Community Management as Global Education Policy: Crisis, International Organizations, and the Trajectory of the "Education With Community Participation Program" in El Salvador and Beyond

• In Event: Another Way: Global Perspectives on Community-Based and Alternative Schooling Initiatives

Abstract

The Education with Community Participation (EDUCO) program began in El Salvador in early 1991, near the end of the twelve-year civil war. To be sure, it represented an extreme form of decentralization in that it officially transferred multiple responsibilities to rural communities, including hiring, firing and supervising teachers; purchasing school supplies; and managing the school’s budget. It was the first reform of its kind at the time.
During the ensuing 20 years, the program has received tremendous attention. Indeed, within the country it became the central program through which the education sector was rebuilt and expanded in the post-war era of the 1990s and 2000s. Internationally, the program has been widely recognized by a range of organizations as a successful and desirable example of community-level decentralization. In fact, the program has become a “global education policy” in that it has been promoted, cited, and adapted around the world. Notably, this program was at the forefront of the worldwide trend of the 1990s that sought to increase community involvement in the management of local schools (Edwards & DeMatthews, 2014).
To date, however, the majority of research on this program has been a-historical in nature and has focused narrowly on whether the program “worked,” in terms of impact on certain outcomes. In contrast, this paper analyzes the dynamics of policy development and diffusion. That is, it sheds new light on the history and trajectory of the EDUCO program by focusing on how the program was formed, scaled up and internationally disseminated. In doing so, this paper highlights the role of international organizations in these processes. The findings reveal specifically how the World Bank, along with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), created a favorable political economic landscape in El Salvador (by taking advantage of the context of crisis during the civil war), subsequently ensured EDUCO’s adoption and implementation domestically, and then strategically and continuously leveraged that experience to promote similar reforms to dozens of other countries.
Research for this paper has been conducted over the course of 5 years (2009-2014). Data include over 100 interviews with representatives of the Salvadoran Ministry of Education, the World Bank, USAID, non-governmental organizations, think tanks, and international consultants, in addition to documents from the archives of these institutions. For analysis, case study and matrix-related methods were employed which facilitate the identification and examination of both structural and processual features of education policy reform in international contexts (Edwards, 2012).
Theoretically, this paper comes from and contributes to a larger project that seeks to understand the emergence and life cycle of policies that go global. In examining this phenomenon, a number of issues are central: (a) geopolitical context, (b) the involvement of a range of international organizations; (c) the processes through which national and international actors negotiate the reform agenda; and (d) the mechanisms by which key organizations influence the direction and content of reform agendas within a particular country and internationally. Elsewhere, this approach has been labeled Critical International Political Economy (Edwards, forthcoming).

Author

• D. Brent Edwards Jr., Drexel University