Inside Decentralization: How Three Central American School-based Management Reforms Affect Student Learning Through Teacher Incentives

Despite decentralization reforms of education systems worldwide,there is little empirical evidence about the processes throughwhich decentralization can improve student learning. Proponentstheorize that devolving decisionmaking authority to the locallevel can improve communication, transparency, and accountability,making teachers and school principals more responsible for betterperformance and more capable of bringing it about. Yet someresearch has shown that decentralization can increase inequalityand reduce learning for disadvantaged students. This articlereports on retrospective evaluations of three Central Americanschool-based management reforms. Using matching techniques,these evaluations investigate whether the reforms enhanced studentlearning and how they affected management processes and teachercharacteristics and behaviors. The evidence indicates that allthree reforms resulted in substantive changes in managementand teacher characteristics and behavior and that these changesexplain significant portions of resultant changes in studentlearning. This article contributes to the understanding of howdecentralization reforms can improve learning and shows howeducation reforms, even when not conceptualized as affectingteacher incentives, can generate important changes for teachersthat, in turn, affect student learning. JEL codes: I21, I28, H52, H75     

Implementing open government: a qualitative comparative analysis of digital platforms in France,Italy and United Kingdom

Open government is spreading throughout the world as a policy agenda oriented to foster transparency, participation and collaboration. Despite its increasing relevance in policy documents, there has been a scarce interest in deepening the analysis of how such agenda has been implemented in different national contexts. By adopting a multidimensional and multilevel perspective, we propose a qualitative comparative analysis of institutional digital platforms able to gather the evolution of open government in three European countries. We retrieved 979 open government platforms in France, Italy, and United Kingdom and analyzed them with an original set of indicators grouped in the three macro-areas of e-government, open data and transparency, participation and collaboration. Our study has methodological and policy implications: from the one hand, we provide the widest and deepest survey of open government platforms so far, contributing to the standardization of research methods on this field. From the other hand, we can observe that open government implementation is characterized by some typical traits, suggesting a trans-national convergence; this evidence is particularly prominent in the e-government and open data areas, whereas Participatory platforms are characterised by higher degrees of fragmentation both at the trans-national and at the intra-national levels. The analysis of open government platforms also reveals that, at the intra-national level, public administrations’ approaches to digital government are not homogeneous, although at different degrees among the three countries involved in our study, suggesting the need of a better integration and coordination by central authorities.