resources.There is of course no denying that for a statewhich intends to remain strong, planning pro-vides a framework for negotiating debt servic-ing, obtaining international financing, increasinginvestment rates and even setting forth a

strategy for individual reconversion. But thiswill be strategic planning, with a medium- andlong-term view, and not the preparation of aspecific instrument for a set programme ofactivities.

The first consequence to emerge from this

279

trend is the need to explode the mystery of theplan as a medium- and long-term instrument,seen in macro-economic terms. On the samelines of thought, a planning process leading toprecise objectives is perceived by many asbeing too analytical and technocratic, andirrelevant to the reality of the social andeconomic scene. While this view is partlyexplained by the uncertainty of the financialconstraints on state resources, the need to showup the plan for what it is can also be explainedby the complexity of the social actors wishingto have a say in decision-making concerningeducational demand. But in situations wherethe educational field, and thosc involved in it,are heterogeneous, compartmentalized and di-versified, planning is no longer applicable sinceby definition it can only exist where the processis a simple one consisting of stable, homo-geneous elements.

Availability of information

The second series of forces which influencedecision-making and its tools relate to thenature and availability of information. It is

accepted that all decision-making today must bebased on an optimization of relevant infor-mation. This information is of various kinds,ranging from systematic periodic statistics tosampling and in-depth surveys and leads topsycho-social surveys to determine motivations,these in turn being subsequently sifted, com-pared and analysed. This moving mass ofinformation, which should ideally be structuredby starting with the most complex material andgradually rcducing it to statistics now hasavailable to it new means of transmission andcommunication. Access to mainframe com-puters, rapid transmission by diskettes enablingmicrocomputers to process huge quantities ofncw information, satellite transmission andvideotex which enable information to be trans-mitted and exchanged, as well as responded to,all of thcsc in theory clearly provide thcdecision-maker today with a vast potentialstore of knowledge which should give him fargreater scope for creativity than was hithertothe case.

280 Sylvam Lourte

Decision-makers often imagine they have farmore latitude for intervention than is actuallythe case. In fact, if a dense nctwork of infor-mation is converted into an organized, readilyavailable information basc, giving decision-makers, or their back-up teams, a clear pictureof what can actually be done, it is likely thattheir `criteria of satisfaction' may be appliedmorc forcefully than before. These informationnetworks and means of communication actuallyexist. In the years to come thcy are bound toinfluence decision-making, which today is stillbased on supposition but tomorrow will bebased on fact.

Quality of information

The third force which may change decision-making, hence the ability to translate com-munity perceptions into action, is the innovationof software reproducing 'artificial intelligence',using, for example, concepts such as thc Expertmethod, designed to reconstruct decision-making processes. Drawing on the empiricalexperience of the decision-maker when dealingwith real-life situations, artificial intelligencerules out fanciful hypotheses and bases thoughtstructures and me'..itods of action on establishedexperience, backed up by the dense network ofinformation referred to above.

In conclusion, the plan will become a manage-ment tool, while analysis and forecasting, withthe help of the information networks and com-puterized reasoning processes, will substantiallymodify the kinds of options faced by govern-ment officials, private companies, local auth-orities and specialized non-profit-making bodies.All of thesc agents, equipped with new meansof information, communication and decision-making, will henceforth be called upon to playan unprecedented role of leadership and inter-vention in education and training. What kindof process of collec,ive participation and actionwill result from this is not yct known; andthere is also some fear that a possible scenarioof polatintion may emerge, with considerablepowcr concentrated in the hands of a minorityof decision-makers. In that casc the next step

2

will bc to try to establish some counteracting I

force.

New processes

As we have just seen, planning is meaninglessunless it is viewed as a process conducted by avariety of actors within a wide range of struc-tures. As the purpose of planning is not toprepare plans (which are its 'products'), weshould examine how far the functions of thoseinvolved in planning are likely to change giventhe context and trends referred to above. Ifuncertainty about the medium and long termsis likely to persist, if the decision-maker's actualscope of action is restricted by relatively per-manent, hence 'irreducible' factors, then inorder to act within thc narrow limits left to himit is absolutely necessary for him to receivereliable information and analyses on a regularand frequent basis. This means that the plan-ners' function will be primarily to gather,proccss, analyse and then disseminate infor-mation, and to report on it to decision-makers.In this way, the bases for choosing this or thatalternative will be as close as possible to reality.

The fact is that decision-makers do not haveto takc a decision at a given time, bearing inmind the range of possible options for estab-lishing a set line to be followed. There hasprobably never been any such set linear system.It is eVen less likely to exist in a context ofpermanent shortages and crises. This is whydecision-makers today must adopt a less cut-and-dried position, at a time when their analysisis less causal and, so to speak, less technocratic.This does not mean that their approach will bestrictly pragmatic and intuitive, or that it shouldbe based solely on their own criteria of satis-faction. We shall now seek to understand thenature of this approach by reviewing the in-consistencies of the present system and tryingto outline the concept of strategic piloting.

Docs education need strategic pilotirg) 281

INCONSISTENCIES EMERGINGFROM OBSERVED TRENDS

As we have seen, there is no symmetric relationbetween thc heterogereous factors making upthe 'social demand' for education, and the re-sponses offered. As demand grows in diversityand its range of component parts becomes moreentangled, traditional responses are no longeradequate, and new responses are at times somc-what inconsistent and divergent. In other words,there is no single field of demands which canbe covered by a single field of responses. Asthere is no linear causal link between these twoforces, and they meet solely by a confluence offactors, the result is synergy rather than alogical predictable construct. This new processis intrinsically more heuristic than algorithmic,and it is consequently impossible to foresee howa response can be provided by establishing aparticular configuration of the various factorsinvolved.

THINKING IN TERMS OF STRATEGY

It is precisely the idea of 'strategy', as used inindustry, which corresponds to the approach toany market which is segmented in this way.In the world of trade and industry the notionof segmentation is due to the differentiatior ofproducts, services and cost-effect relationships;but the conditions which produce it do notseem to be totally alien to a world apparently sodifferent as that of education.

We have seen that an educational strategycannot be devised on the basis of calculatedpiojections or forecasts, but must be rooted inan overall knowledge of the complex present-day situation which often carries within it theembryo of future trends; this approach is some-times called 'forecasting thc present'. By de-tecting the factors which are vectors of change,we may gradually come to understand thenature of the changes that affect the edu-cational order and thc demand for education.It is essential to begin by delimiting areas of

uncertainty, such as the root causes of failuresin the school system, especially as regards tech-nical education, the real causes of the disaf-fection of parents and pupils, and so on.

Identification of these areas will graduallymake it possible to remove any ideological biasfrom our appreciation of the facts. Any under-standing of a situation is invariably deeplytainted by the observer's value judgements,and unrealistic objectives are oftcn sct as aresult of an ideological view of reality. Itideology is no longer the sole criterion fordetermining objectives, and if objectives arcpartly shored up by a better understanding ofthe areas of uncertainty, thcn two approachesmay be adopted. The first might be comparedto some extent with that adopted in causalplanning, although it is more ambitious as itinvolves a deeper concern to understand theconwlexity of the context. This approach is'strategic planning', entailing a variety of hy-potheses to explain a situation that needs to beremedied. These hypotheses may serve as abasis for the construction of response scenarios,since some of them may point in the oppositedirection to the cnd sought. Response scenarioswill make it possible to bring these cases ofdrift back on course. Only when these scenarioshave been drawn up will it bc possible toidcntify the combination of means that will beconsistent with the ends in view. This approach,which is more flexible than 'planning by pro-jection', goes perhaps too far in that its objec-tives, once set, cannot bc changed. The fact isthat objectives are as vulnerable as resources tounforeseen obstacles which may crop up onthe path first chosen. An over-technocratic orover-analytical application of strategic planningwould disregard the interdependence of objec-tives, resources and obstacles.

The second aspect of the strategic approachis of a less theoretical nature. It cbns;sts ofjoint action involving a team of actors whopilot educational stratcgy along a global course,combining the implementation and formulationof tasks with their revision and constant re-adjustment to ensure that the objectives arcconsistent with the resources available, and that

282 Sylvain Laura

the resources can deal with the obstacles andare reflected in the constant revision of theobjectives. This kind of approach, which is moredynamic and involves far greater participation,means that decision-makers must meet threerequirements. First of all, they must be con-stantly aware of prevailing trends or signalsso as to create the necessary conditions for therealization of a collective idea, based on ashared vision of the future. This idea can onlybecome a reality if it is based, first and fore-most, on anticipation of a hoped-for or expectedsituation, and if it involves the active partici-pation of the members of the team producingthe collective idea.

In addition to a change of attitude by thedccision-maker, a second requirement must bemet: the establishment of an information andcommunication system that is both well sup-plied and highly developed, and which canensure a continuous supply of observations,analyses and study findings, which will serveas the basis for the preparation of scenariosand the mobilization of the resources neededto give effect to the decisions taken and theresulting tasks to be carried out.

The third and final requirement depends onthe ability to evaluate contents and strategies,and the resources mobilized. In a continuinginformation system, decision-makers and theirback-up teams must assess the results achievedin relation to the original objectives set. It isthis collective action comprising analyses, re-source mobilization and ongoing revision whichconstitutes the strategic piloting to be adoptedin the future when it comes to determiningeducation policies and, indeed, social policiesin general.

This dynamic action by agents taking a col-lective approach which does not systematicallyfollow the obstacles-objectives-resources cycle,but can at any given time modify that cycle,will reappear in the way in which the orientationand implementation of educational activities aredetermined, whether at the central state level,at the les el of specific progiammes or withinpublic or private institutions.

EDUCATION, STRATEGIC PILOTINGAND THE STATE

We have suggested that decision-makers shouldbe surrounded by a team of people who areboth analysts and, at a later stage, operators.The difference between upstream and down-stream planning w;11 consequently be less rigidthan it seemv! ;ome years ago. Regroupings ofdecisions wil be proposed, which it will bedifficult to issociate from implementation,since general policy analysts will be requiredto give effect to their proi,osals, committingthemselves as technicians and playing theirsocial role to the full.

In adjusting to the changing relationshipbetween the ends and the means, decision-makers and those around them will no longerfollow a predetermined path, but will be re-quired to pilot their multiple choices in thegeneral direction of a single objective, as revisedand confirmed.

Strategic piloting seems to foster the emerg-ence within the structure of autonomous actionmaking it possible to narrow the gap betweenproducers and consumers of education or train-ing products. If this gap can be effectivelynarrowed, collective participation will becomea realistic goal, and the nature of the edu-cational product will reflect at one and thesame time the demands and the resources ofboth those proposing it and those using it.

This is where responsibilities should be moreappropriately shared between groups of indi-viduals, communities, intermediate structures,associations, etc., and the state, whose roleshould gradually move away from that of oper-ator to the more standard-setting one of com-pensator. Although it is true that for thereasons referred to above, this sharing ofresponsibility is not everywhere the same, andcannot be decreed according to a single model,the general trend seems to suggest that as thesocial fabric becomes increasingly mad.c up ofintermediate groups which are effectively auton-omous, and to which material and particularlyfinancial resources can bc delegated, the state

Does education need strategic piloting> 28 3

will then be able to resume its prime functionof upholding social justice and the values ofequity.

There remains the question of the standardsfor evaluating the results achieved. It is unlikelythat the statc alone can determine any suchcriteria. In so far as industry will increasinglytake responsibility for educational and trainingactivities, there can be no question of relyingsolely on the state to bring evaluation backinto linc with the formal school system. Vari-ous professional groupings (banks, insurancecompanies, airline companies, etc.) have alreadyestablished recruitment, selection and pro-motion criteria based on types of training andeducation whose content, methods and struc-tures they have themselves laid down. Onc ofthe key questions which will arise in futurewill be that of recognizing results achieved byvariousand in some cases, as we have seenabove, even divcrgingways and means, so asto ensure a cuitcoive recognition of provenresults. It is likely that such certifianion orrecognition of achievement will be in thc handsof joint bodies in which the state will naturallyplay a major role but over which it will in nocase have a monopoly.

2 5

Absenteeism, 268Academic achievement, 9-20, 15, 63-

64, 79, 85, 127, 138, 147, 255;cognitive achievement, 9, 127, 147;in science, 10

Academic excellence, 268Academic failure, 126-127Academic performance, 31-32, 127,

230;measure of, 31-32

Academy for Educational Planningand Management in Pakistan, 196

Access to education, 50, 110, 134, 171-172, 221

Administration, 63, 65, 90, 134, 143-158, 254;administrative ecology, 90;central, 108-110, 115, 138;educational, 89-105;intermediate, 108-110;local, 109;public, 93

Adult education, 128, 181, 195, 207,217, 225

Africa, 3-6, 8, 13, 143-158;Algeria, 144;Angola, 144;Benin, 4, 149;Botswana, 144-145, 152, 156;Burkina Faso, 4;

285

Cameroon, 7, 156;Cap Verde, 149;Central African Republic, 149;COte d'Ivoire, 144;Equatorial Guinea, 156;Ethiopia, 144, 149, 152;Gabon, 149;Gambia, 149;Ghana, 5, 10, 14, 144;Kenya, 144, 149;Lesotho, 7, 156;Liberia, 156;Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, 144;Madagascar, 156;Mauritius, 145, 156;Mozambique, 7, 144;Nigeria, 10, 15, 144, 156;Sierra Leone, 149;Somalia, 156;Sub-Saharan, 7, 13-14, 145;Sudan, 5-6, 144;Swaziland, 10;Uganda, 114, 156;United Republic of Tanzania, 4-7,9-10;Yemen, 7;Zaire, 5;Zambia, 144, 152, 155;Zimbabwe, 10, 146, 152

African Curriculum Organization, 14

286 Index

Agriculture, 187Ahumada, Jorge, 219Allocation, see ResourcesAmerican Educational Research

Association, 98American School of Abu Dhabi, 269Anglo-Saxon education system, 208Apprenticeship, 206Arab Bureau of Education for the Gulf

States (ABEGS), 180Arab Council of Co-operation, 180Arab States, 8, 167-184;

Algeria, 169, 172-174, 176-177;Bahrain, 168, 172-173;Democratic Yemen, 172;Djibouti, 168, 170;Egypt, 168-170, 172-174, 176-178,183;

Gulf states, 168, 171, 176, 178;Iraq, 168-169, 172, 174, 176-177;Jordan, 168-170, 172-174;Kuwait, 168, 170, 172, 176;Lebanon, 168, 171-173, 183;Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, 168-169,172, 180;Maghreb states, 168-169, 171, 173,176-177, 180, 183;Mauritania, 168, 170, 172-173;Morocco, 169-174, 176-178;Oman, 165, 170;Qatar, 168, 170, 172;Saudi Arabia, 168-170, 173-174,176-177;Somalia, 168, 170, 172-173;Syrian Arab Republic, 168-169,172-174, 177-178, 183;Sudan, 168, 170, 172-173, 176-177,183;

Tunisia, 169-170, 172-174, 176;United Arab Emirates, 168, 172,176;

OC,-)441t

Yemen Arab Republic, 168, 170,172-173, 176

Artificial intelligence, 280Asia (including Pacific region and

Oceania), 3-4, 8, 113, 185-198;Afghanistan, 187;Australia, 70, 72, 98-99, 185, 187,190, 194-196;Bali, 35;Bangladesh, 8, 187, 194;Bhutan, 8, 187;Brunei, 185;China, 10, 50, 185, 187, 190-195,197;

economic background, 185-189;Fiji, 187;human resources, 186-189;Hong Kong, 69, 113, 190, 192, 194-196;

India, 4-6, 10, 19, 46, 187, 191-193,195-197;Indonesia, 15, 114, 187-188, 193-194;

Islamic Republic of Iran, 187;Japan, 10-13, 18, 65, 69, 71-72, 83,108, 185, 187, 190, 193, 195-197,206-207;Lao People's Democratic Republic,187, 194-195;Malaysia, 187-188, 192;Maldives, 195;Myanmar, 187;Nepal, 8, 187;newly industrializing countries(NICs), 185-187, 190-192, 195, 197;New Zealand, 187, 190, 195-196;Pakistan, 187, 193, 1%;Papua New Guinea, 10, 187;Philippines, 5, 7, 10-13, 15, 187-188,192;

Republic of Korea, 18, 69, 83, 108,185, 187, 192-197;

Index

Samoa, 185;Singapore, 69, 188, 192-196;South-East Asian countries, 186-188, 190-192, 207;Sri Lanka, 196;Taiwan, 69, 83;Thailand, 10-13, 19, 110, 187, 192,194;

Turkey, 185;Viet Nam, 187

Asian Development Bank. 186, 190Assessment of Performance Unit

(APU), 29Assistance-intervention, 99Australian Studies in School

Performance Project, 29Australian Thesaurus of Education

Descriptors, 111Authoritarianism, 96Authority, 108-109, 270;

local, 130, 136, 209, 276-277Autonomy, 111-114, 116, 123, 137, 178,

192, 196, 208, 269-270;financial, 276;institutional, 137, 153

Avalos, Beatrice, 16Basic education, 57, 60, 64, 110, 126-

128, 152, 169, 191, 196-197, 225;universal access to, 133

Bates, Richard, 99Bilingual education, see LanguageBrain drain, 145, 240Brazilian National Association of

Professionals in EducationalAdministration, 98

Budgets, 57-60, 62, 113, 128, 161, 175,178, 243, 259, 275

Buenos Aires Conference, 54Bureaucracy, 60, 62-65, 124, 130, 163-

164, 240;centralized, 111, 120;rationalization in, 93

287

Capitalist mode of production, 223Caribbean Society for the Study of

Educational Administration, 98Carnoy, Martin, 86Carroll, John B., 17Caste system, 240Center for Research and Development

of Education (C1DE), 64Centralization, 94-96, 107-108, 115-

116, 134, 137, 149, 152, 160-161, 165,196-197, 208-209, 239, 241;decentralization, 94-96, 111-112,115-116, 124-125, 132, 136-137, 149,151, 164, 174, 193-195, 209-211, 222,241, 269, 276-277;centralized decentralization, 163

Chevrolet, 84Chinapah, V., 154, 156Church, 276Civil servants, 121Civil society, 221Clientelism, 130Closed system, 90Cognitive achievement, see Academic

achievementCollective participation, 89, 99-101Collegiate action, 100Colonial rule, 145, 148, 171;

decolonization, 274Commission of the European

Communities, 211Commonwealth Council for

Educational Administration, 98, 196Communication, 84, 108-109, 150, 153,

206, 229-235, 247, 263-265, 274, 280,282

Community, 49, 109, 112, 114, 116, 130,134, 157, 172, 249, 252, 276;local, 95;mobilization of, 65, 238,participation of, 137, 166, 169, 224-225

288 Index

Community Action Programme forEducation and Trairung forTechnology (COMETT), 201

Company strategy, 259-271Competence, 253, 256Comprehensive university, 207Compulsory education, 171-172, 175,

201, 205-206Computer-aided learning, 199, 204Computer literacy, 204Conference on Free and Compulsory

Education, 54Confucian tradition, 185, 190Contingency theory, 90Continuing education, 195, 200, 273Coombs, Philip H., 45-47, 66, 204, 266Corporatism, 123-124Cost-benefit analysis, 161, 262Costs, 234-235, 263, 266Court, D., 143Criper, C., 4, 9Critical-dialectical approaches, 98Critical-emancipatory research, 99Critical human action, 100Critical theory, 90Cross-cultural co-operation, 89, 97-99,

211

Cross-national cooperation, 200Crozier, M , 138-139Culture, 10, 92, 197, 201-202, 238, 265,

277;

academic, 128;cultural awareness, 252;cultural bias, 39;cultural homogeneity, 127, 135;cultural identity, 159, 168, 247;cultural model, 261;cultural relevance, 135;cultural standard, 127;local, 135;social, 128

Curriculum, 10, 14-15, 22, 96, 109, 113,134-135, 139, 147, 161, 199, 201,208-209, 218, 253, 268-269;intended, 14;implemented, 14;uniformity, 137

Customized production, 83, 86Davies, Lynn, 100Debeauvais, Michel, 98Deblois, Claude, 99Debt, 53-68Decentralization, see Centralizat onDecision-making, 25-41, 84-85, 111,

139, 209, 229-235, 278-280, 282Deconcentration, 194Demand, 147;

for education, 126, 265, 273, 281;for goods and services, 73;for qualified personnel, 161;social, 160, 190, 244, 273

Democracy, 48, 50, 96, 100, 111, 130-131, 160, 165, 219, 241, 267, 269,277;European, 122;participatory, 96

Democratization of education, 168Demographic changes, 78, 81, 202-204Dependence, 122Dependent countries, 121-125Developed countries, 9, 18, 46-47, 69-

88, 93, 95, 97, 124, 132, 139, 163,261, 274-275

Developing countries, 3-24, 39, 43, 45-47, 93, 97, 107, 113, 116, 119-120,130-133, 135-136, 139, 182, 216, 225,240-242, 264

Development, 215, 217;theory, 99, 120

Dialectical method, 901)iez-1-lochleitner, R., 233Disadvantaged (underprivileged)

group, 16, 50, 86, 152

Index 289

Distance education, 19-20, 274, 278Diversification, 135Diversity, 108-109;

ethnic and linguistic, 153Division of labour, 49, 73, 265Dodd, W., 4, 9Donor agencies, 154, 156, 217, 245Drop-outs, 66, 78-79, 146-147, 149,

191, 204, 241Economic circumstances, 10, 38, 92,

122, 143-145, 157, 164-165, 238;crisis, 43-52, 123-124, 178;economic indicators, 220;economic planning, 49;growth, 43-45, 50, 54, 168, 200-201,219, 246;recession, 133

Educational aspiration, 126, 202Educational attainment, see Academic

achievementEducational policies, 94Educational requirements, 79-81Educational Requirements for New

Technologies and WorkOrganization, 84

Educational research, 60, 215-228Educational system, 66, 126-127Educational technology, 65ERIC (educational data base), 64Effectiveness,.90-91;

managerial and institutional, 108Efficiency, 44, 50-51, 53, 61, 63, 65, 90-

91, 94, 111, 114, 127, 130, 165-166,170, 178, 193, 201, 207, 209, 216,225;inefficiency, 116, 120, 129-130

Egalitarian development strategy, 220Elite education, 265Employment, 69-88, 121, 129, 144, 161,

175, 177, 187-189, 201, 221, 242-243,259, 261, 273;teacher, 109;

underemployment, 82, 149;unemployment, 70-71, 132

Enrolment, 11, 55, 66, 145, 169, 190-192, 204, 259, 263;in primary education, 45;in secondary education, 45, 126;in post-secondary education, 72,126

Equality (equity), 53, 61-62, 107-117,130, 201, 241;in educational opportunity, 11-14,95-96, 134;in income distribution, 44;social, 43, 48-50, 129, 134-136, 218

Equipment, facilities and services, 149,157

Escuela Nueva, 113-114Ethnic and racial groups, 39, 77-78, 85,

135, 224, 230, 240;Asians, 78;Blacks, 78-79;Hispanics, 78-79

European Community, 69, 199, 203European Community Action Scheme

for Mobility of University Students(ERASMUS), 201

Europe, 4, 71, 110, 121, 199-212, 264;Austria, 205;Belgium, 208;Common Market, 200;Denmark, 201;Eastern, 182,199-200, 202, 210;England, 29, 53-54, 71-72, 98-99,110, 115-116, 201-202, 210, 231;France, 71, 115-116, 202, 205-206,208, 231, 265-266, 276, 279;Hungary, 207-208;Ireland, 203;Italy, 71;Netherlands, 206;Norway, 208;Republic of Germany, 71-72, 202,

290 Index

205, 207, 210;Sweden, 13, 207-208, 231;Switzerland, 202;Turkey, 203;USSR, 49, 207, 210, 276;Western, 50, 71-72, 119, 182, 199-200, 202, 206, 210, 261

European Forum for EducationalAdministration, 98

European higher education, 261European Research Co-ordination

Agency (EUREKA), 200European Strategic Programme of

Research in InformationTechnology (ESPRIT), 200

Evaluation, 62, 64, 84, 112, 138, 147,149, 177-178, 207, 224, 255-256

Examination, 9, 15, 29Existentialism, 90Expansion, 43-50, 54-55, 58, 96 -97,

107, 116, 125-126, 132, 135, 152, 162,171, 179, 190, 192, 204, 221;of primary education, 242;of the modern state, 119;of the supply of educationalfacilities, 161

Expatriates, 240-241Expenditure, 40, 44, 56-58, 60, 190,

245;central government, 47, 53-56;public, 54-5FR&D, 259

Expert system, 64Family, 238;

low-income, 81;planning, 172;single-parent, 81

Fertility, 78Finance, 43, 54-55, 63, 131, 149, 157,

193, 207, 239, 243, 266, 269, 279;constraintt., 163, 279

Fordism, 267

Foreign aid, 64, 240Foreign currency, 60Foreign debt, 123, 138, 162Foreign domination, 122Foreign institutions, 196Formal education, 143, 154, 161, 171,

195, 216, 220-221, 238, 246, 252-257,27t

Fuller, Bruce, 15, 19Funding agencies, 162, 217Funds, 110, 193, 209, 222, 242, 260,

266-267;public, 196

Garcia, W., 62-63Gender, see WomenGeneral Motors, 83Gesamtschule, 205Globalization, 165Goals of education, 264-266Gonzalez, Norberto, 221Goulet, Denis, 99Government, 50, 93-94, 96, 108, 112,

154, 161, 190, 193, 219-220, 222, 226,240;

central, 130, 136;federal, 210;financing, 58;resources, 53-54, 82;

Graduate education, 97Grass roots, 166, 193, 217, 238Great Depression, 49, 89-Q0, 94Greenfield, Thomas, 99Gross domestic product (GDP), 55, 121Gross national product (GNP), 55Gulf Co-operation Council, 168, 180Hallak, J., 66, 165Harare Conference, 146Hegemony, 123Hewton, E., 53-54Heyneman, Stephen P., 10Higher education, see Post-secondary

education

Index

Homework, 17-18, 21Household income, 59Human action approach, 90Human capital theories, 132, loi, 178,

186, 219, 246, 259Human Development Indicator, 186Human Development Report, 186Human factor, 247-251;human competence, 247, 249-251, 256-

257Human resources, 93, 113, 124, 143-

144, 148, 154, 161, 164, 184,192,218, 237-258 (see also Manpower)

Human rights, 160Husén, T., 66, 267Illiteracy, 149, 169, 173, 179, 181, 260;

adult, 160Immigration, 72, 78, 81, 202, 262Indigenous development, 144Indigenous population, 128, 224-225Indira Gandhi Open University, 278Individualism, 202Indonesian Grade Surveys 79Industrial corporation, 269Industrialization, 122, 165Industrialized countries, see Devel-

oped countriesIndustrial Revulution, 89-90Industrial transformation, 138Inequality, 48-49, 98, 134, 149-150,

152, 165;in family income, 72;social, 123

Informal education, 238Information, 29-40, 62-64, 74, 85, 111-

112, 116, 149-151, 163, 165, 215, 225,239-241, 251, 274, 279-280, 282;data-processing, 63;management, 254;national data base, 64;research-based, 65

291

Information technology, 199, 204, 207-208

Infrastructure, 108, 223, 239Initiative, 84Innovatioh, 110-111, 161, 166, 261, 276;

educational, 64;in pre-school education, 223-224

Institute for Higher Education, 196Institute for Manpower Development,

196Institute of Educational Planning and

Administration, University of CapeCoast/Ghana for West Africa, 156

Institute of International Education (atthe University of Stockholm), 239

Institutional development, 90, 154Inter-American Society for Educational

Administration, 98Intergovernmental agencies, 98, 177International assistance, see Foreign

aidInternational Association for the

Evaluation of EducationalAchievement (IEA), 4, 9-10, 14-17,29, 61

Internationol community, 63, 144, 197International competition, 267International consultants, 60International education, 160International exchange, 98International funding, 138, 190, 216

(see also Foreign aid)International Institute for Educational

Planning (IIEP), 97-98, 148, 167,229-230, 265, 275

International IntervisitationProgramme in EducationalAdministration (11P), 98

Internationalization, 201 (see alsoGlobalization)

International Labor Organisation(ILO), 5

292 Index

International markets, 73International Monetary Fund (IMF),

47, 200International networks, 60International organization, 160, 211,

223

Instructional material, 7, 21Inter-American Development Bank,

162

Investmentcapital, 73;in education, 59

Islamic Educational, Scientific andCultural Organization, 180

Israeli Educational Reform, 230-233Job

future, 74;manufacturing, 72;service sector, 71-72;skill requirements of, 76;training, 69types of, 71-72

Kenya Education Staff Institute, 156Kinyanjui, K., 143Knowledge, 99, 132, 218, 245, 251, 261,

264-266;scientific and technological, 135

Knowledge-intensive products, 132Korean Educational Development

Institute, 196Labour, 70-71, 79;

college graduates, 82;cost of educated labour, 73, 83;demand, 70, 72-73, 79, 81;excess supply of most-educatedworkers, 82;female college graduates, 82;highly educated, 83;market, 133, 161, 165, 202, 206;organization, 267;shortage of educated labour, 81;

3

supply, 70, 72, 77-79, 81;unskilled, 73

Language, 4, 85, 127;bilingual education, 224;English, 4, 15, 35;English-speaking countries, 157;foreign, 17;French, 4, 17;French-speaking countries, 8, 14,157;

indigenous, 224;linguistic code, 128;mother tongue, 30, 32-35;of instruction, 15, 147;Portuguese-speaking countries, 157

Latapi, P., 165Latin America, 3, 6-8, 16, 53-68, 89-

105, 120-123, 127, 131, 135-137, 139,159-166, 215-228, 276;Argentina, 95, 126, 129, 164;Bolivia, 5, 129;Brazil, 3-4, 7, 62, 69, 83, 95, 97;Caribbean, 159;Chile, 54, 95, 97, 164, 223-224;Colombia, 6, 8, 10, 62, 95, 97, 113,164;

Costa Rica, 55, 57-58, 61, 63, 65, 95,164;

Ecuador, 6-7, 57, 224-225;Guatemala, 6, 8;Haiti, 55;Jamaica, 7, 9;Mexico, 5, 55, 61-62, 95;Panama, 55, 95, 97;Paraguay, 57, 224;Peru, 5, 54, 95, 97, 129, 164;Venezuela, 54, 58, 62, 95, 129

Latin American Faculty of SocialSciences, 98

Leadership, 113, 269, 280Learning, 3-24, 85, 112;acquisition, 110

Index 293

Lentz, R., 268Leontief, Wassily, 77Lesourne, J., 265Levin, H. M., 86Liberation approach, 99Library, 39, 60Lifelong education, see Continuing

educationLiteracy, 9, 147, 165, 190-191, 219, 221,

224, 238, 249, 252Local authorities, see AuthorityLocal communities, 194Lourié, S., 55, 63-64Low-income countries, 45 (see also

Developing countries)Lox ley, William, 10Lyles, M., 268Lynch, Patrick, 98Major Project on the Extension and

Improvement of Primary Educationin Latin America, 54

Management, 50, 53, 62-64, 89-105,107-117, 129, 139, 143-158, 166,209-211, 261-263, 267;centralized, 113, 209;holistic, 100;personnel, 157;public, 171;reform, 61-62;school-based, 22, 51, 110-112, 114

Manpower, 190, 194-195, 207, 222, 239,242, 246, 259

March, J. C., 232Market mechanism, 130Mass education, 43-44, 265Mass organization, 123Mathematics, 14McAnany, Joiio Batista Oliveira, 19Media, 238, 249Middle-income countries, 45Migration, 188, 202-204MINDSACROSS, 114

Minority, 78-79, 162, 273;racial, 81

Mobilitystudent and faculty, 201, 211;social, 44, 81, 218, 221

Modernization, 122, 159, 160, 217, 221,226;

theories, 120Monitoring system, 110Multiculturalism, 201, 203Multicultural skills, 85Multidimensional paradigm, 100Multinational enterprises, 70, 211National Assessment of Educational

Progress in the United States, 29National culture, 127National development planning, 147National identity, 96, 127, 136, 211,

259, 273National Institute for Education, 196National Institute for Educational

Planning and Administration(NIEPA), 196

National Institute for EducationalResearch, 196

Neo-classical economic approach, 215,222

Neo-classicists, 90, 130Neo-liberal policies, 123, 165Newly industrialized countries, 69, 83

(see also Asia)Non-formal education, 43, 152, 154,

169, 172-173, 179, 181, 184, 190, 216,221, 224

Non-governmental organizations, 164,196, 250-251

Non-government research institution,225

North AmericaCanada, 7, 70, 72, 99, 206,United States, 10-13, 29, 47, 50, 69-

3 ti ,c;.;

294 Index

77, 79, 81, 83, 85, 98, 110, 163, 206,231, 262, 264, 274

Occupational structure, 85OECD countries, 10, 203OECD's Mediterranean Regional

Project, 161Officials

state, 27-28, 34-36;provincial, 27-28;national, 28-29, 38

Ohmae, K., 261Open systems, 90Open universities, 192Opportunity costs, 82Overeducation, 81-84Organizational development, 90, 111,

150-152Organization of American States, 97Panel on Technology and Employment

of the National Research Council,79

Parents, 20, 26-27, 202, 231;association, 107-108, 116

Participation, 96, 112-114, 125, 139,152-153, 163, 165, 218, 221, 239, 275,277, 280-282;of parents, 113, 224;of teachers, 113;political, 100, 225, 274

Passow, A. Harry, 16Pedagogical dimension, 92Peer training, 84Personnel development, 150, 153, 162,

256, 261Peters, T., 269Phenomenological approaches, 98Planning, 64-66, 85;

educational, 138;future-oriented, 165;goals, 195;micro, 150;of school systems, 254;

outcome of, 237;participatory, 241-242;process of, 237;structure, 176;techniques, 178

Planning Institute of Jamaica, 9Policy-makers, 60, 225Political-ideological condition, 44, 47-

51, 91-92, 94, 101, 109, 122, 125,143-144, 163-165, 197, 200-201, 233,274-277;authoritarian, 125;legitimacy, 123-124;paternalism, 162;pragmatism, 264

Popular education, 219Population, 77, 85, 160, 165, 182, 186-

187, 203, 217, 238, 260Post-secondary education; 16, 57-58,

60, 116, 128, 131,192, 206-207, 261;mass, 206

Prawda, J., 55Pre-school education, 126, 217, 223Primary education, 7, 43, 45, 50, 53,

57-58, 81, 108, 169, 175, 190Principal, 19-20, 22, 27, 31-34, 108-

109, 113, 153Private sector, 47-48, 129, 132, 136-

137, 164, 174-175, 204, 274, 277Privatization, 136, 193-194Problem-solving, 84Productivity, 69, 74, 82;

of educated labour, 73Psacharopoulos, G., 55Public education, 48, 95, 190, 206, 267Public sector, 43, 47, 124, 129, 163;

spending, 43Public policy, 132Public service, 125, 130, 137Public spending, 133, 266Publication, 64

Index 295

Quality of education, 25-41, 43-44, 47-48, 50-51, 58, 107-117, 127-128,130-131, 134-136, 144-147, 163,165-166, 179, 182, 195, 199, 202, 204,207-208, 211, 221

Quick-fix adjustment, 53, 66Reasoning, 84Recruitment, 116, 161, 240, 268Reform, 43-52, 110-113, 152-154, 175-

176, 192-193, 230, 260, 262, 267, 270;economic, 200;management, 66;planned, 53

Regional cooperation, 180-182Regional Educational Development

Program of the Organization ofAmerican States, 97-98

Regionalization, 164Regional planning, 150Regional Programme for the

Universalization of PrimaryEducation and the Eradication ofIlliteracy (Major Project), 179, 181-182, 184

Regional Technical Project for Trainingand Research in EducationalPlanning and Administration(COFORPA), 148, 155-156

Reiff, H., 64Relevance, 90, 150, 166, 278;

cultural, 91, 94, 100-101;curriculum, 146;of knowledge, 216, 220;to educational administration, 151

Research and development, 64-66, 73,131-132, 147, 154-157, 195, 199, 210,220, 223, 251, 255, 261

Resources, 150-153, 163, 195, 243, 267,276;allocation, 18-19, 111, 116, 128-129,131-134, 243, 245, 249, 263, 269;financial, 92, 96, 107-109, 115, 147,

151-152, 162;infrastructure, 152;local, 110;personnel, 115, 147, 152;shortage of, 139, 243;teaching materials, 147

Rittel, H. W., 230Rodrigues, Neidson, 100Ross, K. N., 39Rumberger, R. W., 86Rural area, 3, 8, 13, 15, 36, 217Santiago Conference, 54School-leaving examination, 261School mapping, 149-150, 155School organization, 18;

class size, 18, 21School systems, 10-11, 13;

quality, 54Science and technology, 60, 73, 133,

168, 182, 197, 200, 221Science Education Programme for

Africa, 14Scientific development, 93, 96, 134,

162;science courses, 263;scientific revolution, 265;training of highly qualifiedresources, 134

Secondary education, 7, 9, 59, 81, 128,204-206, 278

Second World War, 97, 159Self-monitoring, 112-114Shift system, 5, 18Shukla, S., 4.Simon, H. A. 232Social chan,-,e, 165, 216Social claso, 240;

bourgeoisie, 122;working, 122, 127

Social debt, 165Socialization, 127Social justice, 100, 268, 283

30

296 Index

Social struggles, 122Social welfare services, 121Socio-econornic status, 230, 240Socio-political sphere, 233, 244, 275-

278Spencer Foundation, 84Staff, 18, 113, 179, 240, 269;

demoralization, 129State, 48-49, 119-140, 160, 218, 244,

269, 276-277, 279, 282-283;authoritarian, 123;capitalist-democratic, 120-121;intervention, 48;management, 124-125;monopoly of education, 274;welfare, 120-121 (see alsoGovernment)

State Committee for Public Educationof the USSR, 210

State of World's Children, 64Steier, F., 55Strategy, 281-283Structural adjustment, 55-58, 143, 145,

200Students, 6, 114, 129;

achievement, 8-13, 15;participation, 65;primary, 6;retention, 8-9, 15, 66

Subjects, 30, 31-34;mathematics, 14, 30;science, 30

Supervision, 97, 146Supply, 274Supply planning approach, 207Swedish Agency for Research

Co-operation with DevelopingCountries (SAREC), 239

Swedish I ligher Education Act of1977, 207

Swedish International DevelopmentAuthority (SIDA), 144

30.3

Tay lorism, 267Teachers, 16-17, 20-21, 26-27, 30-31,

107-108, 111, 129, 147, 229-231, 253,260-261, 268;primary school, 3, 5;pupil-teacher ratio, 4, 204, 260;qualification, 3-4, 13, 19;teacher-parent workshops, 19;training, 16-17, 19, 21-22, 169, 217;salary, 4-5, 61, 113, 129, 163, 269;secondary education, 4;supervision, 6;union, 108, 116, 129, 163;working condition, 4-7

Teacher-training colleges, 155Teaching, 3-24, 66, 169, 268;

aids, 6-7, 53, 57;instructional time, 17;materials, 59, 157;technology, 66

Teaching-learning process, 253Technical and vocational education,

192, 195, 197, 217, 225, 231, 242-243Technical assistance, 93Technical cooperation, 99Technology, 74, 76-77, 79, 83, 133, 165,

211, 260, 274;imported, 133

Techno-political elites, 222Textbook, 7, 15, 114, 146-147, 221Theory of dependence, 98-99Third World nations, see Developing

countriesTibi, C., 55-56Tokman, V., 122Touraine, A., 122Toyota, 83-84Trade liberalization, 200Traditional learning systems, 252Training, 132, 153-157, 175-176, 179,

182, 195, 238, 277;in-service, 113, 150, 154-155, 206,

Index 297

211, 255;.nanpower, 210;of educational administrators, 96-97, 116;vocational, 183

Transactional approach, 99Transfer of information, 216Undereducation, 81-82Underground economy, 70UNDP, 144, 186UNESCO, 54, 64, 97-98, 113, 144, 154,

156-157, 160-161, 167, 173, 179-181,191, 194-195

UNESCO Regional Office forEducation in Africa (BREDA), 148

United States Bureau of LaborStatistics (BLS), 74-76, 79

Universal primary education, 54, 146,160, 169, 171, 179, 181, 195, 221

University Council for EducationalAdministration (UCEA), 98

University Grants Committee (UGC),196

Urban areas, 8, 13, 21, 36Urbanization, 159-161

Value systems, 162Vocational education, 206, 262, 278Wages, 69-70Waterman, R., 269Webber, M. M., 230Wiggins, Thomas, 99Women, 72, 77, 149, 153, 190-192, 201-

202, 240Work organization, 77Worker participation, 74, 83-84, 86Work experience, 206Workforce, 69-70;

worker turnover, 83 (see alsoLabour)

World Bank, 13-14, 46-47, 144-145,162, 200

World Bank Policy Study, 152-154, 222World Conference on Education for

All, 110World Congress on Comparative

Education, 98World development, 263World Development Report, 64Wright, C., 145

u

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