Octavian Gruioniu, Sabina Busuioc University of Pitesti, Romania Abstract
The problem of decentralization of the public services appears when the big centralized systems become inefficient and the state can no longer sustain this level of expenses. This problem is closely related to the debate on the concept of education as a public good. Public goods are often under provided by a free market because people are hesitant to pay for something when they can free ride on the effort of others. So would this happen with education? Unfortunately, the answer is not simple. Some of the benefits of education are private and some are public. I think the key of this problem is to realize that different kinds of education are associated with differing levels of public, private and anti-public benefits.
Keywords: public goods, decentralization, education system, private suppliers, public suppliers
The decentralization of the Romanian education is a very complex process implying deep changes both at the implementation level and in the results of the education system (the service finalization from the point of view of the tax-paying citizen). The present analysis takes into account only the decentralization applied to the Romanian pre-university education. In order to initiate this kind of analysis it is very important to previously debate the education concept as a public good.
This debate must start with the definition of the public good and with the dissociation between the public goods and the private goods. In order to identify the decentralization specific of the education, we must refer to the issue of education as a public good.
I. Contrary to common misconceptions, public goods are not goods provided by the public. Public goods are sometimes supplied by the private sector and private goods – by the public sector. It is the contention of this essay that technology is blurring the distinction between these two types of goods and rendering it absolute. Pure public goods are characterized by: 1. Nonrivalry – the cost of extending the service or providing the good to another person is close to zero1; 2. Nonexcludability – it is impossible to exclude anyone
1Most products are rivalrous (scarce) – zero sum games. Having been consumed, they are gone are not available to others. Public goods, in contrast, are accessible to growing numbers of people without any additional marginal cost. This wide dispersion of benefits renders them unsuitable for private entrepreneurship. It is impossible to recapture the full returns they engender.
Octavian Gruioniu / Procedia – Edu World 2010
from enjoying the benefits of a public good, or from defraying its cost (positive2 and negative externalities). Neither can anyone willingly exclude himself from their remit; 3.
Externalities – public goods impose costs or benefits on others – individuals or firms – outside the marketplace and their effects are only partially reflected in prices and the market transactions. „Externalities are the other face of nonrivalry.”3
It is evident that public goods are not necessarily provided or financed by public institutions. But governments frequently intervene to reverse market failures (when the market fail to provide goods and services) or to reduce transactions costs so as to enhance consumption or supply and, thus, positive externalities. Governments, for instance, provide preventive care – non-profitable healthcare niche – and subsidize education because they have an overall positive social effect.4 Moreover, pure public goods do not exist, with possible exception of national defense.5
Education used to be a private good with positive externalities. Thanks to technology and government largesse it is no longer the case. It is being transformed into a nonpure public good. Technology-borne education is nonrivalrous and, like its traditional counterpart, has positive externalities. It can be replicate and disseminated virtually cost-free to the next consumer through the Internet, television, radio, and on magnetic media.
Distance learning is spreading like wildfire. Webcasts can host – in principle – unlimited amounts of students.
Yet, all forms of education are exclusionary, at least in principle. It is impossible to exclude a citizen from the benefits of his country’s national defence, or those of his county’s dam. It is perfectly feasible to exclude would be students from access to education – both online and offline.6
Nonrivalry and nonexcludability are ideals – not realities. They apply strictly only to the sunlight. As environmentalists keep warning us, even the air is a scarce commodity.
Technology helps render many goods and services -books and education, to name two – asymptotically nonrivalrous and non-excludable.
II. The second problem to be analysed before opening the discussion regarding the decentralization specific in the Romanian education system is the education as a public good. I’ll try to answer to the following question: is education a public good?
We have discussed the concept of public goods before. We have defined the public good as the nonrival and nonexclusive good. We have also pointed out the following problem: public goods are often under provided by a free market because people are hesitant to pay for something when they can free ride on the effort of others. So would happen to education?
2 As Samuelson observed, they are extreme forms of positive externalities (spillover effects);
Samuelson, Paul A., The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure – The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 36, Issue 4 (Nov.1954), pp. 387-389
3Musgrave, R.A., Provision for Social Goods, in Margolis, J./Guitton, H.(eds.), Public Economies, London, McMillan, 1969, pp.124-144; the usual examples for public goods are lighthouse – famously questioned by one Nobel Prize winner, Ronald Coase, and defended by another, Paul Samuelson – national defence, the GPS navigation system, vaccination programs, dams, and public art (such as park concerts).
4 Vaknin, Sam, Is Education a Public Good?, article downloaded from the site http://samvak.tripod.com/publicgoods.html
5 Samuelson, Paul A., op.cit, pp. 350-356: „Many – though not all – of the realistic cases of government activity can be fruitfully analyzed as some kind of a blend of these two extremes polar cases (mixtures of private and public goods: education, the courts, public defense, highway programs, police and fire protections)”.
6Vaknin Sam, op.cit
Octavian Gruioniu / Procedia – Edu World 2010
Unfortunately, the answer is not simple. Some of the benefits of education are private and some public. The private benefits of education include the satisfaction of learning. Social opportunities, increased salary, and parental concern for the welfare of their own children. Public benefits of education include better economic growth, lower crime, more informed democratic participation, and general concern for the welfare of children.
So will a mixed good such as education be under provided by a private market?
One thing that people tend to forget is that just a good will be provided by a private market does not imply that it will be provided to the extent that is optimal. I come across this issue more often when discussing intellectual property. People often argue that private industry will continue to develop new technology without patent protection. This may be true, but in most industries it is highly unlikely that technology would be developed at the optimal rate.
The same principle applies to education. Many children might get a fine education if the system was purely private, but it probably wouldn’t reach the optimal level.
However, there is also the problem that public provision of a good can sometimes reduce the level of consumption for some people. This is because public provision of goods can crowd out private industry. For example, in the absence of public education some people might choose a private school that is worth $10000. If the government provides a public option funded by taxes worth $8000, they will probably choose the public option.
The private option is worth $2000, but it will cost $10000 on top of the taxes already paid.
Another thing to remember is that education also has some negative externalities.
The reason is a little subtle, but the basic explanation is that in a competitive job market if one person improves their education it makes things a little bit harder for everyone else.
Imagine you know you are going to be competing for a job against another person. Would you want to pay for them to get a higher degree? Probably not, because it will hurt you more than it will help. Education can become a rat race where everyone gets far more than is necessary because we always want to have more than the next guy.
So in the final analysis, education includes public benefits, private benefits, and negative externalities. This makes things pretty complicated because government funding is often necessary to provide public benefits, but it can interfere with the provision of private goods, and it is often wise for government to tax or otherwise reduce the demand for goods that are associated with negative externalities.
I thing the key is to realize that different kinds of education are associated with differing levels of public, private, and anti-public benefits. An individual’s education includes many years of participation in diverse activities. To understand how each of these activities should be funded and provided we should think about its particular effect on public and individual welfare.
III. The transformation of the early childhood education into public good and the decentralization of the pre-university education are some fundamental objectives of the government policy since 1989. Far from being a panacea, the decentralization resolves some problems and creates others.
„If the decentralization increases the level of the citizens’ implication, the decision approaches the client, and the needs of the target groups are known better, the quality is not an objective for decentralisation (we must struggle for maintaining the quality during the process) the discrepancies of certain disadvantaged categories of citizens, as well as of institutions or administrative structures can increase. The measures of decentralization
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represent a challenge for every governor, as they must be accompanied by quality assurance systems as well as public and individual responsibility systems.”7
In Romania, we are dealing with deep centralised systems which have passed through stages of evolution that has delegated attributions to the departments in the territory. We assist in these cases to role conflicts (administrative and management), as well as to the collision between the decentralized institutions and local administration. The policy of the post-revolution governments sustained the necessity of the decentralization politics at the speech level.8During the communist period, the education was not considered a public service, but “a main factor of culture and civilisation, of educating the new man.”9 The concept of public good was not known and the debate regarding the public good notion was systematically avoided.
After 1989, the post-revolution government took the decision to accelerate the politics decentralization of education. Thus, in 2005, the Ministry of Education adopted a new strategy of decentralization. For the first time, this new strategy bases the process of decentralization on certain central principles and concepts. The decentralization model is based on a series of projects and programmes focused on certain components of this process, the common element of the initiatives being the fact that they put the school in the centre of the decision and that they intend that all the key-actors consult and implicate for the provision of educational services adapted to the needs of the beneficiaries.
Regarding the principles, the strategy promotes accountability, institutional autonomy and the closeness between the decision centre and the place of the education, the transparency of the decisional act, and the ethical approach of the educational service.
As regards the objectives, the strategy aims to streamline the activity and to increase the performances of education institutions by freeing the central authorities of certain administrative tasks and a better focus on the issuing and monitoring the educational policies, to increase accountability to local actors and to strengthen the autonomy and ability to manage financial and human resources from the schools.
Regarding the interventions, the strategy proposes to transform the school in the main decisional factor, even if not all the described domains and functions subscribe to this principle. Thus, the curricular level aims to gradually increase the curriculum’s weight depending on the school decision in the national curriculum and to increase the implication of the local factors in determining the supply according to the needs and interests of the students/their parents.
As regards the school networks and the educational plans, the local public administration will be involved in the establishment of the supply (specializations, domains, qualifications etc.), the foundation or abolition of schools, the patrimony and organization development. There are also planned further consolidation measures by which schools with a small number of students to be included in units with legal personality; the main criteria to be considered is the evolution of the school population in each area.
7 Păunescu, Mihai(coord.), Public Management in Romania, Editura Polirom, 2008, Iaşi, p.214
8 http://modernizare.mai.gov.ro/documente/Brosura%20de%20prezentare%20UCRAP.pdf
9 The Education Law no.28 din 1978, in The Anthology of the Education in Romania, The Education Science Institute, 2004
Octavian Gruioniu / Procedia – Edu World 2010
Regarding the leadership and management, the strategy provides important changes, of which the most important refer to the administration council structure, the responsibilities and the procedures for the director appointment. In this way the administration of the school is changed, so the school is headed by a board with a tripartite structure: representatives of parents, students, traders and of other local organizations or institutions, school representatives and representatives of local public authorities.10
As regards the human resources, the strategy promotes: the active implication of the school in issuing the staff employment project and the function status, recruitment, selection and hiring the teachers based on based on methodologies and procedures developed by the Ministry of Education. A local component of the continuous training of teachers is also planned.
Finally, in terms of funds, a complex mechanism is planned to be used, which will allow schools to use different types of funds. The new finance system introduces the concepts of basic fund and additional fund. Thus, school funds, regardless of source of origin (state budget, local budget or its own sources of funding) are allocated to the following destinations:
1. the basic fund, proportional to the number of students/preschool for the following categories of expenses: personnel, materials and services, professional development (except for those supported by the state budget);
2. additional fund, which is not directly related to the number of students/preschool enrolled, contains: expenses for consolidations, investments and capital repair works, grants for school boarding and butteries, expenses for the preparation of the evaluations, simulations and national exams of the students (except for those supported by the state budget), expenses for the students’ scholarships, for the students’ transport, for commutation, the six discount rail travels provided by law for the teachers and the auxiliary staff, expenses for the compulsory medical examination of the state pre-university personnel (except for those which are carried out for free according to law), expenses for school competitions and educational activities, cultural, sport and tourism.
The school will thus be able to decide independently regarding the design and the execution of its own budget (except for the investments) and the attraction and expense of its own.
Yet, decentralization of school education has potential drawbacks. Thus, representatives of local authorities can influence the financial independence of schools, the local council tending to adopt the position of the absolute decident regarding school. These dysfunctional systems that are to implement the decentralization in the pre-university education are related to the democratic deficit and the lack of civic involvement. These behaviours and attitudes of the citizens, be they local counsellors, principals, teachers or parents, show the existence of specific social representations paternalist state / welfare.
There is also the risk of duplicating the decision authorities and the appearance of points of divergence. The local councils indicate the lack of communication with some county school inspectorates. There are several incriminatory aspects, ranging from confounding interpretation of law to its’ applying to arbitrary or lack of joint training programs
10 Păunescu, Mihai(coord.), op.cit, p.223: „ The new administration structure is the following: manager, deputy manager, the local council representative, the mayor’s representative, parents’ representatives, 1-5 representatives of the teachers, the representative of the economic operators and a representative of the secondary school students. The number of members is limited to 9-15, depending on the unit’s size and complexity.”
Octavian Gruioniu / Procedia – Edu World 2010
.11
„The central actors of the whole process of decentralization remain school managers12. As in the case of the health services, in the educational services, the whole decentralization process is based on the existence of qualified persons in the system, who are to develop a transparent and independent financial organization. Currently, the decentralization of education system confirms the importance of school managers, but they give them low credit: the decentralization model takes into account the fact that schools are not ready to enjoy financial autonomy, not having executive managers, motivating this by the reduced managerial implication, lack of skills and insufficient training in educational management
”13
Thus, it is important to underline also the risks that may be recorded to the extent that the decentralization stages will not be well defined and will not run coherently, consistently and will not be completed at the deadlines. The weaknesses of this process could be:
1. the inadequate managerial training of the personnel involved;
2. the inefficiency of some of the local and national cooperation structures;
3. the insufficient attractiveness and the variety of the educational offer;
4. the low mobility degree in the education system;
5. the low intra- and inter-institutional competition;
6. the lack of attractiveness for the teaching profession ;
7. the difficulties in understanding the educational problem of the local decisive factors;
8. the insufficient resources allocated for the infrastructure, logistics, communication systems etc ;
9. the initial and continuous instruction of the teachers which is deficient;
10. the emergence of some imbalances between schools-localities- regions;
11. the misinterpretation and the abusive application of the legal provisions;14 In order to avoid such risks, there are also some measures that can facilitate the success of the decentralization programs, regardless of culture and of the context in which the process took place. Of these, we can mention:
1. the advanced monitoring and evaluating systems that give a strong and continue feed-back both to the schools and to the community;
2. a stimulatory system which rewards the high performances;
3. supporting systems for the actors with medium performances, who cannot increase their performance by their own means;
4. a climate that encourages high performance and quality - through measures such as: encouraging the public debates on the education quality; the teachers professionalization, the quality training of the school managers, the introduction of some advanced quality management systems, supporting the
11 The evaluation report of the decentralization measures in five pilot counties, , MedC, 2006
12According to a recent research carried out in the pre-university schools, (data contained in the study
12According to a recent research carried out in the pre-university schools, (data contained in the study