THE REFORMS IN THE SYSTEM OF EDUCATION AT THE PERIOD 2004-2014
The system of education must ensure an ongoing reform and development and this paper aims to analyze these changes after the Ohrid Framework agreement. Although this document was a political agreement it impacted the organization in the system of education largely. In the first part the paper analyzes the need for decentralization of power in the country for the sake of being closer to local communities and also improving services in this regard. The changes were presented in two levels. The first level was an organizational redesign of the service in regard to number of schools in the country. In order to better manage the process, the Ministry of Education established two units: the legal unit and the analytical unit. The urgent challenge for the development of this process has to do with the fact that only in its primary education Macedonia had about 340 primary schools that function as special legal units and therefore the centralized management created the “Black Box” effect according to which only educational units or school heads close to the Ministry of Education could gain privileges or adequate support. A significant legal step was that the decentralization process which did not recognize only the direct delegation of competences from the central to local government, but engaged the school councils, parents council as well as a third party in the process of decision making in the local schools. These decision-making bodies could have a say in the design of the school budgets as well as the selection of the school principals in cooperation with the mayors of the towns. How this was implemented could be a different topic for discussion in another occasion, however, this paper aims to identify key reforms in the educational process in the period of 2004 – 2014. The analyses will include a number of laws before the 2004 period that have impacted the process. It started legal reforms in 2002 with the adoption of the law on self-government and associated with the Law on Financing the Local Self-government in 2004, and a number of amendments on the Law on primary and secondary education in 2004 again.