Improving America's Schools The Role of Incentives (1996) / Chapter Skim
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6 Management Decentralization and Performance-Based Incentives: Theoretical Considerations for Schools
6 Management Decentralization and Performance-Based Incentives: Theoretical Considerations for Schools
Pages 97-110
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From page 97... ...
Advocacy for increasing school-site discretion has been vigorous, and school districts across the country have embraced it in various forms, but research on its effects on student performance is remarkably sparse. Moreover, the little valid empirical evidence that is available suggests that at least this governance reform is not likely to lead to significantly higher levels of student achievement.
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From page 98... ...
Only when we have some understanding of what it is about decentralization that affects or does not affect student learning can we develop appropriate models to estimate the effects of governance reforms on student achievement, and only then can we come to reasonable interpretations of results that are useful for policy making. This chapter reviews common claims made about the presumed intermediate effects of school decentralization in terms of the available evidence.
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From page 99... ...
Evidence of wide variations from classroom to classroom in what gets taught and how it is taught provides fairly clear prima facie support for already high levels of teacher discretion.2 Claims that teachers are overly constrained by central policies and that freedom from these constraints would unleash creative energies and more productive teacher behavior are, at best, overstated.3 Indeed, from the perspective of individual teachers, SBM centralizes decision making in the school and rests operating and performance responsibility with agents who are closer to teachers. So any positive benefits of SBM may actually come from decreasing rather than increasing the discretion of individual teachers!
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From page 100... ...
Although it is too early to judge the effect of Chicago's complex reform effort, preliminary reports suggest that the LSCs focus much of their effort on noninstructional areas such as facilities improvement and student discipline. Some of these efforts may contribute to an environment in which learning is more likely to take place, but observers claim that less than a quarter of the schools have developed plans that are likely to have any significant direct effect on instruction (Hess, 1993)
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From page 101... ...
The granting of formal "participation rights" may overcome whatever hesitation lower-SES parents otherwise have about getting involved in school affairs. Of course, the involvement of lower-SES parents may or may not be effective in managing school operations and influencing policy decisions in ways that make the schools more productive.
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From page 102... ...
The trade-offs may be important for student achievement. It is probably reasonable to expect greater complementarities between instructionally oriented professional development activities and classroom instruction than between management and instruction.
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From page 103... ...
But decentralized management is not the only reform whose benefits have likely been overstated; this is also true of performance-based incentives. Incentives: A Solution and a Problem The Panel on the Economics of Educational Reform's6 proposal for education reform persuasively argues that, without performance-based incentives, decentralization is unlikely to yield expected improvements in performance.
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From page 104... ...
History suggests that a second important distortion also might result: the performance contracting experiments of the 1970s showed that teachers tended to focus their efforts on students in the middle of the performance distribution, ignoring both high achievers and low achievers, because it was middle students who were most likely to make the biggest performance gains and, therefore, reap the biggest rewards for the teachers (Gramlich and Koshel, 1975)
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From page 105... ...
What goes on across schools and classrooms, even in the same school district, is often highly variable and too little directed at challenging academic objectives. If incentives are developed to reward school-level actors for promoting defined areas of student achievement, almost certainly schoollevel actors will focus more heavily on student achievement, at least in those areas that count in the incentives scheme.
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From page 106... ...
Decentralized management systems are important because local monitoring can correct some of the distortions created by imperfect incentive systems and incentives are important because of the weaknesses in the management capacity of many local schools. Even with both decentralization and performance incentives, quality performance and process information is needed to ensure success.
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From page 107... ...
For example, technical assistance might be an especially critical catalyst for effective decentralized management in disadvantaged areas. Realizing there are limitations to what we can learn from systematic evaluations of governance reforms, however, is no excuse for not attempting them.
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From page 108... ...
In short, along with systematic evaluations on the effects of governance reform efforts on student performance, more studies are needed on the nature of education governance itself.
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From page 109... ...
The MacArthur/ Spender Special Series on Illinois School Finance. Normal: Illinois State University.
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