The Model of Providing Resources for Schools in the Islamic Republic of Iran Based on Public Participation

Providing resources for public education in recent decades, the age of complexity and uncertainty, has been one of the challenges in the formal education of countries. In educational systems not benefitting sufficiently from the government budget, the role of markets and the private sector gradually became more prominent, but to fund the system at its best and make it immune from the negative side of the market-based conditions, some plans were developed to engage students’ parents as participatory agents in choosing the schools they wanted. Those plans included projects such as issuing vouchers and concluding various contracts with the private sector to contribute to especially public schools’ earnings to ensure the quality of education in the competitive environment. The purpose of this study is to identify the pattern of supplying school resources in the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is qualitative and phenomenological. By interviewing 15 educational administrators who agreed with participatory management in schools and analyzing them, management mechanisms for utilizing people's capacities were identified. Research findings showed that the manager needs to move away from traditional roles to lead the partnership through mechanisms of awareness, capacity building, opportunity building, and institutionalization by observing behavioral principles such as competence, ethics, independence (side by side with communication) and value-laden acts. Based on this, the model of providing resources in Iranian schools is a public model and not a government model with a new structure.