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Resumen Este artículo ofrece una contribución teórica sobre la necesidad de comprender los orígenes y el funcionamiento del Estado al investigar las intersecciones entre globalización, privatización y educación en contextos postcoloniales. A partir del caso de Honduras, el artículo es el resultado de un proyecto mayor que incluyó el análisis de la información recogida de entrevistas en profundidad con actores clave del campo de la política educativa, la revisión de fuentes históricas y de la literatura teórica sobre política educativa global, economía política, teoría del sistema-mundo y estudios postcoloniales. Se define lo que llamamos “ethos de privatización”, una forma de privatización inherente al Estado postcolonial referida al hecho de que el beneficio privado es la lógica que guía el funcionamiento del sistema.

RESUMEN Este ensayo ofrece, desde una perspectiva sistémica, hallazgos sobre el funcionamiento de la reciente estrategia de descentralización educativa en El Salvador, denominada Sistema Integrado de Escuela Inclusiva de Tiempo Pleno (SI-EITP), con el objetivo de conocer el sentido de su funcionamiento y la experiencia de la participación de la comunidad educativa inmersa en sus dinâmicas. Por medio de una revisión de los documentos relacionados con el diseno y la ejecución, el anâlisis revela que SI-EITP no funcionó según lo esperado, debido tanto a una falta de cohesión conceptual, como a la inexistencia de un marco legal adecuado y de recursos suficientes para lograr una participación y empoderamiento locales.

The World Bank has been called the most influential organization in education reform globally. Not only is it the single largest funder of education for international development, but it also produces knowledge, circulates discourse, and structures policymaking processes in ways that extend its influence far beyond its primary role as a bank. However, while much literature has been produced about the World Bank, the field of education lacks a systematic discussion of what has been reported about how the World Bank influences policy formation at the country level. Through the conduct of a theoretically informed systematic literature review of 70 publications, this article clarifies and provides examples for the numerous ways that the World Bank influences policy formation. In all, the article documents 11 pathways through which the World Bank influences policymaking. The article concludes by suggesting areas where research on the World Bank can be improved, namely, through more explicit attention to the theoretical and methodological approaches employed. The goal of this review is to encourage scholars to be more specific in their conceptualizations and discussions of World Bank influence, to go beyond general claims of policy imposition or agenda shaping.

This study investigates the emergence and supply-demand dynamics of a market for low-fee private schools (LFPS) at the level of early childhood care and education (ECCE) in a slum of Lusaka, Zambia. Based on data collection over 1.5 years, the study reveals that, despite a government policy to support ECCE, over 90% of ECCE centers are private; that school operators tend to be former teachers, businessmen/women, and religious leaders; and that LFPSs charge, on average, 2.5 times as much as government ECCE centers for tuition, not including additional indirect costs. The paper discusses how teachers in LFPSs are caught in the middle, making less than the average income earned by others in the surrounding slum, and are unable to afford LFPS fees themselves. Importantly, the paper highlights that lower income quintiles spend a greater percentage of their income on ECCE, and that a majority of families in the study must make tradeoffs between ECCE, food, housing, and other basic expenditures in order to afford private ECCE, which is a necessity given the inadequate supply of government ECCE centers. In addition to addressing school strategies for keeping costs down, this study reports on parental decision-making when it comes to school selection. Finally, beyond a straight market analysis of LFPSs at the ECCE level in Zambia, this article also comments on how this market fits into the dialectical nature of local and global contexts. That is, it draws attention to the workings of the Zambian state and its precarious position in the global capitalist economy.

This special issue brings together scholars who are working on new aspects of the intersection and implications of globalization, privatization, and marginalization. While globalization’s relationship to education has been of great interest to scholars (e.g., Dale, 1999; Green, 1997; Rizvi Lingard, 2009; Steiner-Khamsi, 2004; Verger, Novelli, Kosar-Altinyelken, 2018). While the relationship between globalization and various forms of privatization has received significant attention (e.g., Adamson, Astrand, Darling-Hammond, 2016; Ball, 2009, 2012; Carnoy, 1999; Mohamed Morris, 2019; Robertson, Mundy, Verger, Menashy, 2012; Verger, Lubienski, Steiner-Khamsi, 2016), we seek to extend scholarship in these areas by examining the current connections and continuing consequences of both globalization and privatization for marginalization in/through education, as well as the ways in which the latter (marginalization) creates opportunities for the former (globalization and privatization). Exploring the relationships among globalization, privatization, and marginalization is vitally important for scholars not only because they are related in multiple yet, we argue, insufficiently understood ways, but also because their relations have real consequences for education policy and practice and for the exacerbation of marginalization itself in and through education. As the introductory essay for the special issue, this article (a) presents a framework for understanding the connections among globalization, privatization, and marginalization in relation to education; (b) distills, visually presents, and expands upon the dialectical connections evident “in” and “through” the cases that make up the special issue; and (c) emphasizes a number of lessons for the globalization-privatization-marginalization nexus.

En el marco de agenda educativa global, las alianzas-público-privadas (como especialmente las escuelas chárter) son reformas con creciente prestigio académico y popularidad política. Supuestamente, y según sus promotores, estas reformas son consideradas una solución costo-eficiente. Existen dos aspectos de las escuelas chárter que han recibido poco interés académico: la gestión del profesorado y la adquisición de recursos. El objetivo de este artículo es subsanar este vacío a través del estudio de caso del programa chárter Colegios en Concesión (cec, activo en Bogotá desde 1999). Los cec son particularmente relevantes, ya que Colombia es uno de los países latinoamericanos que ha experimentado más enérgicamente con las app; además, los cec han recibido una gran atención académica, política, y mediática, muy especialmente de los organismos internacionales; así pues, los cec se han convertido en un modelo paradigmático del programa chárter. Los resultados de este artículo permiten identificar las estrategias económicas de los cec bogotanos, que incluyen el empeoramiento sistemático de las condiciones laborales del profesorado, y nuevas estrategias de adquisición de recursos adicionales; ambos hallazgos problematizan la supuesta ventaja comparativa y costo-eficiencia, tanto de los cec bogotanos como también del programa chárter en general.

El objetivo es analizar las medidas de privatización de la educación adoptadas en los Estados Unidos en el contexto del neoliberalismo, los resultados de ellas y el papel del Banco Mundial en la promoción e introducción de estas políticas de privatización. Con el propósito de sustentar mejor la argumentación, se han analizado, en algunos casos, políticas de privatización que han sido adoptadas en otros países.

While charter schools are among the most prevalent public-private partnerships in the education sector, they are frequently only assessed by measuring outputs such as enrollment and test scores. In contrast, this article assesses the logic model behind charter schools, specifically the mechanisms of accountability and competition, through a study of the Concession Schools in Bogotá, Colombia, using a realist evaluation methodology. Despite the program’s success in increasing access in marginalized areas, findings indicate that accountability and competition were hindered in practice—because of insufficient choice for parents and other unique organizational and political factors. For example, particular issues emerged that influenced the availability of viable charter operators to open and manage schools while political orientations, political shifts, and evaluation design issues affected the charter authorizer’s ability to monitor, assess, and hold charters accountable. Successfully operationalizing public-private partnerships requires that the mechanisms underlying each link in the policy theory are carefully designed and supported, that they directly connect, and that the functioning of one does not adversely impact the others—a difficult task given the dynamic and sensitive nature of such mechanisms and the imperfect world of educational reform. The article concludes by reflecting on a number of issues, including charter school exit from the market, the need for accountability of charter authorizers themselves, the increasing political clout of charter management organizations and their allies, and the ways that these actors circumvent or avoid public accountability.

In the context of accountability and high-stakes testing, professors of educational administration in Texas and across the nation are under tremendous pressure to develop innovative principal preparation programs that produce effective school leaders, especially as research methodologies emerge to disaggregate the effects of such programs. One area few programs adequately address, including more innovative programs, is special education - despite the fact that principals struggle with accountability for all students, but particularly those principals in schools and districts with limited resources and limited professional development opportunitie~ (Bays & Crocket, 2007; Wakeman, Browder, Flowers, & Ahlgrim-Delzell, 2006). Principals have long reported that their preparation programs did not prepare them with the legal and instructional knowledge in the area of special education (DiPaola & Walther-Thomas, 2003; Hirth & Valesky, 1990).

During the 1990s and 2000s, a policy known as Education with Community Participation (EDUCO) not only became the cornerstone of education reform in El Salvador but also became a global education policy, one which is known for decentralizing to rural families the responsibility for hiring and firing teachers. As is shown in this paper, its rise to fame was not only a product of the particular political-economic context in which it was borne, but was also a product of the impact evaluations produced by the World Bank, which served as the evidence base through which this and other international institutions could legitimately promote the neoliberal model of community involvement represented by EDUCO. Problematically, however, a reappraisal of these impact evaluations reveals, first, that their findings and conclusions around significant effects were not warranted and, second, that the entire impact evaluation enterprise is fundamentally flawed due to the financial-political-intellectual complex out of which these studies emerged and back into which they fed as they were used to advocate for market-oriented policy solutions around the world. Thus, in addition to explaining the reform dynamics that gave rise to EDUCO, this paper (a) systematically reviews the findings and limitations of each of the six impact studies that constitute the international knowledge base around this policy, (b) reconsiders what we can reasonably claim to know about EDUCO, (c) reflects on the national and international implications of the critical review presented here, and (d) remarks on the shortcomings of—and the alternatives to—impact evaluations as a means to produce policy-relevant findings.

In the present work, we fill a gap in the writing on the decentralization of educational governance by periodizing and comparing trends that have fallen under this label in both the United States and developing countries in the post-WWII period (1945-present). The findings are informed by a review of 127 decentralization-related studies from seven leading, peer-reviewed journals in comparative and international education, in addition to the Journal of Education Policy, Journal of Educational Administration, and Harvard Education Review. We combine this review with works that address larger political and economic shifts and, in so doing, are able to delineate two pushes for decentralization in the United States. In developing countries, the term decentralization has emerged during three distinct periods. Beyond characterizing the nature of decentralization in general terms over time, we also compare key features of these trends and the forces that brought them about. One key finding is that the application of community-level decentralization in developing countries has not been as widespread as global rhetoric during the 1990s and 2000s would imply. A second key finding is that there has been a relatively recent shift away from decentralization towards other forms of accountability-based reforms in both the United States and developing countries.

Este ensayo toma como base una serie de contenidos relacionados con la participación y el Banco Mundial (BM). Primero, en un nivel general, traza la trayectoria del pensamiento del BM relacionado con la participación en el desarrollo desde 1980 hasta el presente. Segundo, se desglosa el marco dentro del cual se ha concretado el pensamiento –es decir, el Marco para la Prestación de Servicios (MPS) presentado en el Informe de Desarrollo Mundial 2004–. Tercero, se aborda el trabajo realizado por el BM en el sector de la educación que ha promovido los conceptos integrados en el MPS. Centrarse en el sector educativo es esencial, pues en él el BM ha sido más activo en teorizar y más exitoso en implantar su idea de participación. Como muestra el ensayo, es fundamental un acercamiento particular a la descentralización en la manera en que el BM avanza en su concepción de participación y en la forma en que se apoya en la realización de la participación en la práctica, tanto en general como en lo que respecta a la gobernanza de la educación. Por último, el ensayo examina y discute los resultados de los proyectos de descentralización de la educación apoyados por el BM, a la luz de la teoría elaborada para su promoción.

This article focuses on a range of different academic perspectives related to how international actors and ideas affect national processes of education policy production. Specifically, four distinct perspectives from the literature on education policy are presented, and it is suggested that these perspectives can be combined to serve as an analytic framework for understanding this issue – that is, how international actors and ideas impact the formation of education policies at the national level. The four perspectives presented are: (a) policy attraction, (b) policy negotiation, (c) policy imposition, and (d) policy hybridization. The second purpose of this article is to define the underlying phenomenon to which each of the perspectives pertains. Such a term is necessary because, while various perspectives exist on the influence of international actors and ideas, there is not a common language to discuss this phenomenon, nor a clear understanding of its conceptual limits. The term suggested and delineated here is international processes of education policy formation. The third purpose of the present article is to apply the framework presented to the formation of an education policy – Plan 2021 – in El Salvador during 2003–2005. Through this case, three mechanisms are identified which help to explain the dynamics of national education policy formation, namely: percolation, reverberation, and structural legitimation.