Is decentralization behind educational improvement? Reflections based on the case of Peru

• In Event: Latin America SIG Highlighted Session: Unfolding the black box of systems improvement: A comparative study of twelve subnational cases in Latin America

Proposal

From the viewpoint of newspaper headlines, Perú is known as one of the worse performers in the PISA evaluations in the Latin American region.
Such a view, however, hides the very significant improvements that the country has made in the past decade both in terms of its students results in national and international standardized tests, as well as in terms of democratizing access to education -especially in secondary education and in the early years-, and in terms of per capita spending in education.
At the start of the millennium, as Perú regained its democracy, the country opted for a decentralized government model, where capacities were transferred to newly created regional governments. The new Law of Education approved in 2004, embraced decentralization and mandated the transference of financial and executive capacities to regional and local educational government agencies.
What is the relation between such changes and the improvements described above, if any?
Through the study of two subnational cases which have had important and sustained improvements in various key indicators the presentation explores the trajectory of Peru’s decentralized educational governance model over little more than a decade. As the cases show, what began as a highly enthusiastic participatory process with the formulation of regional educational plans, has ended with a movement towards an increasing recentralization of educational policy design and implementation. The discussion will include questions about whether this has been a necessary move in a context where corruption and managerial weaknesses have characterized regional and local governments, or whether it has been the ‘natural’ tendency of a historically highly centralistic government

Author

• Maria Balarin, GRADE