The intention of this paper is to describe the specifics of school-based management arrangements in low and middle income developing countries; and potentially how these are related to performance in terms of school inputs, teacher working conditions, and of student performance. A large number of sources have been consulted and usable evidence was found in about 100 of them. There was usually substantial discussion of the national social and political and policy context, but there is overwhelming evidence that the vast majority of variation in implementation is within and not between countries; and there was very limited evidence on the actual school-level process of constituting the beneficiary control groups, their composition, roles and responsibilities and statutory powers; or on the frequency of and attendance at meetings or what is discussed. Several studies include evidence on performance,defined in various ways, tendto show that there is a small positive effect of decentralization on the aspects of performance that have been measured; but as different definitions are used in each of the countries, a synthesis of results is difficult. But there are very few studies that have related specifics of the school council management arrangements to any of these performance measures.The lack of systematic evidence is surprising given the attention that has been paid to this subject.