El reto de la descentralización educativa: reflexiones desde la mirada de actores nacionales y subnacionales en el caso del departmento del Atlántico.

Public choice theorists argue that political and administrative decentralization increases the efficiency in the delivery of public services in local communities. This paper departs from a critical stand of this perspective in studying the phenomenon of poor school performance. The Department of Atlántico is a case that deviates from the assumptions of public choice scholars, and hence its analysis serves to open an ontological and practical discussion on how to study processes of primary and secondary educational decentralization in Colombia. The use of a realist paradigm as a methodological backup to analyse a set of individual and group interviews at different levels of the government helps to unveil many of these implications. Themes identified in this study include the limited capacity of local authorities to design and administrate educational policies, the lack of clarity among the actors of different levels of the national education system about the use of state examinations, and the difficulty experienced by school directors of public educational institutions to access promptly to educational quality resources. These findings are all indicative of policy complexities omitted in the diagnostics of the sector published in the mainstream literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]