EDUCATION INDICATORS: An International Perspective

Notes on Figures and Tables for Indicator 20

Austria, France, Germany, Spain, and the United States

In cases where two methods are reported for one decision, they are given equal weight in the calculation.

Belgium

Results for public schools at the lower and upper secondary school levels include commissions locales in intermediate level 1. Responses for two systems are represented proportional to their enrollment.

Ireland

In cases where two methods are given for a decision at the same educational level, they are given equal weights in the calculation. Further, a joint response was submitted for primary and lower secondary education. In cases where decisionmaking is reported as different for the two levels, they are represented proportional to their enrollment.

Technical Notes

Indicator 20 presents results from a survey conducted in 1992 and 1993 under the auspices of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Center for Educational Research and Innovation's International Indicators INES project. The purpose of the survey was to collect information about how education decisions were officially made during the 1991 school year.

The survey form consisted of a list of 35 decisions that are made in education systems and grouped into four areas: a) Planning and Structures; b) Personnel Management; c) Organization of Instruction; and d) Resources. For details of the 35 decisions included in the survey, see OECD, Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators, Paris: 1993.

For each decision, persons knowledgeable about the education system were asked to provide two items of information: the level where the decision is made and the decisionmaking mode.

The indicators were calculated to give equal importance to each of the four decision domains. Because there were different numbers of decisions in each domain, each item was weighted by the inverse of the number of responses in its domain. If responses were given for all items, the weights were as follows:

   Organization of Instruction     1/8
   Structures                      1/8
   Personnel Management            1/12
   Resources                       1/7

If a country did not respond to all the items in a domain, the weight was adjusted to match the number of responses provided.

Four levels of decisionmaking were distinguished:

a. The school level, including decisions made by its own governing board, the school principal or head teacher, teachers, parents, and students;

b. Intermediate level 1, the intermediate decisionmaking level that is institutionally closest to the school, usually the local authority (for the United States, this is the District level);

c. Intermediate level 2, the decisionmaking level that is closest to the central government; this may also be a regional agency of the central government (for the United States, this is the State level); and

d. The country level, represented by the central government (e.g., national or federal).

Three modes of decisionmaking were identified:

a. Full autonomy, subject only to the constraint of legislation that is external to the education system or very general;

b. Jointly, or in consultation with another level (joint decisionmaking with actors at the same level was not taken into account); and

c. Freely, but within a framework (binding legislation, regulations or finite options, a budget, etc.) decided at a more central level.