The Trajectory of Global Education Policy: Community-Based Management in El Salvador and the Global Reform Agenda
Dr. Brent Edwards, Educational Foundations Associate Professor, brings a new focus and new insights to the phenomena of global education policies and, relatedly, international policy transfer. While both of these issues have gained popularity in the field of international and comparative education, there remains much that we do not know. In particular, while numerous studies have been produced which examine how global education policies—such as vouchers, charter schools, conditional-cash transfers, standardized testing, child-centered pedagogy, etc.—travel around the world and are implemented, we lack research which illuminates the origins and evolution of such policies. Put differently: scholars have yet to examine how such policies first emerge and then enter the global reform agenda for education. The present book addresses this critical gap in our knowledge by looking at multiple aspects of the trajectory of a particular policy which was born in El Salvador in the early 1990s and subsequently went global. This policy was known as “Education with Community Participation” and was an extreme form of community-based management that transferred (among other things) the responsibility for hiring, firing, and managing teachers from the central Ministry of Education to communities themselves. This book also explicitly analyses the trajectory of global education policy with reference to the role of international organizations and within the larger international political and economic dynamics that affected the overall country context of El Salvador.
About The Author
D. BRENT EDWARDS JR. is an Assistant Professor of Theory and Methodology in the College of Education at the University of Hawai‛i, Mānoa. He was previously a Visiting Scholar at the University of Amsterdam, a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Central America, and a Post-Doctoral Researcher at The University of Tokyo. His work focuses on the global governance of education, the political economy of education reform, and education policy analysis.
