Paper abstract:

This presentation compares how different forms of school funding influence the ability of urban public school principals’ decision-making for the development of the school in Kazakhstan. Per-capita school funding (PCF) in Kazakhstan provides schools with more adequate funds while maintaining the same regulations for the distribution of the school budget at schools with the same legal status. The presentation discusses whether the formula-based PCF creates a different managerial accountability burden for school principals as compared to incremental line item budget-based school funding. The evidence in this paper comes from a real-life policy experiment context where one part of otherwise similar public urban schools receive formula-based PCF and another – incremental line item budget allocations. Data analyzed in the paper comes from online survey responses of almost 500 school principals across the regions of Kazakhstan. This research finds that principals at schools with PCF feel more autonomous in making decisions about the development of the school than their counterparts at schools with a different form of funding. Yet, there is no difference between these two groups of principals in respect to the experience of managerial accountability burden. This research argues that the experiences of school principals are similar in terms of accountability pressures regardless of whether it is a bureaucratic or an evaluative state paradigm that guides the national education policy. What matters, however, is access to financial resources. When principals have sufficient resources to allocate toward the unmet needs of the school, they feel more in charge of the development of the school.