Page 20 - Education for Development:George Psacharopoulos University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

18 ᐿ࿲ၾආӉj઺ԃٙɢඎ

Centralization

Most education systems in the world today are heavily centralized. The

Ministry of education regulates how schools operate, the curriculum, the
way teachers are hired or, rarely, fired and how much they are paid. In some
countries, the regulations also apply to private schools imposing tuition caps and

teacher hiring practices.
Education and labor market policies can be viewed as institutions that
affect the quantity and quality of human capital formation in a given country.

Take as an example the degree of centralization of an educational system, i.e.
the extent to decisions pertaining to schools such as hiring or firing teachers,
the curriculum and budget allocation are determined by the central Ministry of

Education rather than the school master or the local authorities. Evidence from
OECD’s PISA shows a negative correlation between the degree of centralization
of an education system and student achievement. Finland’s shine in student

performance has been attributed to the freedom school teachers have to
determine the curriculum and timetable.
One of the reasons private schools outperform public schools has to do

with decentralization. When education decisions are taken at the school rather
than the central level, achievement is higher (OECD, 2004, 2005).

School choice

In most countries, the institutional and political ideological setting is
against private schools, imposing all sorts of restrictions in their operations such
as a ceiling on tuition fees and regulation of teachers’ pay. Yet, evidence form
PISA and many studies shows that students in private schools exhibit higher