Introduction

As noted in the introductory chapter to this volume, Central America is a region about which comparatively little academic literature is produced that focuses on the political-economic dynamics that constrain education reform. However, one research project stands out as an exception. This research project, carried out from 2018 to 2022 by a network of researchers from the region,1 was entitled ‘Quality Education in Central America: Dynamics and Tensions among Models of Education and Development’. It brought together scholars from four Central American countries to produce case studies on El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. These case studies – published in Cruz (2022) and summarized in Table 3.1 – offer nuanced insights into the national-and local-level tensions that have surrounded the development and implementation of education reform in these countries, while also being attentive to the influence of geopolitical dynamics, macro-economic pressures, global policy trends, and the role of international organizations. In other words, the value of these studies stems from the multilevel and international political-economic perspective that guides them. These studies are also unique in terms of the level of complexity and depth by which they are characterized, not to mention the extended time period (from around 1990 to 2010) that served as the focus of their investigations.

The present chapter thus makes a contribution by presenting insights that derive from a cross-case analysis of these studies, each of which was based on document analysis, literature review, and interviews.2 In so doing, it seeks to add breadth to the depth provided by each individual case. This is achieved by analysing the chapters jointly in order to present crosscutting themes. The themes included here are organized according to the framework discussed in Chapter 2 – rooted in international political economy – which, it should be noted, also served as the analytic guide in the process of producing the individual studies.3 To summarize the discussion of the framework from Chapter 2, the three levels, or dimensions, of the framework highlight: (a) processes of policy making and how these are affected by such considerations as geopolitical constraints, capitalist pressures, and international organizations; (b) the ways in which different reform visions are communicated, interpreted, and experienced; and (c) the manner in which tensions across political-economic forces and interest groups are resolved.

Introduction

At the start of 2020, Latin American countries had low levels of learning: 51 per cent of students could not read proficiently by late primary age; in Central American countries such as Guatemala and Honduras, 67 per cent and 75 per cent of students, respectively, could not read proficiently (World Bank, 2021). Educational inequity was exacerbated by the closure of schools due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In El Salvador, where schools were closed between March 2020 and April 2021, the loss in the average number of years of schooling is estimated to be 1.5 years (from 7.6 years of average schooling to 6.1 years) (World Bank, 2021).1 The global trend in the educational response to the closure of schools due to COVID-19 was, in most countries, to switch to 100 per cent virtual instruction, while others moved to hybrid instruction (UNESCO, 2020). Central American governments followed this trend, trying to mitigate the loss of learning through online instruction and the provision of printed and digital learner guides for students to work on independently at home. Yet this option was unfeasible due to the high percentage of students that lacked access to the internet and/or a digital device and printing options. For most students, schooling was reduced to filling out worksheets and infrequent contact with teachers through the WhatsApp messaging service with a smartphone (of their own or belonging to a family member). The relationship between teachers and their students was weakened, making it difficult to keep track of learning. This lack of interaction led to education delivery that was neither meaningful nor engaging for students.

The recently dominant trend in international donor support has been to fund large-scale early grade literacy programmes globally that prioritize students increasing their reading speed and fluency and measuring for this continually, while de-emphasizing meaningful learning (Dowd and Bartlett, 2019). Many governments, including those in Central America, have adopted such approaches, which leave little room for critical thinking and socioemotional learning. While some reform efforts have emphasized quality through improved curriculum and teacher training, the poorest and most remote public schools remain at a disadvantage due to the alreadyexisting learning gaps and geographical isolation.

Introduction

In the last few decades, education policy in Latin America has moved from focusing primarily on increasing school enrolment and improving education quality to education as a force for transforming broader culture. Many policies and programmes related to school convivencia, defined as peaceful coexistence or positive school environment, have been promoted in the last two decades (Morales and Lopez, 2019). An important characteristic of education reforms in Latin America is that they are generally encouraged by regional and global institutions, with homogeneous agendas offered to multiple countries, in the hopes of adapting them to local and national contexts (Gillies, 2010). An ongoing field of research is how national policies – that is, macro-policies – are enacted and the kinds of results that are achieved in generating change at the school or micro-policy level (Ball, 1987; Blase, 2002).

The emphasis on the school as a place to learn convivencia can be traced back to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report by Jacques Delors on the four pillars of education for the 21st century, which states that learning to live together is just as important as learning to learn (Delors, 1996). Learning to live together, or getting along, is considered an aim of education to combat violence, promote participation, cooperation, acceptance of diversity, etc. More recently, UNESCO has proposed fostering child-friendly schools and an improved learning environment, both in terms of physical school infrastructure and social interactions, while also highlighting that school-related, genderbased violence seriously undermines attempts to achieve gender equality in education (UNESCO, 2015). By late 2015, the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals underscored the need for learners to obtain knowledge and skills considered nondisciplinary: human rights, gender equality, peace culture, nonviolence, global citizenship, cultural appreciation, and sustainable development (United Nations, 2015, Goal 4.7).

Another force behind the promotion of school convivencia policies is the situation of violence and inequality in the Latin American region. More than a third of intentional homicides occur in the Americas (UNOCD, 2013

Introduction

One characteristic of the relationship between education and development in Central America and the Latin Caribbean (CALC) is its dialectical nature. Although research on the region rarely speaks to this characteristic (see Chapter 1), it is clearly evident when looking across the cases presented in this volume. By dialectical nature, I am referring, first, to the reality that education helps to resolve or reduce tensions between the state and capitalism (as was first discussed in Chapter 2) and, second, to the fact that the ways in which this tension is resolved repeatedly creates new opportunities for a range of international actors to insert themselves into education reform dynamics in the region. Involvement by these actors, together with counterparts from state agencies, then proceeds – typically while ignoring or without input from teachers, students, and families – until a new crisis emerges, at which point the cycle repeats itself.

The purpose of the present chapter is, first, to make the aforementioned dialectical dynamics clear, which are summarized in Figure 15.1. Second, and relatedly, the purpose is to highlight the challenges that accompany this dynamic when translating policies and programmes into practice. These purposes will be addressed by engaging in an analysis of the chapters in this volume. The guiding framework for the discussion is the one presented in Chapter 2. The key points of this framework are summarized and further elaborated upon in the next section.

In that the chapters of this volume take the international political economy framework detailed in Chapter 2 as their point of departure, it is argued that a contribution to the literature on education and development in CALC has already been made. This chapter seeks to make a further contribution by harnessing and bringing together the insights from each study. The goal is to make explicit that which is typically unacknowledged or insufficiently addressed in research on education in CALC – that is, the extent to which education, in its reform and implementation (or lack thereof), is inextricably linked to and constrained by tensions and incentives produced as a result of the relationship between the state and the global capitalist economy.

Introduction

This chapter concerns itself with three tasks: first, to depict some key historical and regional dynamics in Central America from a political economy perspective; second, to contextualize education reform in relation to international political-economic forces affecting the region; and, third, to outline the framework that informs the analysis and commentary presented in subsequent chapters. In attending to these tasks, the purpose is not only to provide essential background context relevant to all the chapters in this volume, but also to make explicit the dimensions and tensions to which the chapters in this volume speak.

The outline sketched here of historical and regional dynamics grew out of a multiyear collaboration with a network of colleagues from Central America. Teams of scholars from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua carried out case studies of education policy making in these countries, with a focus on the 1990s and 2000s. At the invitation of this network of scholars, my contribution to this collaboration was, first, to situate the aforementioned case studies in a long-term perspective. I did so by engaging literature from the fields of international development studies, international relations, sociology, history, and political economy. Second, my contribution was to engage in a cross-case analysis of those case studies in order to examine commonalities and differences in terms of the factors that influence education policy making, as well as how education serves to resolve the political and economic tensions that characterize the region. Both the individual case studies and my contributions are contained in a book published by the Central American University, entitled Quality of Education in Central America: Dynamics and Tensions between the ∼Model of Education and the Model of Development (Cruz, 2022). However, to date, the results of this multicountry and multiyear research collaboration are only available in Spanish.

Chapters 2 and 3 of the present volume thus seek to share the fruits of the aforementioned collaboration with a wider audience by making them available in English. This chapter does this by presenting the historical and regional panorama, while Chapter 3 then presents the insights generated through comparative analysis of the individual case studies.

Introduction

The formation of the liberal state has been linked from its inception to the creation of national education systems. Education has been the means par excellence for the transmission of bourgeois liberal values, and, in the course of its development, the state consolidated its educational role and education's character as a public good. However, this conception has changed considerably in recent decades: nation-states are no longer the only space of production of education policy and, on a global scale, they are ceding space to other actors, other agendas, and other interests. The state's central role in education policy making has been substantially modified; government decisions are influenced and even altered by a range of other actors and powers that challenge the idea of state sovereignty.

There is now a ‘global education policy field’ involving multiple and diverse actors – for example, state, private, and civil society organizations as well as international agencies – which operate at different scales (that is, locally, nationally, internationally, and transnationally) simultaneously (Lingard and Rawolle, 2011). Yet, in this context, states retain a central role as coordinators and activators of educational policy options, but are simultaneously pressured and ‘coordinated’ by local and external actors in a framework of heterarchical relationships, typical of network governance (Ball and Junemann, 2012; Shiroma, 2014). In this sense, for example, in relation to the reforms inspired by the paradigm of New Public Management that spread globally since the 1990s (see Chapter 3), the state continues to be a key actor in terms of regulating the system – for example, in limiting the power and presence of private agents or in the creation of opportunities for the private sector as a ‘market-maker, commissioner of services and performance monitor’ (Avelar and Ball, 2019, p 66).

However, states’ room for manoeuvre is limited by factors that are largely beyond their control. When trying to understand changes in educational policy, it is not enough to understand the motivations of individual state actors or the conditions of the micro-institutional context in which these changes occur. In line with the conceptual and analytical approach of this book (see Chapter 2), we concur with the fundamental need to understand the structural constraints that affect and shape the educational policy choices and decisions of policy makers, as well as their discourses, interests, and justifications.

In this chapter, we build on the previous chapter's discussion of brands and vertical integration and look at two responses to the supposed failure of universities in preparing sufficient effective teachers for public education systems: the Teach for All global brand; and the emergence of ‘independent graduate schools of education’ outside of traditional university structures. These responses are globally ‘travelling ideas’ (Seddon et al, 2013) that have materialised in profoundly different settings. In both, global financial networks’ ‘venture philanthropy’ (Saltman, 2010) is significant, more so in some national settings, less so in others; these networks of individuals, foundations and corporations using their private wealth to influence public policies, responding to the rhetorical appeal of the enterprise narrative. In our discussion, the idea of disruptive innovation (Clayton Christensen Institute, nd) will continue to be important as well as the related concept of creative destruction (Schumpeter, 1942/2014). Our concern will be with what these travelling ideas have come to mean and what the consequences are for how teachers are prepared.

Teach for All: the global brand with ‘the universal solution’

Since its creation in 2007, Teach for All has become a selfconsciously global brand that has identified a ‘universal solution’ to ‘a universal challenge’ – that of equity in education (Teach for All, 2011, p 8). Although now grown to a network of over 60 formally affiliated organisations in multiple countries as well as several ‘un-official’ partners, its origins lie in the undergraduate study of one of the US's ‘charismatic entrepreneurs’ in teacher education identified by Adonis (2012).

Origins: Teach For America

In 1989, Princeton University student Wendy Kopp submitted a senior thesis entitled ‘An argument and plan for the creation of the teachers corps’. Within the year, Kopp launched the teacher recruitment programme, Teach For America (TFA), in New York City with seed money from the Mobil Corporation and office space donated by Union Carbide (Scott et al, 2016). In 1990, TFA had over 2,500 applicants and chose 500 of them for the inaugural, five-week Summer Institute, placing them in six sites nationwide (Heilig and Jez, 2010; Blumenreich and Rogers, 2021).

A key feature of policy mobilities and assemblage theory (PMAT) is that policy, as assemblage, functions primarily to coordinate desires (see also Thompson, Sellar and Buchanan, 2022), and it is the forces of desire that make policy mobile. As discussed in Chapter 2, while desire is central to assemblage theory, it has often been overlooked in secondary literature. The role of desire is also something that has not been fully explored in existing PM-informed research, and we believe it is one of the key contributions that a conjoined PMAT approach can make to CIE research. We see this as a concern for questioning and problematizing assumptions around why is policy (see Figure 6.1); that is, why do we even have policy, and why do policies occur in the way they do? In this chapter, we will first spend some time detailing the concept of Deleuzian-Guattarian desire by addressing the question of how policy works to make certain situations desirable. Some of this was covered in Chapter 2 (see the section titled An ontology of difference, becoming and desire), but it is worth repeating and devoting further attention to here. We will then explore how policy research(ers) might work with an analysis of desire when looking at a policy assemblage, such as PREP.

How does policy make certain things un/desirable?

Assemblage theory is premised on the assertion that there is nothing in our worlds that is not a product of our desires. We appreciate this may be a confrontational statement. It suggests the acts of violence, hatred, abuse and neglect that we experience in our worlds are a product of what we desire. In suggesting this, we are not suggesting that humanity is necessarily evil or, for that matter, inherently good, or that our worlds are the product of our inner evil or goodness. First, Deleuzian desire is not the desire of individuals but a generalized desire (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983). It is desire that flows through society, which we then experience as our own. Second, Deleuzian desire is not expressing a want or a need; it is not a longing for some pre-existent object that we miss or lack (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983).

In this chapter, we introduce our approach to studying the post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC) crises in teacher education in more detail, especially as it relates to the importance of attending to the histories of institutions and practices in understanding the present situations. We then provide some brief, historical background to the emergence of pre-service teacher education in the US, England and Norway, highlighting the cultural– political– economic dimensions of those histories and acknowledging that the preparation of schoolteachers has never been motivated purely by educational ideals alone. This is followed by our discussion of the enterprise narrative, and how private sector entrepreneurialism has become an almost inevitable response to perceived public sector ‘failure’, and how the involvement of private, non-state actors can create shadow state structures. Finally, we explore what these ideas mean when they are materialised through examining the case of the Academy of Urban School Leadership (AUSL) in Chicago and the role of ‘experts’ in the political reform of teacher education in England.

A cultural-historical approach to political economy: the importance of social situations of development

As Verger et al (2016a) note, ‘political economy studies are interested intrinsically in understanding how influence and power operate in multiple settings’ (p 6), analysing how political forces and economic resources work together both to constrain and enable human agency in societies. In the previous chapter, we also emphasised the social and cultural dimensions of political economy, not by tacking them on as separate dimensions to the political and the economic, but to focus on how the interaction of the political and economic shapes the way we make meaning in societies. So, as Jessop points out, a cultural political economy approach inevitably involves attention to meaning-making (Jessop, 2004), and therefore has to look at the specific social practices of organisations and individuals, including their rhetoric. As Sayer put it: ‘Cultural political economy emphasises the lifeworld aspects of economic processes – identities, discourses, work cultures and the social and cultural embedding of economic activity, reversing the pattern of emphasis of conventional political economy with its concern for systems’ (Sayer, 2002, p 688).

COMPARATIVE; adjective

• – measured or judged by estimating the similarity or dissimilarity between one thing and another; relative: ‘he returned to the comparative comfort of his own home’

• – involving the systematic observation of the similarities or dissimilarities between two or more branches of science or subjects of study: ‘comparative religion’

• – from Latin comparativus, from comparare: ‘to pair, match’ (Oxford Languages)

We compare things every day. Restaurants, mobile phone plans, holiday destinations, weather: they are all subject to comparison. We also compare ourselves every day (my steps, my productivity, my learning, my coffee intake): against family and friends, our past or future selves, and our acquaintances and their social media feeds, with the constant exhortations to accrue experiences and live your best life. All these activities are predicated upon there being some objective benefit that comes from comparing things, as well as the ability to recognize differences between notionally commensurate (or comparable) things. For sure, a Thai restaurant is clearly not an Italian restaurant, but at least we can judge them by which one makes the more appealing dishes as a restaurant.

To this end, comparison is arguably a useful, and perhaps even necessary, tool for our survival, both individually and socially. We pick the safer of two travel routes or the more efficacious medicine, or we plant the more resilient of two food crops. However, we also need to consider what is gained and what is lost in the act of comparing. What is gained is a sense of comprehensibility that comes from making otherwise different things commensurate: you do not need to know the intricacies of Thai cuisine to understand that it is like an Italian restaurant, insofar as both offer (hopefully tasty) dishes for sale. The unknown is thus rendered less important, and a decision on where to eat can now be made a little more readily. At the same time, what is lost is our ability to engage with the unknown. We lose the ability to appreciate the unexplored intricacies of Thai cuisine, or to know it as anything other than something that is like Italian.