Women Participation in School Governance in Lalitpur, Nepal: A Participatory Development Practice

Participation is an important dimension of good governance. In Nepal, there seem positive changes in women's participation in School Management Committees (SMC), Parent Teachers Association (PTA), and school administration but the participation of women has become a far-reaching goalin public school governance. This article is about exploring how women's participation could contribute to promoting good governance practices in community schools. Authors have applied an interpretative inquiry and participation and feminist standpoint theories to make out the meaning in this study which was carried in two public schools in Lalitpur, Nepal. The finding reveals that his meaningful representation of women in school governance is likely to minimize the governance challenges such as absenteeism, low parents’ participation, poor resource mobilization, transparency, and accountability.These positive transformations contribute to the community development process. However, enabling environment for women is needed to ensure their meaningful representation in school governance structures. This study is beneficial to educationists, planners, and development workers in Nepal.

Good School Governance: An Approach to Principal’s Decision-Making Quality in Indonesian Vocational School

The purpose of this research is to examine the model of good school governance and to establish the correlation between good school governance and the principal’s decision making in Indonesian vocational school contexts. The samples of the present quantitative descriptive study are the vocational school principals, vice-principals, and teachers by considering the representation of all provinces in Indonesia. The data were gathered from a structured questionnaire survey of 838 respondents. The factor analysis was applied to bring out the latent variables representing the attributes, and later, the causality between these variables was established using structural equation modeling (SEM). The result of confirmatory factor analysis shown that good school governance was constructed by six principles, namely; transparency, accountability, responsibility, autonomy, fairness, and participation. Supported by empirical evidence, good school governance has have impacted positively on the quality of the principal’s decision making. The research has affirmed that good school governance facilitates the participation of teachers and educational staff in the decision-making process. Moreover, good school governance improves a decision-making quality through the empowerment of teachers, the delegation of authority, and encouragement of shared decision-making.

Unanticipated Consequences of Reforms in School Governance

This article argues that policy development and evaluations should not only incorporate whether and to what extent the policies achieve the intended goals, but should also take the unintended consequences of the policies into account. Based on the classic work of the sociologist Robert Merton, this article addresses the side-effects of attempts that have been made by the Lithuanian national government to improve on the governance of basic and high-schools. The intended goals of the policies concerned the increase of autonomy of school governance through the decentralization of responsibilities; increasing autonomy of and control over school governance; increasing market-driven governance, inducing competition and collaboration between schools, and altering the relation between service providers and recipients. An in-depth analysis shows that there were serious side-effects. Due to the limited knowledge and capabilities at the local level the policies resulted in sub-optimal decision-making at the school level. As the transfer went hand in hand with national laws and strict regulations, stipulating the financing and content of education, setting standards and uniform requirements this reduced the ability of schools to make autonomous decisions and rather turned them into bodies implementing national standards. A decrease in cost-efficiency is visible as every school has to make its own plans; administrative burdens increase, and insufficient funding results in a transfer of shortages instead of transferring the responsibility to find solutions for those shortages, and instead of becoming more collegiate, the relation between schools becomes competitive resulting in distrust with all the expected negative consequences. The plans to increase the autonomy of school governance could have developed rather differently if these unintended consequences had been taken into account beforehand. If such side-effects would be anticipated, that could have resulted in more realism, less one-sided and unfounded optimism and in the end, less frustration and demotivation.