Three essays on multi-stakeholder school governance : participation of parents, local communities and private partners in school management and finance

Education decentralization facilitates the participation of parents, local communities, and private partners in school management and finance, forming a system of multiple-stakeholder school governance. While their participation is expected to hold a school accountable for educational outcomes, engaging external stakeholders who are not education professionals and who have diverging interests may have adverse effects. Does the participation of external stakeholders in school management and finance improve educational outcomes? Whose participation really counts? What conditions need to be met to realize the purported positive effects of multiple-stakeholder governance? I examine these questions in three studies.The first study explores efficiency-equity tradeoff of engaging non-state stakeholders in public school finance. Financing public schools with private funds is expected to promote efficient use of resources while it raises concern for financial equity. However, private funds raised from different non-state stakeholders may have differential efficiency and equity effects. Using public school data derived from the Learning and Educational Achievements in Punjab Schools (LEAPS) in Pakistan, this study examines how private funds mobilized from parents, local communities, and private donors are associated with the efficiency of generating student achievement and the equity in school finance. The findings inform the importance of understanding effects of private-fund revenue that vary by its source and school type. This helps design cost-sharing policy that improves both school efficiency and financial equity.The second study explores factors that facilitate or constrain the influence of parents and private partners on school decision-making. Parents and private partners are increasingly engaged in school management as a means to improve education quality and outcomes. In multi-stakeholder school governance, external stakeholders are considered to be able to influence school decisions when their interests and concerns become elevated over the priorities and demands of other parties. This raises a question: under what conditions do their influence become salient? I used the stakeholder salience theory as a conceptual framework to identify factors affecting the influence of parents and private partners on school decision-making through a systematic literature review. The findings were applied to participatory school governance in Pakistan to examine how these factors affect the influence of external stakeholders in a particular context. Based on the analysis, I present a new framework that addresses the multi-dimensional and interrelated nature of stakeholder influence in multi-stakeholder school governance.The third study explores the association between parent participation in school management and student achievement in eight countries and economies. Engaging parents in school management is expected to hold the school accountable for educational outcomes. However, the evidence has proven inconclusive and limited in explaining mechanisms of learning gain/loss. Using the public school student data derived from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015, this study examines the association between student achievement and participation of a student's own parents in school management, which would affect their learning support at home, and the participation of a parent group, which would influence school decisions and thus affect the learning environment at school. The findings suggest the importance of identifying which mechanism accounts for positive/negative associations in order to design effective participatory school governance models.