Decentralized School Governance Policy: A Comparative Study of General Public Schools and Community-Managed Schools in Nepal

The literature reviewed for this study revealed that the movement toward decentralizing responsibility of school governance to communities has become a global policy in the contemporary world. With the aim of enhancing greater community participation and retaining students in public schools, the Government of Nepal introduced two different policies: the General Public School (GPS) Policy and the Community-Managed School (CMS) Policy; both guided by the Decentralized School Governance Policy. Since then, there has been a debate about whether centrally controlled but locally managed GPSs or community owned-locally governed CMSs are better. Policy documents in Nepal repeatedly claim that the CMS Policy achieves better results than the GPS Policy. The research reported on in this paper gathered evidence for examining claims concerning the performance of the policies. The research used mixed methods. Results indicate that there is no significant difference in the respective policy implementation performance between the two types of schools.