Emerging management challenges often make regional education authorities start transforming their organizational structures. But, as a rule, such reconstruction takes place without analysis and evaluation of the existing structure, identification of its defects and their impact on the management quality. Underestimating these procedures happens because of the lack of scientific and methodological framework for the regional organizational structural research. Ultimately, even new structures are linear-functional, that is why management efficiency cannot be sufficiently increased under dynamic conditions. This article reveals a situational approach to the diagnosing of the organizational structure of the regional education authority in the constituent entity of the Russian Federation. Situational diagnostics includes a set of criteria and procedures that were used to assess the structure of the education authority in the Murmansk region. Diagnostics of the structure of this authority showed poor performance of signifi cant managerial functions, imperfection of the way they are combined, and inconsistency of the organizational structure with the requirements of the external and internal environment. As a result, the situational approach to the diagnosing of organizational education management structures made it possible for managers to assess the authority performance completely in real-time mode, to change their ideas about the priorities of this performace, and to recognize previously unnoticed details.