THE IMPACT OF EDUCATIONAL DECENTERALIZATION IN LATIN AMERICA
ACASE STUDY OF PERU
The term “decentralization” embraces a variety of concepts which must be carefully analyzed in any particular country before determining if projects or programs should support reorganization of financial, administrative, or service delivery systems (The world bank group, 2002). Decentralization, wich denotes to a process or situation of transfer of authority and responsibility for public functions from the central government to intermediate and local governments or quasi-independent government organizations and/or the private sector, is a complex multifaceted concept. Different types of decentralization should be distinguished because they have different characteristics, policy implications, and conditions for success.
Decentralization can be broadly defined as the process of devolution of political, economic and administrative power from the central to the intermediate and local levels of government (Carranza and Tuesta , 2003). A key feature of a decentralized country is that SNG can make autonomous decisions (Baskaran, 2009), which usually entails that subnational authorities are elected by the citizens of their respective jurisdiction (World Bank, 1999). This is to be distinguished from a process of deconcentration, which is the redistribution of decision making among different levels within the central government; or delegation, which is the transfer of responsibilities and power from the central government to semi-autonomous organizations not wholly controlled by the central government but ultimately accountable to it (Prud’homme, 1995). In turn, countries can be defined as more or less decentralized depending on their position along the continuum
PERU
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Peru was worth 192.09 billion US dollars in 2016. The GDP value of Peru represents 0.31 percent of the world economy. GDP in Peru averaged 50.81 USD Billion from 1960 until 2016, reaching an all time high of 201.22 USD Billion in 2013 and a record low of 2.57 USD Billion in 1960.
EDUCATION IN PERU
Education in Peru is under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education, which is in charge of formulating, implementing and supervising the national educational policy. According to the Constitution, education is compulsory and free in public schools for the initial, primary and secondary levels. It is also free in public universities for students who are unable to pay tuition and have an adequate academic performance. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has placed Peru at the bottom of the ranking in all three categories (Math, science and reading) in 2012 compared to the 65 nations participating in the study of 15-year-old school pupils’ scholastic performance.
Decentralization in perus education
General opinion of school quality in Peru is that students are not achieving the desired standards and that there is a wide dispersion in educational outcomes. This view has been ratified by different international studies in which Peru has participated, in the national “sample” assessments performed by the Ministry of Education and in last year’s census-evaluation in reading skills of second graders. A general consensus has emerged regarding the country’s need to improve its educational outcomes, a that education quality has to increase to boost productivity and foster growth and at the same time that the country needs to reduce the education gap between top-bottom achievers as a way to reduce income inequality among Peruvians.
Emerging from a thirty-year period of highly centralized, authoritarian regimes, and
resting on a centuries-long tradition of state centralization, the decentralization movement that began in the 1970s in Latin America and took off in the 1980s was wrongly perceived as a panacea for all of Latin America’s democratic failings.
Advocates overstated the power of decentralization by stating that it would bring about strong, consolidated democracies by promoting social capital and citizen participation in politics.
It was certainly reasonable to claim that, by bringing government closer to the people and empowering local government with meaningful governance tasks, citizens would have a greater stake in government, hold their officials accountable, and in the process, gain such democratic qualities as interpersonal trust and tolerance–a la Tocqueville, Rousseau, Putnamand company (Grindle 2007; Montero and Samuels 2004). Other proponents of the decentralization strategy viewed it as a way to strengthen the grassroots bases of political parties, increase government transparency, and improve governance across the many emergent democracies of Latin America (O’Neill 2005). In short, by the end of the 1990s, a description of a prior “New Federalism” movement in the United States during the late 1960s rang equally true for Latin America in the 1990s, “Decentralization is rapidly replacing God, Country and Motherhood in popular favor” (Furniss 1974:958).
In the years that have followed the initial decentralization push by government officials and development specialists in the 1990s, one thing has become abundantly clear –the strategy has had dramatically different outcomes, not only across different countries, but within the same country as well. Surprisingly, we still have very little systematic work on understanding these variations in the outcomes of the decentralization strategy. The question has the qualities of a classic natural experiment –a similar set of policies implemented during the same time period in countries within one region of the world have produced vastly different outcomes with respect to the democratic goals set forth by proponents. This question is even more amenable to a natural experiment design when considering the often times wildly different outcomes that have occurred as a result of the exact same policy implementation within a single country.
During the “second reverse wave” from democracy in the 1960s, most Latin American countries heavily concentrated political power in the central offices of authoritarian regimes.Centralized decision-making was widely implemented by force rather than consensus, and human rights were systematically violated. Secret intelligence cross-border systems, such as Operation Condor
, were established in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay to repress, torture and execute political opponents, including dissidents and leftists, students and teachers, union leaders and intellectuals, and purported guerillas. Conservative estimates show that centralized state terror may have rendered some 60,000 individuals killed and tens of thousands seized and tortured during military operations (McSherry 2002)
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Decentralization started to be not only earnestly implemented by policy-makers in country after country, but also generously funded by international development agencies. Today, calculating precisely the total investment on decentralization is difficult –if not impossible-but since the last democratizing wave, estimates show that it has run into the billions (Treisman 2007). Decentralization programs are among the most widely spread and resource intensive of all democracy and governance programs funded by multilateral and bi-lateral donors, especially in countries transiting to democracy (Goldstone et al. 2008).
In 1980, sub-national governments around the world collected on average 15% of revenues and spent 20% of expenditures. As a result of decentralization, those figures had risen to 19% and 25%, espectively, and had even doubled in some regions by the late 1990s (Falleti 2004).
