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While much literature has been produced on globalization, privatization, and the State individually, it has not been common to treat them together, at least not in the field of comparative and international education. There is excellent work that has documented the ways in which globalization and privatization have influenced education reform, but extant scholarship typically has not engaged with theories of the State. In this paper, through the case of Honduras, we explore the aforementioned issues. First, we draw on the approach of Critical International Political Economy (CIPE) to understand the ways that (political-economic) globalization and privatization have affected and manifested in both policymaking and the provision of education. The second half of the paper then turns the gaze back on the Honduran State and draws on State theory literature to consider why globalization and privatization have been able to be so influential in the first place.

Since the 1990s, Singapore has firmly established its reputation in the global education policy space as one of the best education systems in the world. However, existing policy transfer literature on Singapore has been mainly interested in Singapore as a decontextualised, ahistorical case, rather than as a unique player in the global education policy sphere. Analysis of how Singapore's educational policies and lessons have been exported to other countries tends to focus on the mediating roles of international assessments and global policy actors like the OECD or McKinsey consultants. What has been much less clear is Singapore's own proactive branding and education export strategies. Guided by the Cultural Political Economy framework, this paper draws attention to how an enabling global education policy context with an insatiable appetite for fast policy lessons has aligned with Singapore's own initiatives to cultivate and export its brand of educational success.

This theoretical article not only applies a decolonial critique to the Christian-positivist-liberal-capitalist foundations of global governance and global education policies but also suggests an alternative approach to constructing globality that respects and learns from onto-epistemic difference, rather than furthering the epistemicide of non-Western and Indigenous worldviews by forcing them to assimilate to Western modernity. This article seeks to make an intervention in the literature on global governance, global education policy, and global citizenship education, where decolonial lenses are scantly employed. We argue that public school teachers are using frameworks rooted in the matrix of coloniality to teach a multicultural population in an occupied land about concepts of Global Citizenship Education that not only divert attention away from other ways of being, acting, and knowing but which, by their nature, cannot even recognize those other ways of being--at least not without contradicting its own Christian-positivist-liberal-capitalist onto-epistemic foundations.

In the past decade, the trend of "low-fee private schools" (LFPSs) for the poor has increasingly gained attention, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where governmental funding is insufficient to provide education for all. Up to now, research has tended to address this phenomenon in the context of primary and, to some extent, secondary education. Where research is particularly lacking is at the level of early childhood care and education (ECCE). Thus, while the present research note seeks, generally, to contribute to literature on the operation of LFPSs, its more specific goal is to share insights into the complexities, difficulties and in-equities that intersect with--and stem from--the provision of ECCE through LFPSs, above all in the context of insufficient public funding, low governmental capacity, and export-oriented economic globalisation. The findings reported emerged from a study of ECCE as provided by LFPSs in Lusaka, Zambia.

This study investigates the emergence and supply-demand dynamics of a market for low-fee private schools (LFPS) at the level of early childhood care and education (ECCE) in a slum of Lusaka, Zambia. Based on data collection over 1.5 years, the study reveals that, despite a government policy to support ECCE, over 90% of ECCE centers are private; that school operators tend to be former teachers, businessmen/women, and religious leaders; and that LFPSs charge, on average, 2.5 times as much as government ECCE centers for tuition, not including additional indirect costs. The paper discusses how teachers in LFPSs are caught in the middle, making less than the average income earned by others in the surrounding slum, and are unable to afford LFPS fees themselves. Importantly, the paper highlights that lower income quintiles spend a greater percentage of their income on ECCE, and that a majority of families in the study must make tradeoffs between ECCE, food, housing, and other basic expenditures in order to afford private ECCE, which is a necessity given the inadequate supply of government ECCE centers. In addition to addressing school strategies for keeping costs down, this study reports on parental decision-making when it comes to school selection. Finally, beyond a straight market analysis of LFPSs at the ECCE level in Zambia, this article also comments on how this market fits into the dialectical nature of local and global contexts. That is, it draws attention to the workings of the Zambian state and its precarious position in the global capitalist economy.

Much literature has focused on the influence of the World Bank with regard to policy reform in low-income countries. While this literature has been produced over the course of many decades, the underlying studies have not tended to take a multi-decade approach to examining the way that World Bank influence changes in a given country. Put differently, studies tend to examine specific periods of time rather than looking at influence over time. This article seeks to contribute to scholarship on World Bank influence by looking at a twenty-year period of World Bank engagement in Indonesia. The purpose is (a) to map the nature and influence of the World Bank as it engaged with the government of Indonesia (GOI) around education and development policy, (b) to reflect on how and why that engagement changed over time, and (c) to consider the implications of the study in relation to the broader literature on the evolution and current status of World Bank influence. The focus of this article is in the area of governance, where the World Bank has pushed and experimented with decentralization, community-driven development, and school-based management. While the article focuses on education policy, reforms in this area have been impacted by governance reforms more broadly.

Based on research in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, this article argues that the globally popular reform of school-based management suffers from several shortcomings and is a partial, extractive, and technocratic means of engendering parental and community participation. Ultimately, this article demonstrates that it is necessary to move beyond SBM as a technocratic reform if community participation is to contribute as well to community empowerment. More specifically, the article emphasises, first, the need to combine parental involvement with adult education, community organising, and social justice leadership (SJL). Second, the article argues that the last of these (i.e. SJL) is crucial to enabling the first three. Third, this article suggests that a combination of these four things -- SJL, parental involvement, adult education, community organising -- can contribute to the foundations of community empowerment.

For international organisations in the global education policy field, legitimacy is based in large part on the supposed techno-rational basis of these organisations and their ability to credibly produce knowledge and policy expertise. However, as the present article demonstrates, there are clearly a range of macro-micro organisational dynamics driving the production of knowledge and the policy ideas that are advanced. By revealing the way that a particular policy emerged and was promoted "within" the World Bank, this article seeks to expose the way that policy innovation is produced by the iterative interplay of agentic activity and particular organisational circumstances -- and how this process is used to maintain and extend the influence of international organisations and the individuals who represent them. By drawing on Stewart Clegg's 'circuits of power' approach, we seek to theorise the internal dynamics of international organisations, and, in so doing, to move beyond the dominant coercive and normative perspectives.

The present article addresses the production and global dissemination of 'policy relevant knowledge'. It not only unpacks the methodological assumptions of a particular type of knowledge production -- known as impact evaluations -- but also analyses the issue of knowledge mobilisation within the political economy of the global education policy field. Having a critical understanding of impact evaluations is crucial because they are widely regarded as the most valid informational basis from which to make policy decisions. The importance of grasping the methodological limitations and political-economic dynamics that afflict knowledge production and mobilisation is demonstrated through the case of Colombia's well-known charter school programme. By employing a strategy that has been labelled bibliographic ethnography, this article not only takes a critical look at the knowledge base that has been produced on this programme but also maps the way that evaluations of this charter school programme, despite their limitations, have been cited and invoked in academic and organisational publications to project this programme internationally. The article concludes by offering a theoretically-informed discussion of how we should understand the trajectory of impact evaluations (and other knowledge products) as they cross multiple personal, organisational, political, and discursive contexts.

Educational public-private partnerships (EPPP) have been widely implemented in the Philippines, primarily through the Education Service Contracting (ESC) voucher. Yet, the effects of this voucher on privatization of education, school choice, and competition dynamics remain largely understudied. This article addresses this gap through an investigation of families' school choice patterns and schools' logics of action in the Philippines' education. Paradoxically, despite the pro-private sector impetus of the Philippine government and the implementation of the voucher scheme, the privatization of school provision in the Philippines is diminishing, and the schools receiving the voucher are becoming increasingly unaffordable for the poor families to whom the voucher was initially targeted. In parallel, despite its initial equity focus, the voucher has led to different patterns of school choice among families and to an array of responses by schools, both of which have combined to accentuate school segregation and stratification dynamics--between and within schools.

Along with the dramatic expansion of private tutoring around the world, a significant body of literature has been produced to understand this phenomenon. While many studies consider the issue of geographic location, the spatial dimension tends not to be a central focus of private tutoring studies. In contrast, the present essay applies mobility theory to research from Cambodia, where private tutoring is essential to student success. It does so in order to place private tutoring provision into a broader perspective that includes but moves beyond the economic dimensions of supply and demand and the sociological dimensions of economic, cultural, and social capital to include consideration of how private tutoring provision is constrained by a multidimensional spatial field of possibilities and how private tutoring participation is enabled by one's position and abilities in relation to that field. The paper argues for increased attention to 'spatial capital' in studies of private tutoring and education generally.

In the present work, we fill a gap in the writing on the decentralization of educational governance by periodizing and comparing trends that have fallen under this label in both the United States and developing countries in the post-WWII period (1945-present). The findings are informed by a review of 127 decentralization-related studies from seven leading, peer-reviewed journals in comparative and international education, in addition to the "Journal of Education Policy, Journal of Educational Administration", and "Harvard Education Review". We combine this review with works that address larger political and economic shifts. One key finding is that the application of community level decentralization in developing countries has not been as widespread as global rhetoric during the 1990s and 2000s would imply. A second key finding is that there has been a relatively recent shift away from decentralization towards other forms of accountability-based reforms in both the United States and developing countries.

This article analyses the institutional power of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in the process of education policy formation in El Salvador during 2003-2005. The results show how bi- and multi-lateral institutions are able to leverage financial and intellectual capital to guide the policymaking process and sway which policies are seen as acceptable and desirable. As is shown, one key to this influence is how USAID was able to manipulate the policymaking process by creating key events and producing key informational inputs that led to future events and subsequent opportunities to present and emphasize their research. Additionally, this research underscores how even exceptional leadership and political will at the national level can be insufficient to avoid the agendas that are at times advanced by international institutions. Finally, it is suggested that research on education in small states expand the notion of smallness to focus on institutional capacity, particularly within the context of the "global architecture of education." (Contains 2 tables and 13 endnotes.)

For those who focus on the role of education in international development, the approach to education governance of school-based management (SBM) has been the primary means by which the participation of community members has been incorporated into the provision of education. However, while SBM is a well-known approach to governance that has become a global education policy, in that it is widely promoted, adapted, and implemented, a trend that stands out--and which is addressed in this paper--is the use of, and reference to, SBM in work on conflict-affected contexts (CACs). Indeed, there has been insufficient attention directed at understanding how SBM is advocated in these contexts. Our intention is to use the present paper as a point of departure for further discussion on issues that arise in relation to the intersection of SBM and CACs. With that in mind, we seek to characterize the extent to which international organizations espouse support for SBM, particularly when it comes to its applicability in CACs; to review the rationales that are invoked in favor of this governance model, again with a focus on CACs; and to highlight important areas for future research.

In the field of global education policy, it is common for scholars to reflect on the progress made toward internationally agreed-upon agendas, such as Education for All (EFA). However, scant research has turned the gaze back on the major multilateral institutions that commit to taking the lead in meeting these agendas in order to ask, what implications do such agendas have for these organizations? We respond in this article by investigating the way in which UNESCO used its position as the coordinator of EFA to help it regain some of the legitimacy it lost in the preceding decades. To do so, the article first elaborates a tripartite conceptualization of organizational legitimacy and then applies it to the two prongs of UNESCO's strategy--EFA coordination and the production of the Global Monitoring Reports (GMRs) during a key period, 2000-2014, that were at the forefront of UNESCO's efforts to rebrand and reposition itself in the context of multilateralism.

This paper examines the Civil Society Education Fund's (CSEF) impact on the non-governmental organisation education partnership (NEP) in Cambodia. With financial backing from the World Bank and the Fast Track Initiative, the CSEF is an initiative that is managed internationally by the Global Campaign for Education. Its goal is to help national networks of non-governmental organizations participate in education decision-making and to serve as a watchdog for progress related to internationally agreed upon goals. Through the CSEF, the deployment of various strategies, and other external factors, the NEP was able to able to achieve recognition, legitimacy and influence at the national level. However, the NEP has had to balance working "with" the state and working for the state. This case study highlights strategies used by civil society actors to engage state actors, the efficacy of international support, and the conflicts inherent in both.

This research note shares insights which resulted from a larger study into the ways in which the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)--during 2010-2014--used its position as coordinator of the post-Dakar Framework for Action (initiated at the World Education Forum held in 2000 and designed to reinvigorate the Education for All initiative) to help it regain some of the legitimacy it had lost in the preceding decades. The research study focused on the role of both the UNESCO Education for All Follow-up Unit and the production of the Global Monitoring Report (GMR) during the 2000s because they were at the heart of UNESCO's efforts to repair its image and renew its impact in one area of global governance, specifically in the global education policy field. The study's findings were based on an analysis of documents, archives and interviews (n = 17) with key actors inside and outside UNESCO, including representatives of UNESCO's peer institutions.

Research Approach: This in-depth qualitative case study explores one school leader's enactment of social justice leadership in an elementary school in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Analysis of interviews and observations revealed how this leader adapted her leadership to prioritize the severe needs of families and students in one of the world's most violent cities. Findings: The article describes how the leader made sense of the community and its needs. Then, it examines how the leader enacted social justice leadership by addressing the out-of-school challenges that affected student achievement and well-being. Consequently, the leader's focus shifted toward meaningful family engagement through adult education, community advocacy, and critical questioning of the status quo. Implications: Implications for future research, theory, and administrator preparation programs are presented at the conclusion of the article.

While participation has for decades been a buzzword in development, the term has been imbued with greatly different meanings depending on the perspective of the actor in question. We attempt to clarify these meanings by presenting a tripartite framework. This framework delineates the tenets and strategies of three overarching and complementary perspectives: those perspectives labelled "neoliberal", "liberal", and "progressive". The framework pertains to participation in development generally and to the realm of educational governance specifically, which has long been at the forefront of the theory and practice of participation.

This paper explores the relationship between the emergence of global education policies and conflict-affected contexts by analysing the trajectory of community-level education decentralization within and beyond El Salvador from the 1980s, during the country's civil war, to the 2000s, by which point this approach to education governance was being widely promoted and adapted around the world. The findings--based on two years of data collection--demonstrate not only the way these contexts can be particularly susceptible to intervention by foreign governments and international organizations but also how, in certain historical-structural moments, those contexts can be transformed and leveraged to experiment with and to entrench certain policies.

This paper uses Margaret Archer's morphogenetic approach to analyze the emergence of civil society within global educational governance. The purpose is to understand the intersection of historical structures with global actors and spaces that have accompanied the globalization of education. Based on findings from a study on the impact in Cambodia of the Civil Society Education Fund--sponsored by the Global Campaign for Education--we first identify the relevant sociocultural, political-economic, and governance structures within which the politics of education is embedded in Cambodia. Then, we detail the relational processes through which Cambodian civil society has been able to join and, in so doing, modify the structures of education governance. The value of the morphogenetic approach is its treatment of time--that is, the way that it temporarily separates structure and agency in order to make possible an analysis of the dynamics of global education governance. While this approach is not new, we suggest that a morphogenetic approach can help in understanding the ways actors come together to create the processes and co-constitute the spaces through which existing educational structures and policies are made and remade across time.

This article has three purposes. First, it presents findings from a study of student retention and dropout in Cambodia, as pupils transition from primary to lower secondary school. Second, it aims to understand from an in-depth, emic perspective the dynamics of this process and the challenges that individual families and their students face around this transition. Third, it offers policy-relevant suggestions for addressing obstacles to students continuing in school. It meets these goals by combining complexity theory with the use of narrative research methods in interviews with student-parent pairs in urban, rural, and remote communities in Cambodia.

This paper explores the nature and quality of the participation that characterises the Bank's consultations with external actors and examines the extent to which the Bank is responsive to such feedback when it comes to defining its policy preferences and strategies in the education domain. It draws on a case study of the participatory process that was organised around the definition of the last World Bank Education Strategy (WBES2020) and focuses on the participation of three European aid agencies, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Department for International Development of the UK. This paper acknowledges that a significant effort was made to promote the inclusiveness and transparency of the participatory process, yet it concludes that the conditions for promoting quality participation and substantive policy change were not provided. Furthermore, the way international aid agencies produce and use knowledge limits their role and influence in the context of the Bank's consultations. Hence, by not contesting the Bank's policy ideas substantially, the agencies contribute inadvertently to reproducing the Bank's predominance in the education for development field.

This article uses multiple perspectives to frame international processes of education policy formation and then applies the framework to El Salvador's Plan 2021 between 2003 and 2005. These perspectives are policy attraction, policy negotiation, policy imposition, and policy hybridization. Research reveals that the formation of Plan 2021 was the product of both policy imposition by international actors and policy negotiation by national policy makers. This article further extrapolates three phenomena from the findings on Plan 2021--termed here percolation, reverberation, and structural legitimization--that help to explain the way in which international influence manifests in national education policy formation. (Contains 2 tables, 2 figures, and 19 footnotes.)

Background/Context: Charter schools are commonly discussed as being more effective at matching student and family interests with school mission, ensuring family choice of educational products and improving education quality and the efficiency of resource use as a result of the competitive dynamics they are assumed to generate between themselves and public schools. The rhetoric around charter schools in general puts little attention on teacher management and resource acquisition, and the literature on charter schools has tended to focus on outcomes such as student achievement. The prevalence of charter schools within and outside the United States underscores the need to understand what role such issues as teacher management and resourcing play in this increasingly popular education reform. Focus of Study: The purpose of this article is to uncover and present the strategies that charter schools employ for managing teachers and acquiring resources, and with what implications. Research Design: Through a qualitative case study of a charter school program in Bogotá, Colombia, that began in 1999, we investigated (a) the regulations that governed the hiring, firing, and compensation of charter school teachers, in addition to (b) how charters respond to those regulations in contracting teachers, and (c) the overall approach of charter principals and the charter management organizations (CMO) that oversee them when it comes to teacher engagement, collaboration, supervision, and professional development. In terms of resource acquisition, the focus was on understanding (d) the extent of government-provided resources to charter schools, (e) the perceptions of charter principals and CMO directors of the resources provided by the government, (f) the ways in which these actors have sought to complement these resources, and (g) the kinds of additional resources that have been obtained. Data in the form of documents, archives, literature and evaluations, and qualitative interviews were collected over eight months. Conclusions: Findings indicate that charter school teachers in Bogotá feel that many aspects of their work environment are positive, though they also report tradeoffs in terms of job security and financial compensation. Charter schools use the flexibility afforded to them around employment to spend half as much on teachers by hiring nonunionized teachers, contracting them for periods of a year or less, assigning teachers to lower compensation categories, and offering significantly lower salaries, despite teachers working over 12 hours more each week than their public school counterparts. Findings with regard to resource acquisition address differences between public and charter schools, perceptions of school leaders, and the routes to resource acquisition used by charter schools, namely budget prioritization, donations, volunteers, partnerships, and alumni networks. Implications for future research are discussed, including the need for studies to distinguish among types of charter schools. The article concludes that, when addressing the costs and benefits of charter schools, we need to ask: Costs in what sense? Benefits for whom? And at whose expense?

Social movement oriented citizenship (SMOC) centers on peaceful protest, proactive community involvement and participation in activities to support human rights and environmental protection. Research generally on SMOC is extremely limited; even more so is research that analyses the influence of school- and student-level, policy-relevant variables on SMOC. Using 1999 survey data on student civic knowledge, attitudes and behaviors, this study looks at this relationship in the context of Colombia. Controlling for background characteristics and student personal disposition, findings from regression analysis suggest that pedagogy and curriculum which encourage discussion, promote an open classroom climate, and implement a social movement-centered curriculum are positively and significantly related to the development in students of SMOC, while after school-related activities are not. (Contains 2 tables, 1 figure and 4 notes.)

This article elaborates one approach to conceptualizing and investigating international processes of education policy formation (IPEPF), which are dynamic, multi-level and processual in nature. This contribution is important because, although research is increasingly conducted on phenomena with such characteristics, extended discussions of how these processes are either conceptualized or researched are rare. This article engages with both issues. With regard to the latter, the article adapts and tailors to the phenomena of IPEPF a range of qualitative methodological strategies suggested by Miles and Huberman, and by Yin. (Contains 2 figures, 6 tables, and 5 notes.)

Reviewing the literature on critical pedagogy (CP) and democratic education (DE) reveals that very little has been written comparing the two (Knight and Pearl in Urban Rev 32(2):197-226, 2000). After reading the Urban Review article by Knight and Pearl (2000)--the only publication explicitly comparing the two approaches to education--I was intrigued to further compare, contrast, and consider the possibilities of connecting democratic education and critical pedagogy. My review of current literature suggests that the authors may offer some misleading claims about the theory, operation, and potential of CP. This manuscript, therefore, attempts to (a) present counterevidence to the claims of Knight and Pearl (2000) and (b) explore possibilities for cross-pollination between CP and DE. To do this, this manuscript presents various aspects of Knight and Pearl's conception of DE; lays out the tenets of CP by drawing on the most recent work of its theorists and practitioners; and, lastly, demonstrates not only that the two approaches are more similar than different, but also that possibilities for cross-pollination exist in working towards the formation of democratic and social justice-oriented citizens.

Recent decades have witnessed the rise in popularity of a handful of related yet distinct approaches to governance and decision-making in many different contexts that either relocate the level and location at which decisions are made or how they are made, or both. True for developing as well as developed countries, and for both the public and private spheres, this article explicates four of these trends (decentralization, democratic decentralization, deliberative democracy, and empowered participatory governance) in terms of their theory and definition, goals, and implementation--with particular attention to their application in education. Furthermore, the article invokes a framework for analysis that permits an assessment of the extent to which each approach to decision-making facilitates participation along four dimensions: breadth, depth, range, and control. Lastly, this article discusses weaknesses in theory and practice across all four decision-making variations and proposes areas for further research. The results of this inquiry are relevant for theorists and practitioners given the fact that many policies and reforms--often incorrectly--are lumped under the term decentralization. (Contains 1 table and 9 notes.)

Democratization of decision-making processes and increased local involvement are mentioned regularly as desirable ways to proceed in education policy reform. Nevertheless, the limited publications examining reforms for more democratic organization of school districts have tended to focus on isolated examples and very specific aspects of that reform; and while, more recently, scholars have argued for the democratization of education generally in response to global trends, what is missing from the debate is a comparison of specific reforms in education designed to allow for system-wide democratization and authentic participation. This article reviews the existing literature investigating democratic school system reform in Porto Alegre, Brazil and Chicago, USA--both chosen because they were uniquely able to achieve system-wide reform for more democratic involvement. The article discusses the reforms in terms of their context, specific policy mechanisms, successes, and limitations. (Contains 3 notes and 2 tables.)

For international organisations in the global education policy field, legitimacy is based in large part on the supposed techno-rational basis of these organisations and their ability to credibly produce knowledge and policy expertise. However, as the present article demonstrates, there are clearly a range of macro–micro organisational dynamics driving the production of knowledge and the policy ideas that are advanced. By revealing the way that a particular policy emerged and was promoted within the World Bank, this article seeks to expose the way that policy innovation is produced by the iterative interplay of agentic activity and particular organisational circumstances – and how this process is used to maintain and extend the influence of international organisations and the individuals who represent them. By drawing on Stewart Clegg's 'circuits of power' approach, we seek to theorise the internal dynamics of international organisations, and, in so doing, to move beyond the dominant coercive and normative perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]