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We explore the effects of decentralization on education and health in Ethiopia using an original database covering all of the country's regions and woredas (local governments). Ethiopia is a remarkable case in which war, famine and chaos in the 1970s–80s were followed by federalization, decentralization, rapid growth, and dramatic improvements in human development. Did decentralization contribute to these successes? We use time series and panel data analyses to show that decentralization improved net enrollments in primary schools and access to antenatal care for pregnant women. The main channel appears to be institutional, not fiscal. We offer the database as an additional contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We review empirical evidence on the ability of decentralization to enhance preference matching and technical efficiency in the provision of health and education in developing countries. Many influential surveys have found that the empirical evidence of decentralization's effects on service delivery is weak, incomplete, and often contradictory. Our own unweighted reading of the literature concurs. However, when we organize quantitative evidence first by substantive theme, and then--crucially--by empirical quality and the credibility of its identification strategy, clear patterns emerge. Higher-quality evidence indicates that decentralization increases technical efficiency across a variety of public services, from student test scores to infant mortality rates. Decentralization also improves preference matching in education, and can do so in health under certain conditions, although there is less evidence for both. We discuss individual studies in some detail. Weighting by quality is especially important when quantitative evidence informs policy-making. Firmer conclusions will require an increased focus on research design, and a deeper examination into the prerequisites and mechanisms of successful reforms. Decentralization, Schoolbased Management, Education, Health, Service Delivery, Developing Countries, Preference Matching, Technical Efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no national accreditation or quality assurance mechanism for Canadian higher education. This paper argues that a number of structural characteristics that emerged as a function of the transition to mass higher education have served to stymie the development of government quality assurance mechanisms, including the decentralization of higher education policy, the development of a relatively homogeneous university sector, and the limited policy capacity of provincial ministries. The development of new types of degrees, combined with an expansion of degree-authority to new institutional types have led to the emergence of new quality mechanisms in several provinces designed to assess the quality of new degrees, but it is the universities that continue to play the central role in terms of quality assurance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Americans abolished 100,000 school districts from 1920 to 1970, altering a policy domain that had long epitomized the decentralized character of American politics. This political development coincided with women’s increased authority at the county level of government as reformers sought to overcome local, and typically male, resistance to reform. Not only did women become pivotal actors in generating legislative support for change; they came to wield new influence as the county became a central locus for administration. This gendering of county government, as women reformers undermined entrenched patterns of male political power at the local level, shows how avenues for women’s political influence may open up as the administration of policy across different levels of government shifts over time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite decentralization reforms of education systems worldwide, there is little empirical evidence about the processes through which decentralization can improve student learning. Proponents theorize that devolving decisionmaking authority to the local level can improve communication, transparency, and accountability, making teachers and school principals more responsible for better performance and more capable of bringing it about. Yet some research has shown that decentralization can increase inequality and reduce learning for disadvantaged students. This article reports on retrospective evaluations of three Central American school-based management reforms. Using matching techniques, these evaluations investigate whether the reforms enhanced student learning and how they affected management processes and teacher characteristics and behaviors. The evidence indicates that all three reforms resulted in substantive changes in management and teacher characteristics and behavior and that these changes explain significant portions of resultant changes in student learning. This article contributes to the understanding of how decentralization reforms can improve learning and shows how education reforms, even when not conceptualized as affecting teacher incentives, can generate important changes for teachers that, in turn, affect student learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public librarian is working out a new way of neighborhood democratic life in the public school community library. A social worker faced his in the local community clearing house and welfare station; the physician, in the health center; the theologian, in the community church; the educator, in the wider use of the school plant; the chamber of commerce, in the civic association; and the social scientist in the study of community organization generally. Economy is the first argument for local school library branches. Taxes, donations, volunteers can't be stretched far enough to meet demands that they reach and serve everybody. More intensive use of existing equipment therefore has to be made: more consolidations reducing overhead costs; more decentralization; closer living together in the neighborhood service groups at the risk of more minor collisions in them. For illustration, take the present situation in Chicago. The state legislature can grant a millage yielding of $300.00. Yet 50 branch library buildings are projected in a new program, one for each ward of the city, at a cost of $100,000 and an annual maintenance charge of $20,000 each, amounting to a million dollars a year that must be raised by taxation.