One way to decentralize decision-making power in education is popularly known as School-Based management (SBM). There are other definitions and names for this concept but they all refer to the decentralization of authority from the central government to school level. SBM emphasizes the individual school ( as represented by any combination of principals, teachers, parents students and other members of the school community) as the primary unit for improving education and the redistribution of decision-making authority  over school operations as the primary means by which this improvement can be stimulated and sustained. The school- level actors however, have to conform to or operate within a set of centrally determined policies. It will identify the decision domains in which teachers contribute most effectively and this will take into account teachers’ perceptions of their performance in the school.

                  School-Based management (SBM) is a proposal to decentralize school control and to promote teachers’ participation in decision making. Centralization was considered as an institutional reform in improving quality education. This centralization is said to be the process where the concentration of decision-making is in few hands. All the important decisions and actions at the lower level are subject to the approval of the top management.

                Principals are catalyst of change, as such he/she must be able to establish the building of relationships through proper interaction and shared-decision making. Teachers’ participation in shared decision-making is one of the recommendations of school-based management policy, as stipulated with the enactment on August 11, 2001 of Republic Act 9155(An Act Instituting a Framework of Governance for Basic Education and for other Purposes),the legal mandate for decentralization of governance in basic education.

            An assumption of school-based management is that if decisions are made closer to the client, better decisions will be made and greater satisfactions and commitment will prevail. However, although teachers’ participation in decision-making is claimed to be correlated with their affective outcomes, few researchers have attempted to verify the predictive effectiveness of participation in different decision domains under a multi-dimensional participatory model on their affective outcome’

          So teachers, do you really share decision-making in the school environment? Apart from you, under the SBM, parents community people and other external stakeholdercan may share in the decision-making in the school.

 

Reference:

Department of Education and  Manual and Framework on the Assessment of SBM Practices.

By: RUBELYN NUNEZ CARATIKIT