Types of Education Management: Centralized and Decentralized, Autocratic and Democratic

Types of Education Management

Education management involves the setting directions, aims and objectives of educational programmes. It also involves enlisting and organizing available resources.

Moreover, it helps in the proper allocation of responsibilities and duties which results in saving time and money. Effective resource utilization ensures that all aspects and operations of an educational programme run smoothly.

Types of Management

Educational management is the process of creating policies, programs, and plans to achieve an institution’s goals and objectives. It requires a combination of technical knowledge, leadership skills, and interpersonal abilities. It also involves working with a variety of stakeholders, including teachers, students, and parents. There are four major types of management in education: centralized and decentralized, external and internal, autocratic and democratic, and creative educational management.

Centralized educational administration is a system in which all sorts of powers and responsibilities are vested in one hand, that is the real executive head. For example, in the field of higher education the Director, Higher Education is the real executive head and has all kinds of powers and responsibilities but his/her associate officers, Additional Director, Deputy Director, Assistant Director remain mute in this regard. Such an arrangement enhances the authority of the executive head, restricts the initiative of pedagogical workers, complicates the search for new ways of developing education and makes the work of administration boring and monotonous.

Autocratic

A teacher following the autocratic management style takes decisions and gives instructions to teachers and students. The teacher does not ask the students for their opinions and teaches them in the way she thinks will be best for them. In this type of leadership ego of the teacher is pre-dominant and it is very effective in areas where time for discussion is limited and efficiency of work needs to be high.

Educational management is the administration of the education system, which involves a group of professionals and material resources. Its goal is to supervise, plan, strategize and implement structures in order to carry out the education system. This can be done through the development and use of pedagogical, innovative and supporting processes. The management of human and material resources is essential for the success of any educational programme. Managing these resources properly will ensure that they are used effectively and efficiently. This will reduce operational costs and improve overall productivity.

Democratic

Democratic educational management is an approach that is highly popular in today’s world and is considered the need of the hour for bringing a wholesome change in education. It involves distributing power and responsibilities across all management levels. It also stresses equality, which is a basic hallmark of democracy.

It can be used for both short- and long-term goals of the educational institute. Moreover, it helps in properly allocating resources and ensuring that these are well-used. This is important in order to avoid waste of time, effort and money.

Educators need to use thoughtful practical management principles in order to enlist the available resources and attain their key objectives. They must also be responsive to changing conditions within society and educate teachers and students about the impact of new technologies on teaching and learning. Similarly, they must also help develop strategies that address teacher professional ethics and respond to cultural imperatives within differing societies. This makes educational management an extremely complex endeavor.

Decentralization

Decentralization involves transferring decision-making power to lower levels of the organization, with the aim of improving efficiency and increasing accountability. In education, this can take the form of empowering school-based managers or giving schools more autonomy in making decisions about their operations.

However, there are limitations to decentralization. One of the most important is that it’s difficult to know exactly how much decentralization a country has, since it’s often a tool used to achieve other objectives. For example, a country might have decentralized its educational management by allowing local councils to select school directors and budgets but may have centralized its financial decisions or pay teachers according to a national scale.

Another challenge is that decentralization requires harmonizing a complex set of functions. Ongoing impact evaluations indicate that community-managed schools have lower rates of teacher and student absenteeism, but the effects on students’ test scores are less clear. This is due to the complexity of measuring student outcomes.