Deconcentration of education in Honduras: Restriction and ritualization of a chimeric reform

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Education and development in Central American and the Latin Caribbean: Global forces, local responses

Proposal

This paper analyzes the changes that occurred in terms of governance in the Honduran educational system during the 1990s while also closely examining the global discourses that oriented the content and local agendas of the educational reforms in this period. In so doing, the paper addresses the complexity of the global-local interface by (a) analyzing the economic conditions under which educational reforms were prompted in the period, and (b) paying special attention to how the recontextualization of such reforms gave rise to singular, highly idiosyncratic enactments of global education policy prescriptions. Taking as a starting point the economic circumstances of the Structural Adjustment Program, the paper analyzes the role of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the production of a new, neo-liberal economic order in the country, and shows how this order provided the basis for the educational reforms that were subsequently promoted. In this regard, the paper focuses on the flagship policy of educational decentralization and analyzes how recontextualization gave way to a mild form of decentralization—i.e., deconcentration—that was integral to maintaining centralized control of education

Authors

• Ricardo Morales Ulloa, Universidad Pedagógica Nacional Francisco Morazán

• Mauro C Moschetti, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona