The Echo Chamber of Global Education Policy: Charter Schools in Colombia, Inconclusive Evidence, and the International Promotion of Public-Private Partnerships Through Research Mobilization

• In Event: The International Politics of Knowledge Mobilization: The Intersection of Funding Agencies, International Organizations, Epistemic Communities, and Policy Entrepreneurs

Abstract

In 1999, the Secretary of Education of Bogotá, Colombia, introduced a charter school model to the city known as Concession Schools (Colegios en Concesión, or CECs). In this model, the city built and financed new and well-resourced schools in high poverty areas with insufficient access to education that would then be managed by private organizations, though the schools would be open to all students who met requirements for proximity and poverty. In the years since, this model has gained considerable attention within and beyond Latin America in key publications and conferences for being an innovative and successful way to implement public-private partnerships (PPPs) in the education sector in order to improve access, test scores, and student dropout rates.

Despite the high-profile nature of this policy, previous studies have not critically evaluated the research foundation on which its fame is based; nor have previous studies examined how that research has been mobilized and leveraged in the international politics of education. The present paper presents findings on each of these points, based on (a) an initial case study conducted in Colombia on the evolution of the CEC program; (b) a critical review of the findings and limitations of this program’s evidence base; and (c) subsequent bibliometric and ethnographic methods used to detail how this program’s example and evidence base have been mobilized in the international arena.

The findings suggest that the CEC program has come to signify the success of PPPs in education, and that a key mechanism by which that signification has been achieved is the impact evaluations performed by economists from international development organizations such as the World Bank. Yet as is shown in the paper, we have reason to believe that those studies do not in fact show what they claim to show (or what they are now used to suggest). As such, the paper demonstrates how development knowledge, in the process of being mobilized, can enter the “echo chamber” of global education policy by becoming deterritorialized and disconnected from the context and limitations that beset it, while at the same time being imbued with a legitimacy and meaning that may not be justified (Goldie, Linick, Jabbar, & Lubienski, 2014). Nevertheless, the example and evaluations of this program continue to be mobilized and cited as floating signifiers that represent the desirability of PPPs in education. The implications of this finding are significant, since doubt must arise regarding the way that research is selectively invoked and favorably interpreted by policy entrepreneurs and international development organizations such as the World Bank. That is, to the extent that the CEC program is not alone in being decontextualized and then re-inscribed with unwarranted meanings, fundamental questions must be asked not only about the way that international actors mobilize knowledge for education reform but also how we should re-interpret those same actors and re-inscribe them with a meaning other than that of neutral knowledge producers and brokers who disseminate objective findings related to “what works” in development generally and the education sector specifically.

Author

• D. Brent Edwards Jr., Drexel University