Arefore

Community Participation in School Management in Developing Countries
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education

Community Participation in School Management in
Developing Countries
Mikiko Nishimura
Subject: Education, Change, and Development, Education and Society, Educational
Administration and Leadership
Online Publication Date: Mar 2017 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.64
Summary and Keywords
Community participation in school management has great potentials for removing

mistrust and distance between people and schools by nurturing transparency of
information and a culture of mutual respect and by jointly pursuing improvement of
school by sharing vision, process, and results. Individual and organizational behavioral
changes are critical to increase the level of participation. In countries where the
administrative structures are weak, the bottom-up approach to expanding educational
opportunity and quality learning may be the only option.
Nevertheless, when community participation is implemented with a top-down manner

without wider consultation on its aims, processes, and expected results, the
consequences are likely to be conflicts between actors, a strong sense of overwhelming
obligation, fatigue, inertia, and disparity in the degree and results of community
participation between communities. Political aspects of school management and socio-
cultural difference among the population require caution, as they are likely to induce
partial participation or nonparticipation of the community at large. Community
participation in school management will result in a long-term impact only if it involves a
wide range of actors who can discuss and practice the possibilities of revisiting the
definition of community and the way it should be.
Keywords: community participation, school management, developing countries, basic education, private sector,
accountability, transparency, client power
What is Community?
What is community? There is no common definition of community and its function in
education of developing countries. If there is a school within a walking distance for most
people, school community is likely to overlap with the geographical community. However,
this is hardly the case in many developing countries. When the locality is sparsely
populated, a school community may cover a wide range of geographical communities.
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Also, when geographical communities are divided into different cultural, ethnic, or
linguistic identity groups, a school community needs rigorous coordination over the
language of instruction, school events, and the membership of the school management
body (e.g., school management committee, school council, and school board). The locality
may have several schools based on religion, language, and other cultural backgrounds,
and people from the same geographic community may belong to different cultural and
school communities.
The context of community also influences its function. Community may promote social
cohesion in school through various forms of collaboration within itself, but can exclude or
be competitive with others over available resources. Such resources include public or
private financial resource allocation to schools, assistance by donors, and access to
natural resources such as water. Thus, using the term “community participation in school
management” requires caution in what we mean by community and careful consideration
of the social context.
In more conceptual terms, there are geographical, cultural, and school (or functional)
communities. Geographical community is a group of people who reside in the same
geographical boundary. Cultural community means a group of people with the same
ethnic, linguistic, and/or religious backgrounds who share common norms and practices.
Finally, school community denotes a group of people who gather and work for the
purpose of school management, regardless of their geographic location or cultural
backgrounds. School community may or may not include diversity in the socio-economic
and cultural backgrounds of its members. This article assumes the functional community
as the operational definition of community participation in school management.
Different social and institutional contexts of the education systems affect results in
community participation differently, particularly in their roles and responsibilities, the
levels of participation, representation of community members in the school management
body, and the outcome of students’ learning performance and life course. For instance,
the recent upsurge of decentralization devolved decision-making power to the community
level in many developing countries. However, in some countries, the actual power
devolved to the community is fairly limited due to scarce resources at the community
level and high dependence on the guideline of usage of grants allocated to school by the
government. In other countries, where community participation has a long history of
compensating for the weak management of government schools, communities are actively
involved in hiring teachers themselves and contributing to school in various forms. In the
latter case, monitoring attendance of students and teachers, construction of classrooms
and pit latrine blocks, and financial contribution to scholarships for pupils from
disadvantaged backgrounds are likely to be in the hands of community members.
With the recognition that there are a variety of ways of involvement of community in
school management in developing countries, this article examines how and in what ways
community has been involved in school management in the context of developing
countries and how the existing studies have documented the phenomenon with reference
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to the actual challenges, constraints, and possibilities. The section “Conceptual

Framework of Community Participation in School Management” demonstrates the
analytical framework of community participation, including historical roles of community
in school management, the school-based management theory, and types and levels of
participation. The section “Empirical Literature on Community Participation in School
Management,” reviews the empirical literatures on the impacts of community
participation on access to and quality of learning in schools as well as the constraints and
driving factors for community participation in school management. The conclusion
summarizes and suggests further studies on this theme.
Conceptual Framework of Community

Participation in School Management
Historical Roles of Community in School Management
Who bears the cost of schooling?

Who bears the cost of schooling is a primarily important question to ask, since the
education policies and international discussion on the role of community often emphasize
its benefit as a means to fill the financial gap left by the government. In many developing
countries, community, historically, has played an important role in educational provision.
In sub-Sharan Africa (SSA), for instance, community-based providers and faith-based
organizations supported educational provisions even before independence, until the
1960s and 1970s when the governments in the region exerted their own influence on
educational development. During the period, some countries in the region declared
primary education fee-free, resulting in a dramatic increase in the public education
expenditure. Earlier attempts, however, to provide free education in SSA in the 1970s,
had failed to achieve the objective owing to ineffective institutions, reduced quality of
education, high informal fees, and other costs of schooling (Allison, 1983; Amutabi, 2003;
Bray, 1986; Obasi, 2000; Prince, 1997; Sifuna, 2007; Somerset, 2009).
The structural adjustment programs (SAPs) adopted in many poor countries in the 1980s
with the aim of overcoming the debt crisis, hampered school education with reduced
government budgets and introduction of user fees for basic education, while private
education expanded its presence in the provision of basic education. In many developing
countries, basic education had fees until the 1990s or 2000s, and the fees varied across
schools. Parents bore not only the direct and indirect costs of schooling; they also
contribute to school in the form of labor (e.g., classroom construction) and in cash (i.e.,
contributions, even despite the fee abolition policy). However, private education was not
financially sustainable in some areas and was out of reach for children from poor
households. Olembo (1985) indicates, for instance, that many community-financed school
projects in Kenya were abandoned because of the lack of capacity. Further, many families
living in poor areas were unable to afford the non-tuition fees and other contributions at
the primary school level, and many rural nongovernmental schools found it difficult to
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collect fees from the parents (Colclough & Lewin, 1993; UNESCO, 2007). Because of the
recognition that the high cost of education hinders many poor children from going to
school, the abolition of school tuition has regained popularity in developing countries
since the mid-1990s (Avenstrup, Liang, & Nellemann, 2004; UNESCO, 2008).
Nevertheless, the re-introduction of fee abolition policies in many developing countries

over the past 20 years did not stop the spread of private schools. In this context, it is
helpful to divide private schools into two groups: (a) high-cost private schools that
provide high quality education to wealthy children in urban areas, and (b) low-cost
private schools that are often financially supported and managed by communities and
parents (Bray & Lillis, 1988; Knight & Sabot, 1990). While some argue that the low-cost
private schools are only substitutes for public schools in areas where the latter are
absent, others maintain that private schools provide basic education more cost-effectively
for the poor, even in areas where public schools are available (Kingdon, 2007; Phillipson,
2008; Tooley & Dixon, 2005). Thus, it is important to note that various intentions and
demands for community participation in school management have led to different roles of
community.
Substitute, Complementary, and Critical Roles of Community

Community can play the substitute, complementary, and critical roles in school
management. The substitute role is to substitute the government’s service due to the lack
of government support. James (1987, 1995) explained the phenomenon of high private
expenditure on education in developing countries by the excess demand model (James,
1987, 1995). This model describes the role of the private sector in satisfying excess
demand and filling in the gap, relative to the size of the age cohort, created by
inadequate capacity of the public sector. Private schools driven by excess demand often
offer low-cost and affordable education, while some suffer from low quality education
when there is no competition with other public or private schools.
The complementary role for community is to provide alternative education to the existing
education system. Contrary to the excess-demand model, the differentiated-demand
model hypothesizes that the public education system is unable to meet the diverse
demands of parents, especially for cognitive, religious, and linguistic education (James,
1987, 1995). When the quality of public education is attractive enough to keep pupils
from different socio-economic backgrounds, there may not be the high demand for
private schooling. In other words, the quality of public education determines the demand
for high-quality education in private schools. There are also cases whereby cultural
communities take initiative to operate non-formal schools for children and adults.
Community organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) offer adult literacy
programs to target those who missed the opportunity of schooling due to poverty, war,
conflicts, child labor, early marriage, and so on. In such cases, community organizations
take alternative pedagogical approaches to the public schools. For instance, ActionAid’s
REFLECT and ACCESS programs use participatory learning methods and suggest a new
role of teachers as facilitators in promoting students’ learning in school (Archer &
Cottingham, 1996). The program emphasizes the linkage between education and action,
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whereby the educational goal is not just to master systematic knowledge and skills
offered in school, but also to empower learners to solve the problems in daily life.
The community’s critical role is to be a friend of the school system and to address the
issues and problems of school management from the side of the community. Let us look at
educational evaluation as an example. The school-based learning assessments do not
include the data on learning performance of those students who tend to be frequently
absent from school or on unenrolled school-age children, thus providing a partial
overview of learning output in school. Such assessments are often collected and compiled
at the central level after administering the assessment in schools without school-based
analysis or feedback to draw some practical implications for further pedagogical and
managerial strategies at the school level. Educational evaluation tends to be regarded as
a professional and policy matter, managed by central government officials and
professionals such as university professors and senior teachers, leaving out other
stakeholders including parents, community members, and students as sole beneficiaries.
However, since the mid-2000s, civil society organizations have emerged that challenge
the closed form of educational evaluation and decision-making process on quality of
education. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) in India was the pioneer in this
regard and conducted the learning assessment for 700,000 children in 5,000 villages in
all parts of India in 2005. Such household-based learning assessment did not aim only to
assess learning achievement of school-age children but also to promote discussion on
quality of education with a wide range of people at the community level for social change.
Such movement was rapidly expanded to Pakistan, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Senegal,
and Mali.
UWEZO, a civil society organization established in 2009 in East Africa, conducts a large-
scale household-level learning assessment for the purpose of forming a civil society to
take action with respect to the quality of basic education. UWEZO conducts annual
household-based Grade 2-level learning assessment in math and reading for children ages
6 to 16 years in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. UWEZO uses various means, such as
mobile phone’s short message services, radio, league tables, and posters for stakeholders
at the household, community, and local government levels to discuss the results of the
learning assessment and to demand quality education to schools and the government.
UWEZO challenges the conventional norms that teachers and education specialists
handle quality issues in education by opening up the forum to the public to raise multiple
voices to school.
Accountability Mechanisms for Education Service Delivery

The role of community in school management attracted attention in the 1970s, when the
mainstream idea, that government is the sole actor to provide educational services, was
challenged, and community-led alternative education programs were proposed as more
relevant and effective for providing basic education. Since the 1980s, community has
become the main actor of development, not the recipient, and participatory approaches in
learning, such as Participatory Learning and Action (PLA), were adopted. Furthermore, in
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the early 1990s, neoliberal economic theory and liberal democratic theory were jointly
called a “new policy agenda,” which regarded the market and private sector as the most
efficient service providers and maintained that democratization and civil society form a
strong foundation for economic success. Many donor agencies shifted their targets of
assistance to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society organizations
(CSOs), away from inefficient and corrupt governments.
The critical role of community was further explored by the World Bank (2003), which
provides an analytical framework of its accountability mechanism for the improvement of
service delivery, as shown in Figure 1. There are long and short routes of accountability
for schools to account for their service to the beneficiaries. The long route of
accountability is for the citizens to elect the political leaders who then formulate
education policies to respond to the will of the voters and to direct and supervise schools
to deliver the service demanded by the citizens. With a precondition that each institution
could maintain autonomy, citizens as the clients of public service utilize votes to enhance
the control of central and local governments over service delivery institutions and to
oversee these institutions more effectively through the direct exercise of client power.
The short route of

accountability is to
increase client power,
which is power to demand
educational services that
match client needs by
directly raising voices and
asking for explanation of
schools on their services.
The short route of
Figure 1. Accountability framework for school accountability is ensured
management.
by forming a school
Source: Created by M. Nishimura, based on World management committee or
Bank (2003, p. 188, Figure 10.3).
school council that
consists of representatives
of parents and community members plus a head teacher to discuss the school plan and
challenges facing the school to collaboratively improve quality of education. In many
developing countries, it is quite difficult to ensure the long route of accountability due to
corruption and mismanagement on the part of politicians and government officials and
unclear election processes. Thus, much attention is being paid to enhancing client power
through the short route of accountability.
There are numerous examples of using this short route of accountability. The initiatives of
ASER and UWEZO in the previous section are the very challenge to enhance the short
route of accountability. These household-level learning assessments are intended to
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initiate “client power movement” for quality improvement of basic education through
sharing and analyzing information on learning at the household and community levels.
Another example can be drawn from a “School for All” Project started in Niger in 2004
and expanded to surrounding countries (i.e., Burkina Faso, Senegal, Mali, Madagascar,
and Côte d’Ivoire) by Japan International Cooperation Agency. These West African
countries had low enrolment rates, high levels of poverty, and serious public financial
constraints, altogether inducing the lack of classrooms and of parental understanding and
cooperation for schooling. Teacher absenteeism and the lack of capacity of teachers
resulted in learning crises in schools. While thatched classrooms are commonly built by
communities, the lack of transparency in school management increases the “distance”
between community and school and results in malfunctioning of the school management
committees. The School for All Project aimed at functional school management committee
(SMC) and adopted the minimum package of democratic election for the SMCs,
participatory planning and implementation of school improvement plans, collaborative
monitoring and evaluation of school activities, and accounting through community
gathering. After school management became participatory, with transparency of
information, the intake rate increased from approximately 60% to almost 100%, and the
gross enrolment rate of below 60% reached about 80% (Hara, 2011). The primary
completion rate also gradually increased from about 40% to over 50%. Community
members became more active in participating in various school activities such as
classroom construction and implementation of supplementary and night classes, and
purchased and procured textbooks and learning materials.
Both UWEZO and the School for All Project attempt to improve the short route of
accountability for quality of education. The School for All Project puts more emphasis on
the function of school management than the public movement for social change proposed
by UWEZO. Nevertheless, they have common goals, to improve the quality of education
by ensuring information sharing between school and community, to overcome the distrust
and distance between them, and by promoting the participation of community members
to collaboratively manage local schools. They also share potentials to improve
accountability by linking the government, teachers, parents, community, and students to
share information, to raise awareness, to dialogue, and to act together. Such bottom-up
initiatives to ensure accountability seem to be key to expanding educational opportunities
and improving the quality of education, especially in fragile states with weak
administrative systems.
Types and Levels of Participation
It is important to note that the types of participation vary depending on the purpose of
participation and the actual power devolved to the community. The categories in which
power is devolved include budgeting (i.e., budget formation and allocation), personnel
management (i.e., appointment and dismissal), pedagogy and educational content (i.e.,
curriculum development, making of class schedules and school calendar and events,
selection of textbooks, etc.), school infrastructure and maintenance (i.e., improvement of
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buildings and other infrastructure, procurement of textbooks and scholastic materials),

and monitoring and evaluation (i.e., monitoring and evaluation of teachers’ performance
and students’ learning achievement).
School-Based Management (SBM), discussed in the next section, is a typical example of

promoting community participation in school management under the “new policy agenda”
described in the previous section. Nevertheless, various types of SBM exist in the types
and levels of devolved power. Latin American countries have several examples of power
devolved to the community for appointment and dismissal of teachers, while other parts
of the world generally devolved power of budget formation, a certain level of pedagogical
approaches and educational content, and maintenance of school infrastructure to
community. Monitoring attendance of students and teachers tends to be managed at the
school level, while evaluation of teachers and learning performance is often in the hands
of the central government. Devolved power is dynamically re-allocated within the system
among school, community, local government, and central government in various
educational reforms.
There are political, economic, and historical backgrounds against diverse allocations of
decision-making powers within the education systems. In theory, democratic school
management intends to democratize a society. In reality, however, community often
becomes responsible for school management as an alternative to the unstable
government after the political turmoil. There are also countries with diverse ethnic and
cultural groups where decentralization becomes an option to weaken the conflict between
groups. Alternatively, highly centralized states that pursue efficient economic growth as
“development states,” often seen in East and Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s,
restricted community participation. From the economic perspective, decentralization is
often regarded as a means to utilize financial, physical, and human resources at the local
level when facing the constraints of the national budget. Historically, how a school was
established in the society determines the role of the community. For instance, in SSA, it
was churches and communities that constructed schools during the colonial period and
that kept their contributions to school after independence due to low capacity of the
government. In short, community has played an important role since the origin of school
education in these countries.
The degree of participation also requires attention. The ladder of participation, by

Arnstein (1969), is well known to indicate the levels of participation. According to
Arnstein, there are eight ladders categorized as client power (i.e., citizen control,
delegated power, and partnership), tokenism (i.e., placation, consultation, and informing),
and nonparticipation (i.e., therapy and manipulation). Even if the decision-making power
is devolved to the community level, how power is distributed among multiple groups of
community members and to what extent participation takes place need careful
speculation, as we see a variety of impediments in the process later, in the section on
empirical literatures.
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School-Based Management Theory
The neo-liberal agenda of privatization and the recent upsurge in school-based

management (SBM) both imply the importance of community participation for the
efficient and effective delivery of educational services (Bruns, Filmer, & Patrinos, 2011).
The underlying belief is that the closer the decision-making power is to local
communities, the more relevant and efficient the consequent resolutions will be. The
theory of SBM emphasizes (a) increasing poor people’s opportunity to choose schools and
participate, (b) giving citizens a stronger voice, (c) making information about a school’s
performance widely available, and (d) strengthening the rewards and penalty to schools
based on their performance for improving learning outcome (Barrera-Osorio, Fasih,
Patrinos, & Santibáñez, 2009). In more concrete terms, there are three essential
components of school management in the theory of SBM, namely, autonomy, assessment,
and accountability for improving the learning outcome (Barrera-Osorio et al., 2009;
Demas & Arcia, 2015). School management under autonomy often gives an important role
to the school management committee and its school policy formation (Yuki, Igei, &
Demas, 2016).
SBM has also attracted attention due to the lack of perspectives on school management
and their relation to learning outcome in the previous research. For instance, many input-
output analyses based on the education production function have discussed possible
factors affecting performance of students while paying less attention to how inputs are
managed and interacted with at school. Inputs include attributes to students, such as age,
gender, socio-economic backgrounds, and teacher and school characteristics such as the
pupil-teacher ratio, the pupil-textbook ratio, qualification of teachers, and school
facilities, as a proxy indicator for school inputs (Glewwe, Hanushek, Humpage, & Ravina,
2013). Outputs are measured by test scores, promotion rate, dropout rate, and so on.
However, these models do not include policy environment and management of school, and
they have faced criticisms that they deal with school as “a black box” and that they often
lack analysis on how schools are managed and are using resources to improve learning
(Hanushek, 2003; Rogers & Demas, 2013).
The researchers of the World Bank developed the System Approach for Better Education
Results (SABER) tool in 2011 to overcome the limitation of the traditional input-output
analysis and to examine the inside of the “black box” by looking at variables related to
policy intent and implementation at the school and government levels. JICA Research
Institute further contributed to developing questionnaires at the school and government
levels to capture different levels of intent and implementation of an education policy,
focusing on school autonomy and accountability domain. The SABER data on the school
autonomy and accountability domain allows us to analyze how policy intent and
implementation of school management is associated with learning achievement at the
school level. Evidence is expected to accumulate in the coming years, but some of the
research on Senegal and Burkina Faso indicate that school autonomy and accountability
are moderately associated with educational outcomes such as access to school, learning
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improvement, and gender equality (Nishimura, unpublished manuscript; Yuki et al.,

2016).
Empirical Literature on Community

Participation in School Management
Impact of Community Participation
The impact of community participation in school management is mixed at best in the past
literatures. Empirical evidence, mostly from Latin American countries, has highlighted
some impacts of community participation on the increased attendance of pupils and
teachers and of pupils’ learning achievements (Bruns et al., 2011). Taniguchi and
Hirakawa (2016) recently suggested some indirect positive relationship between
community participation and learning achievements of pupils through improved school
management in rural Malawi. In Senegal, a recent study that used a randomized control
trial method reports that the impact of school grants was seen on French, mathematics,
and oral reading test scores of Grade 3 students, especially on girls with high ability
levels at baseline (Carneiro et al., 2015). Reviewing a wide range of the past empirical
literatures, Bruns et al. (2011) note that a combination of school autonomy, students’
learning assessment, and accountability to parents and other stakeholders brought better
learning performance by students.
In contrast, Hanushek et al. (2013) analyzed a panel dataset from international PISA1
tests between 2000 and 2009 and found that school autonomy affects student
achievement negatively in developing and low-performing countries, while its effect is
positive in developed and high-performing countries. A number of other studies, based
mostly on qualitative case studies, have posited the challenges of community
participation in school management in terms of social structure, the social and cultural
aspects of individual and organizational behaviors, and political intervention in
community participation.
Impediments of Community Participation
A number of qualitative research efforts indicate that the devolution of decision-making

power to school and community does not automatically result in exercise of devolved
power due to social structure, attitude and culture of individuals and organizations, and
political intervention in community participation. Contextual understanding of
participation is of primary importance to clarify diversity in the results of community
participation in school management in developing countries.
Social Structure
The past literatures suggest that structural factors that cause low accountability are two-
fold, namely, the lack of autonomy of each institution and severe inequality in the society
(Bruns et al., 2011). As for autonomy of institutions, many studies suggest that, unless the
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main actors of the local government, school, and parents/community members are
independent in their decision making and control over resources, an accountability
mechanism does not function well (e.g., Francis & James, 2003; Ogawa & Nishimura,
2015). When resources stem mainly from a single source characterized by insufficient
information sharing and transparency, community participation is discouraged, the local
government becomes unaccountable, and the central control becomes stronger (Francis
& James, 2003).
Social inequality tends to reproduce unequal client power and quality of education among
schools under the decentralization policy. Socio-economic and geographical inequality
tend to result in disparities between the available resources and the level of academic
achievement among schools in different countries (Cuéllar-Marchelli, 2003; Kristiansen &
Pratikno, 2006; Ogawa & Nishimura, 2015). There are numerous cases where the heavy
economic burden of education on community resulted in disparity in the quality of
education among schools and regions in SSA countries in the 1980s and 1990s (Bray,
1996; Bray & Lillis, 1988). In the post-conflict situation in El Salvador, access to primary
education expanded rapidly, while unequal financial capacity of parents, region, and
Association for Community Education was reported to result in disparity of school
education and learning performance of students (Cuéllar-Marchelli, 2003). Kristiansen
and Pratikno (2006) also note that decentralization in Indonesia brought an increase of
education expenditure of parents and socio-geographical disparities.
Abolition of school fees, often called universal primary education policy or free primary
education policy, attempts to ensure equal educational opportunity, while this policy
minimizes local decision making power by enhancing central control over school finance
(i.e., a flat rate of capitation grant set by the central government replaced the various
levels of tuition fees and parental contribution) and thus contradicts the decentralization
policy (Sasaoka & Nishimura, 2010). In reality, however, parents and community
members bear the cost of education in forms other than tuition fees (e.g., contribution,
exam fees, development fees, compensatory or remedial lesson fees, etc.), and it is likely
that disparities in client power will perpetuate in an unequal society (Ogawa &
Nishimura, 2015).
Individual Attitude and Organizational Culture

The second major challenge is more to do with behavioral patterns of people, such as
attitude and culture. To change one’s attitude and to build capacity take time, with
various kinds of confusion in the process, albeit with the legal and administrative systems
in place. For instance, in India, local administrators and community members are used to
following directives and could not adjust to the “guidelines,” based on which they could
have initiated independent action (Varghese, 1996).
Numerous cases at the school level also showed that organizational culture and
conservative attitudes of teachers and administrators did not exercise the devolved power
in reality. For instance, in Nicaragua, the organizational culture of schools influenced the
ways in which schools handled the devolved power differently and widened the disparity
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in quality of education among schools (Rivarola & Fuller, 1999). Where obedience to
authority is a social norm, local district officers and community members do not seem to
practice devolved decision making (Chapman, 1998; Varghese, 1996). In Asian countries,
it was reported that parents, teachers, and principals preferred maintenance of the status
quo to taking a risk of undertaking a reform, and thus the devolved power did not result
in education reforms for improvement at the school level (Chapman, 1998). Case studies
from Ghana and Indonesia have revealed that the hierarchical behavior of head teachers
and teachers could not change the teachers’ attitudes to be more independent and
spontaneous during reform to the local curriculum, and the existing pedagogical
practices persisted (Bjork, 2003; Pryor, 2005; Yeom, Acedo, & Utomo, 2002). Other
literatures suggest that a school culture that encourages parental and community
participation seems critical if such participation is to occur (Rivarola & Fuller, 1999;
Shoraku, 2008). In Cambodia, for example, it is reported that parents’ norm, as being
obedient to teachers and community leaders, as well as teachers’ perceptions that regard
parents as passive, with no interest in the learning environment of schools, jointly led to
the limited degree of parental involvement in school management (Shoraku, 2008).
Attitudinal issues are also indicated at the community level. For instance, the
decentralization policy, planned and led by the central government, weakened school
management due to a lack of consensus building among community members, that they
are the ones who would manage schools and create a new learning environments under
the new policy in the Philippines (Chapman, 1998). Furthermore, as community members
lacked the willingness to change the situation, and lacked as well the understanding and
confidence necessary to discuss the quality of education, community participation did not
lead to an improvement in the quality of education in Ghana and the Philippines
(Chapman, 1998; Chapman et al., 2002; Mfum-Mensah & Friedson-Ridenour, 2014). In
Nicaragua, parents were unprepared, with insufficient understanding of the meaning of
autonomy, leading to no action and passive attitudes towards school management
(Rivarola & Fuller, 1999).
In more decentralized forms of school management, tension theoretically exists between

teachers’ professionalism and political legitimacy as represented by community
participation (McGinn & Welsh, 1999). In Latin American countries such as Guatemala,
where power to hire and dismiss teachers was devolved to community, tensions occurred
between teachers and community members over personnel management and school
policy (Tamura, 2012). However, most of the existing literature on developing countries
does not reveal such tension. Rather, the degree of participation is fairly limited due to
the top-down nature of policy formation and implementation of devolution and the
difficulty of attitudinal and behavioral changes of people.
Socio-Cultural and Political Aspect of Participation

The socio-cultural aspect of each society determines the form and degree of participation.
In Ghana and Tanzania, the higher general level of parental education was reported to be
a contributing factor to the higher level of participation in school management (Mfum-
Mensah & Friedson-Ridenour, 2014; Phillips, 2013). Based on the case study of Ethiopia,
Page 12 of 19
and Legal Notice).

Yamada (2012) indicates that the SBM-type school management structure and
institutionalization of School Management Committee (SMC) itself tends to favor
educated males conversant with the logic and formalities of the school management
committee’s work, while excluding others.
Political influence on the way participation takes place is also evident from some
qualitative studies. For instance, a case study in Nepal illustrates that participation in
legitimate spaces for community participation in school is taking a form of tokenism
whereby school management represents only a small number of political elites (Khanal,
2013). In Guatemala and Honduras, a case study suggests that hiring of teachers was
based on partisan loyalties rather than teaching qualifications and trust of broader
community members in the community-managed schools due to the intervention of the
patronage politics in community participation (Altschuler, 2013).
McGinn and Welsh (1999) note that one of the important conditions for smooth
democratic decentralization is a highly uniform citizen in terms of levels and distribution
of education and training. Needless to say, many developing countries do not meet this
condition, and yet various types of decentralization and SBM are being implemented in a
mostly top-down manner, leaving individual attitude and organizational culture as
remaining challenges for improvement of accountability of school education.
Driving Forces of Community Participation
Although central government plays the primary role in providing public education,
community plays a complementary role to the government in fragile states that suffer
from political turmoil and stagnant economy. El Salvador’s Community Managed Schools
Program (EDUCO) is a typical example. The EDUCO Program devolved power to recruit
and retain teachers to school management committees that consisted of parents and
community members when the governments had not recovered administrative functions
in the post-conflict situation. In Maasai communities in Kenya, where public education
has recently spread and became popular, parents and community members are hiring
teachers on behalf of the government, which froze teacher deployment due to financial
constraints. The high demand for alternative education also promotes community
participation in school management. In Afghanistan, for instance, teachers and
community members offered home schooling for girls who had been excluded from public
schooling under the Taliban regime.
In any role that community plays, be it substitute, complementary, or critical, the most
important driving force is the demand for education from the side of a wider community
(the school community). Also important are information sharing within the community
and between community and school, collaboration and coordination among actors within
the community and administrative institutions, critical thinking abilities of community
members for analyzing government policy and their own needs to initiate action, attitudes
of trust and mutual respect among people over school management, untiring efforts to
improve, and a spirit of voluntary contribution (Nishimura, 2014).
Page 13 of 19
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Conclusion
This article discusses the role of community in school management from historical,
theoretical, and empirical perspectives. It is important to note that community plays a
substitute, complementary, and critical roles in educational development and that the role
of community and its impacts varies by country, region, and actor. To understand the role
of community, it is imperative to grasp the social context and needs of the community in
which community participation is promoted in school management. In-depth analysis of
cases is required to carefully investigate the process of producing or not producing the
impact.
Community participation in school management has great potential for removing mistrust
and distance between people and schools through nurturing transparency of information
and culture of mutual respect and for jointly pursuing improvement of schools by sharing
vision, process, and results. It should also be noted that individual and organizational
behavioral changes are critical to increase the levels of participation. In countries where
administrative structures are weak, the bottom-up approach to expanding educational
opportunity and quality learning may be the only option. On the other hand, when
community participation is implemented with a top-down manner without wider
consultation on its aims, processes, and expected results, the consequences are likely to
be conflicts between actors, a strong sense of overwhelming obligation, fatigue, and
sabotage, disparity in the degree of participation and its results between communities,
and political interference. School management body will also become a mere name
without substances or activities, and people will feel helpless if the range and degree of
devolved power is limited to the minimum scale.
Finally, although this article did not discuss the issue of exclusiveness and the politics of
community, a community may not be able to agree to one goal and may face multiple
vested interests and intensions. Community participation in school management will
result in a long-term impact only if it involves a wide range of actors in the discussion and
application of its possible methods, including revisiting the definition of community and
the way it should be.
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Mikiko Nishimura
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Community Participation in School Management in Developing Countries

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education

Summary and Keywords

Community participation in school management has great potentials for removing

Nevertheless, when community participation is implemented with a top-down manner

date: 16 February 2019

date: 16 February 2019

to the actual challenges, constraints, and possibilities. The section “Conceptual

Conceptual Framework of Community

Who bears the cost of schooling?

date: 16 February 2019

Nevertheless, the re-introduction of fee abolition policies in many developing countries

Substitute, Complementary, and Critical Roles of Community

date: 16 February 2019

Accountability Mechanisms for Education Service Delivery

date: 16 February 2019

The short route of

date: 16 February 2019

Types and Levels of Participation

date: 16 February 2019

buildings and other infrastructure, procurement of textbooks and scholastic materials),

School-Based Management (SBM), discussed in the next section, is a typical example of

The degree of participation also requires attention. The ladder of participation, by

date: 16 February 2019

School-Based Management Theory

The neo-liberal agenda of privatization and the recent upsurge in school-based

date: 16 February 2019

improvement, and gender equality (Nishimura, unpublished manuscript; Yuki et al.,

Empirical Literature on Community

Impediments of Community Participation

A number of qualitative research efforts indicate that the devolution of decision-making

date: 16 February 2019

Individual Attitude and Organizational Culture

date: 16 February 2019

In more decentralized forms of school management, tension theoretically exists between

Socio-Cultural and Political Aspect of Participation

date: 16 February 2019

Driving Forces of Community Participation

date: 16 February 2019

Altschuler, D. (2013). How patronage politics undermines parental participation and

Amutabi, M. N. (2003). Political interference in the running of education in post-

date: 16 February 2019

Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of American Institute of

Bjork, C. (2003). Local responses to decentralization policy in Indonesia. Comparative

Bray, M. (1996). Decentralization of education: Community financing. Directions in

Chapman, D. W. (1998). The management and administration of education across Asia:

date: 16 February 2019

Cuéllar-Marchelli, H. (2003). Decentralisation and privatization of education in El

Hanushek, E. A. (2003). The failure of input-based schooling policies. The Economic

James, E. (1987). The public/private division of responsibility for education. Economics of

James, E. (1995). Public-private division of responsibility for education. In M. Carnoy

Khanal, P. (2013). Community participation in schooling in Nepal: A disjunction between

Kristiansen, S., & Pratikno, S. (2006). Decentralising education in Indonesia. International

date: 16 February 2019

Nishimura, M. (2014). An analysis of “governance” to improve quality of education in the

Obasi, E. (2000). The impact of economic recession on UPE in Nigeria. International

Olembo, J. O. (1985). Financing primary school buildings in Kenya. Nairobi, Kenya:

Phillips, K. (2013). Dividing the labor of development: Education and participation in

Phillipson, B. (Ed.). (2008). Low-cost private education: Impacts on achieving universal

Prince, A. (1997). Quality of learning in Nigeria’s universal primary education scheme:

Rivarola, M., & Fuller, B. (1999). Nicaragua’s experiment to decentralize schools:

Shoraku, A. (2008). A case study of parental participation in primary school education in

date: 16 February 2019

Sifuna, D. N. (2007). The challenge of increasing access and improving quality: An