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Highlights • Argues for thinking about community-based management in terms of community organizing, building, and empowerment. • New and critical insights are shared on the well-known Education with Community Participation program from El Salvador. • The concept of social capital is highlighted as one aspect of the shift away from technical approaches to community-based management. • Underscore the many issues that confound the operation of community-based management as envisioned by development professionals. Abstract The present paper is both a critical analysis of an example of community-based management of education (CBM) and a call for a shift in perspective related to how we think about CBM, particularly in marginalized and low-income contexts. The example of focus that serves as the basis for critical analysis is the "Education with Community Participation" (EDUCO) program in El Salvador, which achieved fame in the late 1990s and 2000s because it formally transferred, among other things, the ability to hire and fire teachers to a committee of parents at the community level. Given its fame and the fact of its imitation elsewhere, it is important to have an in-depth understanding of how this program operated at the local level, with what limitations, and with what implications for CBM programs more generally. For the second purpose—related to shifting perspectives on CBM—this paper draws on concepts related to systems theory, social capital, and community empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]