Community Participation with Schools in Developing Countries

Towards Equitable and Inclusive Basic Education for All

Mikiko Nishimura, Mikiko Nishimura

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429614422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (2016-2030) set by the United Nations in 2015 restated the importance of universal primary education for all, and specifically discuss quality, equity, and inclusion in basic education. To achieve this, the role of community has been emphasized and participation has become a "buzzword" in international development over the past several decades. Despite the growing attention to community participation in school management, previous literature has shown mixed results in terms of its actual practice and its impacts on quality, equity, and inclusion in education.

This book deepens the contextual understanding of community in developing countries and its involvement in schools in general, and its impact on quality, equity, and inclusion of school education in particular. By presenting various case studies in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and a post-conflict state in Europe, the book analyses commonalities and differences in the ways communities are involved and cast their impacts and challenges. The book contributes knowledge on the ways in which community involvement could work in developing countries, the detailed processes and factors that make community participation work in different dimensions, and remaining challenges that scholars and practitioners still need to be concerned and mindful in the field.

This book will appeal to both researchers and practitioners who are concerned about the community participation approach for the SDGs.

1    Introduction

Mikiko Nishimura

Objectives of the book

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (2016–2030) set by the United Nations in 2015 restate the importance of universal primary education for all, and specifically discuss quality, equity, and inclusion in basic education. To achieve this, the role of community has been emphasized. Community is deemed an important actor to complement the lack of financial capacity of the government, to seek an alternative way to deliver education that suits the context of people in need, and to hold schools accountable for sustainable and quality education services. Despite the growing attention to community participation in schools, previous literature has shown mixed results in terms of its actual practice and its impacts on quality, equity, and inclusion in education. Previous books on this topic also tend to focus on a certain region (e.g. Asia and India), a certain aspect (e.g. finance), or certain methodological evidence (e.g. quantitative research), and lacks comprehensiveness in its analysis. In the Oxford Research Encyclopaedias: Education (Nishimura, 2017) I outline both conceptual and empirical challenges of the theme and call for more contextual and comprehensive understanding of this topic.

This book attempts to fill the aforementioned gap in literature and practice in international educational development. In particular, the book aims to deepen the contextual understanding of community in developing countries, and its involvement in school in general and its impact on quality, equity, and inclusion of school education in particular. By presenting various case studies in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and a post-conflict state in Europe, the book will analyse commonalities and differences in the ways communities are involved, and how such case studies demonstrate their impacts and challenges as compared to theories and widespread notions. By doing so, the book will contribute to knowledge on the ways in which community involvement could work in developing countries, the detailed processes and factors that made such cases, and remaining challenges that scholars and practitioners still need to be concerned about in the field. The book also draws fresh attention to the linkage between community participation and the current SDGs agenda, namely, quality, equity, and inclusion in basic education. This is the first book to tackle the very topical issue of community participation in schools in developing countries, with a breadth of scope and depth of analysis in relation to the current international policy agenda.

The contributors to this book are both academic researchers and practitioners in international educational development, with varying backgrounds that include Economics, Sociology, Anthropology, Development Studies, and Policy Studies, to name a few. The authors represent those who were pioneering in this area in academia, major international development organizations, and innovative non-governmnetal organizations (NGOs). They have been involved in the areas of international educational development as advisor, consultant, volunteer, and/or researcher. Multi-disciplinary perspectives will enrich the discussion on the roles of community in school and demonstrate multi-dimensionality of the lessons learnt.

Organization of the book

This book is composed of four parts. Part I outlines the theoretical perspectives on community participation in schools. Chapter 2 presents a comprehensive outlook of theoretical paradigms of community participation discourses in international educational development. Through a careful historical overview of definitions of community and participation, the authors classify four goals of community participation in schools, namely, to develop or empower community itself; to hold schools accountable; to enrich schools with community resources; and to provide community schools or complementary schooling. Theoretically, neoliberal approaches emphasize the accountability goal by using market mechanisms and individual choice to promote change, whereas the liberal perspective relies on existing institutions to make pragmatic change, such as improving democratic representation of the school management committee under decentralized school management. The progressive approach seeks to reorganize political, economic, and social relationships, thus community participation denotes empowering and involving marginalized individuals and groups. The authors successfully show that the essential terms and theoretical assumptions about community participation in schools are so diverse that the meaning and likely effects of a particular initiative depend on specifics such as context, conceptions, mechanisms, and underlying intentions.

Chapter 3 presents the theoretical perspectives of school-based management (SBM) and the most updated empirical evidence in different parts of the world. By establishing the principles for enabling SBM to support student learning and improve learning outcomes, this chapter provides contextualized examples of SBM that shed light on the factors that can make a difference in successful SBM implementation for inclusive, equitable, and quality education. It also calls for more research into policy implementation at the school level and the enabling environment for SBM to deepen understanding of the critical factors that allow SBM to support better learning for all.

Chapter 4 presents the theory of change from the bottom-up perspective. Using the case study of Pratham, an innovative NGO in India that initiated the household-based learning assessment by involving community volunteers, the author retrospectively discusses how and in what ways Pratham managed to take the education quality discourse out of bureaucratic professionalism and to make it open to the public by empowering the community. The chapter concludes that educational movements flourish when learning goals are aligned and understood by both schools and communities, and when both schools and communities collaborate or at least work in tandem with each other.

Part II presents case studies on stakeholder relationships and accountability in community participation in schools. Cases come from Ghana, Mexico, Niger, and Kenya. Chapter 5 uses the concept of “relational trust” to analyse the relationship among stakeholders in school management and its relation to learning outcomes. By looking at the case of two schools in Akatsi South District, Ghana, the chapter finds that the relational trust between community and school, as well as between teachers and parents, explains the balance between support and accountability, the process of mutual accountability, and the existence of teachers who feel demotivated owing to a lack of relational trust with school communities and guardians. Although there is no direct relation between relational trust and learning outcomes, relational trust was an important process factor in school education.

Chapter 6 highlights the aspect of community empowerment, and discusses four contributing factors, namely, social justice leadership, parental participation, adult education, and community organizing. By using a case study method to analyse a private but fee-free school in a marginalized community in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, the authors propose a potential theorization of community participation in schools with community empowerment as its core value.

Chapter 7 outlines the methodology developed by the Japan International Cooperation Agency to create a democratic School Management Committee (SMC) in Niger. Consisting of three core elements: conducting secret ballot elections to enable the community to elect its SMC members democratically; carrying out the entire cycle of the school action plan with community involvement; and establishing a sustainable monitoring and advisory structure to support SMCs, this model significantly increased the country’s school enrollment rates, decreased student repetition, and lowered teacher absenteeism.

In Chapter 8, the authors used the panel data of 480 parents in 30 villages in Loitokitok, Kenya in 2018 and 2019 to examine the influence of information on collective action in school, as well as parents’ awareness of learning performance. Although information sharing through text messages alone did not increase the overall level of parental financial contributions and attendance of school meetings, those who were aware of school and child performance improved the accuracy of the information. The parents with accurate data on child performance contributed more to the school after the intervention. On the other hand, those who had accurate information at the baseline contributed less to the school at the end line. Parents can be disappointed with school performance and divert their financial resources to avoid collective action when dissatisfied with the school.

Part III deals with the role of community for equity and inclusion. Chapter 9 discusses the dilemma of trust building through community participation in schools in the post-conflict context of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The ethnic quotas of board membership seem essential to ensure democratic representation and to increase the legitimacy of school policy, thereby promoting local residents’ trust in public institutions. While such a mechanism ensures a school space of interaction between diverse groups, and maintains stable ethnic coexistence after war, ethnicity is still the imperative that governs the citizens’ lives and the education system.

Chapter 10 takes up the theme of inclusive education by examining the case of rural Kenya, where the author explored the perceptions of parents of children with disabilities and teachers on schooling and its inclusive environment. The author found that the capacity of the school and acceptance of parents and teachers to meet the unique needs of each child are vital factors to create Inclusive Education, while the roles of communities and schools should be regarded as inseparable in order to generate a “society-acceptance situation” of Inclusive Education based on the relationship between communities and schools.

In Chapter 11, community is defined as peer relations that serve as important supports to enable young people from marginalized backgrounds to further their education and earning, particularly when faced with social, economic, and gender inequalities. Based on longitudinal interview data with 230 young people from three youth livelihood programs in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, young people were able to organize themselves to support one another and to overcome inequalities in education and the workplace to further their livelihoods and achieve their goals.

Finally, Part IV presents case studies on community participation and learning outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Chapter 12 discusses how the intervention of training executives of School Management Committees, provision of mathematics workbooks that match students’ proficiency levels with training on their use, and conducting community-based remedial lessons contributed to improvement of the students’ performance. The correct responses in basic mathematics assessment rose from around 40 percent to an average of 67 percent in six months in Niger.

By using an original cross-sectional school and local government data including 111 schools from the two regions and six provinces for Burkina Faso, and 205 schools from the four regions and 13 provinces for Senegal, Chapter 13 examines the relation between the function of school councils and students’ performance as well as student assessment. The functionality of school councils and the use of student assessment results in schools have a statistically significant positive relation to learning achievement. The authors suggest that strengthening the policy implementation on participatory school councils, along with a more substantial use of student assessment results at school, makes an important contribution to better learning results.

Chapter 14 seeks to draw attention to the ways in which the community participation program in El Salvador, known as Education with Community Participation (EDUCO), has been treated by the international and academic literature as a knowledge base for community participation in schools. Despite this abundant literature, the author presents the weaknesses of this program in practice by drawing on largely unknown and ignored qualitative studies concerning EDUCO’s implementation. The chapter highlights the fundamentally problematic way that knowledge is produced and used in the global education policy field, and argues for a different approach to community participation that focuses on community empowerment and community organizing.

Chapter 15 presents the results of an impact evaluation of Programa Escuelas de Calidad, implemented in Mexico between 2001 and 2014. The evaluation was made in the state of Colima in 2006 and found that a formal school-based management intervention plus a monetary grant was not enough to improve learning outcomes. While some methodological issues were reflected upon, the evaluation did reveal that the intensity of treatment increased test scores during the first year of the intervention.

Finally, Chapter 16 presents the conclusion of the book.

Reference

Nishimura, M. (2017). Community participation in school management in developing countries. In: Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Education. https://oxfordre.com/education/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264093-e-64?rskey=2tWXFT&result=1

Part I

Revisiting the theoretical framework

2 Community participation

Policy discourses and controversies

James H. Williams, Romina Kasman, Paromita De, Meng Zhou and Ana Gonzalez

Community participation in education (CPiE) is a term whose broad yet fuzzy appeal makes it quite useful in advancing educational improvement efforts in educational reform circles. Grassroots activists are likely to see CPiE as a way to mobilize and empower local communities, helping to develop their social capital and social infrastructure. Neoliberal reformers are likely to see it as a way to promote greater and more direct accountability of schools to those they are chartered to serve – children, parents, the local communities, and possibly larger communities; or to bypass the complexities of an overly centralized or ineffective school system. Educators of many stripes are likely see it as a way to improve the educational experience of children and the outcomes of schools – cognitive learning outcomes as well as other desirable outcomes of school. Of course, “community participation” can mean a number of different things. It may refer, among other things, to community contributions to the school, to school-based management of schools, involvement in decision-making about the school by members of the community, or inclusion of local history and culture in the school curriculum. As with other buzzwords (Cornwall, 2006), community participation is best understood in light of the particulars of fit between context and goals, mechanisms or forms, resources and capacity. Due in part, perhaps, to the lack of a robust research base, arguments for CPiE have often been initiated on theoretical or ideological rationales first, with data – possibly – following. The emphasis is often on prescriptions of what should happen, rather than analysis of what has and does happen. This volume is an important step in filling that gap.

This chapter attempts to sketch a broad-brush map of the CPiE landscape, a landscape that is bigger than is often suggested by particular initiatives. We locate CPiE in the context of the broad historical development of formal education, with a particular focus on the changing relationships among community, school, and government. We look at variations in contexts in which CPiE takes place, and discuss different meanings we see in the CPiE literature. We consider goals and underlying approaches to conceptions of education and school, community, and government, and touch on some examples of ways in which CPiE is enacted. The chapter ends with a set of diagnostic questions to help think th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Author biographies
• Foreword
• 1. Introduction
• PART I: Revisiting the theoretical framework
• PART II: Case studies on stakeholder relationships and accountability
• PART III: Case studies on the role of community for equity and inclusion
• PART IV: Case studies on community participation and learning outcomes
• Index