The impact of education decentralization on high-quality education has been mixed at best. This can be attributed to a variety of factors including decentralization itself, ineffectual implementation, political-economic friction, and poor design. This paper focuses largely on the issue of design, contending that if governments or donors aim to decentralize education systems, or parts thereof, for the purpose of high-quality education, the system must be designed to do so. Only then might there be some chance of it actually happening. In this paper we put forth a methodology for designing a high-quality decentralized education system and discuss the ways in which that design can be used to support the planning process aimed at bringing about the design. (Contains 3 figures, 4 tables, and 30 footnotes.)