Review of Centralization and Decentralization Approaches to Curriculum Development in Iran

The current review article aims at classifying, summarizing and organizing some researches conducted about the process of centralization-decentralization and its influence on curricula. Regarding some conducted studies in this area, this paper discusses the condition of decentralization in general and then represents decentralization levels in order to provide the readers more information. Types of decentralization in education are the issues that have been mainly discussed in this paper. The analysis of centralization reduction policies in curriculum of Iran's higher education is the next subject to be discussed; some investigations carried out in this scope are also presented. Then school-based curriculum planning is explored as a practical solution to reduce centralization of curriculum planning system. Finally, after introducing the dualistic (zero or one) view as the main problem that makes educational issues complicated and inefficient, such as in curriculum planning decentralization, the evolution overview is presented from centralization to decentralization and then again turning back to centralization in Iran's and world's curriculum systems. The most important result obtained from this review is that although many theorists and experts in the field of curriculum planning have supported the dominance of decentralization on curricula and have talked about various shortcomings of centralization, the real move towards decentralization of different parts of educational system such as curriculum planning, specially in Iran, is very slow.