School Management and Effectiveness in Developing Countries: The Post-Bureaucratic School

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A&C Black, Feb 8, 2006 - Education - 200 pages
This book is quite different from existing 'Western' books on school effectiveness. It describes and analyses the way in which schools operate in developing countries and also tries to explain why they are as they are. Examining them at three levels - the macro, the meso and the micro - the authors use a theoretical framework that they have termed 'post-bureaucracy.'

The book has four interlinked sections. First the authors examine the existing economic and theoretical contexts around school effectiveness, including an analysis of the causes of economic crisis and its impact on school management. In the second section the analysis of schools as bureaucratic facades is proposed. The reality of school life, from which any theory of school effectiveness must derive, is illustrated by an ethnographic account of the job of the headteacher in developing countries. The third section explores different ways to understand this reality, operating on three levels: global relationships, national and community cultures, and individual agency. In the final section Haber and Davies draw these levels and realities together. They argue for the democratization of schools as the only way forward for effective education fordevelopment.
 

Contents

Education in the Context of Developing Countries
5
School Effectiveness and Ineffectiveness
22
Contextual Realities for School Management
41
School as an Organization Bureaucratic Facades
43
Leadership Headteacher as Taxi Driver
56
Explaining School Management Levels of Understanding
75
The Macro Level Transformational and Development Theories
77
The Meso Level School Management in Prismatic Society1
91
Towards PostBureaucracy
121
The Need for Flexible Schools
123
Democracy and the Post Bureaucratic School
147
School Management and Development Goals and Own Goals
163
REFERENCES
169
Name Index
181
Subject Index
183
Copyright

The Micro Level Scripts Discourses and the Individual Agent
104

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About the author (2006)

Lynn Davies is Professor of International Education at the School of Education, University of Birmingham. Clive Harber is Professor of Education and Head of the School of Education, University of Birmingham, UK.

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