Educational decentralisation has been implemented globally. However, few studies have compared the effects of different decentralisation strategies on students' academic achievement in diverse cultural contexts. Using data from 49 countries participating in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015, this study attempts to fill…

Most research to date about the English government's policy to make schools independent of local authorities (LAs) has looked at the "macro" level of national policy and at the "micro" level of the institution. The study of which this article is a part explores changes at the "meso" level of the locality. Over a…

The U.S. Department of Education (Department) continually seeks opportunities to ease administrative burdens on State educational agencies (SEAs) while ensuring strong fiscal and programmatic accountability. This letter grants limited prior approval to SEAs to approve pre-award costs and participant support costs for subgrantees for programs in…

In Turkey, two types of administrative structures existed in the fields of National Education: "the central" and "provincial" institutions. However, between 1926-1931, the Locality model was implemented. Locality can be considered as a local administration formed in the provincial organization of the Ministry of Education by…

The future of Greece's well-being will depend on improving educational performance to raise employment and social outcomes. The challenges are significant, as public education expenditure in Greece has declined in recent years and learning outcomes are weak. To help the Greek government address these challenges, this report proposes a set of…

Contemporary discourses in educational administration have exponentially grown the number of adjectival leaderships, challenged traditional organisational structures, and offered autonomy as a solution to performance issues. In this theoretical paper, I ask "what does the principalship look like after autonomy?" Despite the range of…

Discussions charting the changing role of local government in education have often focused extensively on "concrete" policy changes over time, but have provided less detail on the contribution to changing power relations of less tangible shifts. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of discourse and governmentality, in this paper, detailed…

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the potential impact of the reform designed to decentralise public education in Italy, currently under discussion, on interregional redistribution. The central government has always played a prominent financial and administrative role in the provision of compulsory education in Italy. This has had a strong…

Since 2008, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) has annually surveyed our nation's authorizers. Survey findings provide an annual measuring stick for those in the field of authorizing, and they help education decision makers, foundations, legislators, and researchers inform their understanding of the field of charter…

In 2013, Governor Jerry Brown and the California legislature radically restructured the state's school funding system and accountability systems with a weighted student formula and a mandated local planning process in each district. The new law substitutes local politics and grassroots agency for state-driven mandates and compliance reviews. While…

The popular narrative of Wisconsin's collective bargaining battle started out being about money. Should public employees pay more toward their healthcare? Can school districts offset state aid cuts using the additional revenue from employee healthcare contributions? Does collective bargaining have a cost? This article gives an overview of…

Prepared for a Strategic Education Governance learning seminar, this working paper analyses the ways in which the Dutch government tried to reach overarching goals in education, in a system characterised by a high degree of distributed autonomy of education institutions and the participation of multiple actors, and consequently a government highly…

Use of local environments and stakeholders to illuminate the school curriculum, and increase ownership of it, has been demonstrated by international research as an effective means by which to make the curriculum more relevant and engaging to students. Localism is a key tenet of the Government's policy platform, and in education policy the…

The article focuses on tracking financial delegation (introduced nationally in January 2010) as part of the broader process of education restructuring and decentralisation in post-communist Romania. The aim is to critically pinpoint some of the challenges specific to the Romanian context, such as the multitude of policies and legislation (due to…

This case study focuses on a four-district collaborative that shared services for more than 15 years in an effort to retain rural schools and thereby to preserve community identity. With population losses in the four districts and suburbanization in the largest, the collaborative made extensive use of distance education in addition to itinerant…