State capacities, educational management, and their effects on school performance

The panel aims to generate knowledge and debate about state capacities in educational policies in Basic Education. Priority is given to debates on subnational realities, but the group is open to analyses at the national level. However, the focus is on educational management, not school management; that is, the panel aims to encourage work to improve the understanding of the functioning of different administrative instances beyond schools, not within them, the contexts and forms of action of subnational (or national) bureaucracy, analyzing their effects on school performance. The main question guiding us is: if, what, and how do the state capacities of subnational governments determine the school performance outcomes of schools in socially and economically heterogeneous environments? In recent decades, extensive literature has presented evidence of the availability of “state capacities” as means, resources, and instruments necessary for the implementation of public policies (Cingolani, 2013; Cingolani et al., 2015; Centeno, Kohli & Yashar, 2017; D’Arcy & Nistotskaya, 2021; Cingolani, 2020). However, the concept has been used in a polysemous way, corresponding to the administrative (Evans & Rauch, 1999; Centeno, 2002; Centeno, Kohli & Yashar, 2017), informational (D’Arcy & Nistotskaya, 2017), fiscal (Besley & Persson, 2010, 2011), legal (Fukuyama, 2004), political, and relational (Olsen, Weaver & Rockman, 1993) dimensions, among many other possibilities. Some dimensions that dominate the literature, with overlaps and singularities, to cite the main ones: administrative-bureaucratic, coercive, fiscal, legal-regulatory, political, relational, technical-administrative, political-relational, legal, organizational-administrative. All analyzing, from different theoretical-methodological approaches, the effects of different dimensions of these capacities on the provision and implementation of social policies.