182 Brooke Zobrist and Patrick McCormick
approval from either Township or District Officers. Because local
levels had no authority over curriculum or special programmes,
they could not raise funds for such uses.- According to interviewees, in 2012 the central government created a
new programme under which schools must choose needy students
to receive scholarships from the Ministry of Education. The schools
must form a committee to evaluate and select the students, typically
very low in number, such as four students per school. The schools
could not ask for more funding for more students, nor could they
move budget allocations from elsewhere to help those students.
Political
- Regional and state-level hluttaws had no authority over education.
There appeared to be no formal connection between the Ministry of
Education and the regional hluttaws and their members. In any case,
education falls under Schedule 1 of the constitution and therefore it
is not clear how these hluttaws could become involved in education.
Several Ministry of Education officials interviewed for this study
appeared to view the state legislatures as irrelevant to their work.
As one official put it, “They do their own things.” - Below the Union Hluttaw, no elected officials play a role in education.
All other officials were appointed. Similarly, the authority to
appoint teachers and principals lay with the Union Department of
Basic Education. No lower level organizations or committees have
authority to make these appointments. - A few “national education” systems associated with non-state ethnic
groups who had reached cease-fire agreements with the central
government had created what appear to be viable ethnic education
systems, such as the Mon National Schools, which developed out
of the New Mon State Party. These systems, however, are not legal
and represent an ad hoc form of accommodation in what could be
considered a form of “decentralization through devolution”.
DISCUSSION
As of this writing, there are very limited signs of decentralization happening
in the education sector. Much of what we observed and what interviewees