The goals and consequences of the centralization in public education in Hungary

What is it about?

A robust process of centralization in education administration and school finance has taken place in Hungary after 2010. The governance, control, and funding of schools have been taken from local government by the state, and the autonomy of headmasters and teachers has diminished. However, neither the objectives of, nor the motives behind this centralization seem to be completely clear. Our paper clarifies these objectives and motives, and explores whether the reform has been successful in achieving its declared objectives.

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Why is it important?

While the declared objectives of the centralization included the reduction of inequalities in resource availability and teachers’ wages, and an improvement in equality of educational opportunity, in the first two post-reform years these results failed to materialize. There was a significant drop in the level of resources per student, resulting in an increase of inequality of resources. A drop in expenditure may in principle indicate a growth in efficiency, but in this instance this seems actually to have been achieved at the expense of shortages and other school-level problems with a negative effect on the quality of education. The usual requirements to be observed in public sector governance reforms were deliberately neglected. The reform was carried through in the absence of any pilot study or systematic impact assessment. This is all the more problematic as the recent literature on the experience of other countries does not provide unanimous support for centralization. Further, given the declared objectives of the reforms, it is rather remarkable that no systematic monitoring of results was put into place.

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