Thomas Skidmore and Peter Smith, well-known historians of Latin America, characterized the minimal attention that Central America has received from scholars. From their perspective, neglect of Central America:

Though their comments were directed at the lack of attention from US scholars, this argument is at least (if not more) relevant for scholars from other regions that are even farther removed (geographically, economically, etc.) than North America. And though these comments do not name the countries and colonial territories of the Latin Caribbean, they are no less applicable there. Indeed, as Allahar argues with regard to the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, not only is this region neglected by academics, but this neglect ‘is synonymous with erasure and constitutes a major obstacle for anyone wishing to develop a truly comprehensive understanding of the entire region’ (2005, p 126). As will be further explained later on, the present volume seeks to make a contribution to the scholarship on these regions – Central America and the Latin Caribbean (CALC) – by drawing attention to the global and local forces that influence the relationship between education and development.

First, however, it is important to underscore the fact that, despite relative academic neglect, the region has been, and continues to be, important in numerous ways. In other words, while ‘Central America was [historically] not a source of great wealth’ and while it ‘received correspondingly little attention from the Spanish crown’, its perception as a source of wealth changed in the 19th century, as further explained in Chapter 2 of this volume (Skidmore and Smith, 2001, p 319).

This book has emerged from the long-term engagement of the editors in research on Central America and the Latin Caribbean (CALC). There are other books about education in this region, but they are relatively few in number, and they tend not to address the issues of central concern here – namely, the way that education policy and its enactment is the result of the interaction of global forces, national actors, and local responses. Put differently, research on education in the CALC region has tended to shy away from looking explicitly at the way that education is shaped by larger political-economic forces. And, moreover, the extant scholarship has shied away from taking the additional step of interpreting global-local dynamics in relation to the dialectic of the state and capitalism. What we have in mind here is how education reform is central to resolving tensions that emerge as states and other actors seek to manage threats (for example, relating to the legitimacy of prevailing political and economic systems) that result from states’ embeddedness in the global capitalist economy.

The questions that guide this volume derive from the above observations. The chapter authors examine a variety of education policy themes, ranging from community-based management to decentralization, privatization, digital technologies, gender inequities, gang influence, peer bullying, and sexual violence, among others. In all cases, however, the chapters are concerned with rooting their analysis in a consideration of how the case of interest is influenced by larger political-economic forces. This is then followed, in the cross-case analyses (presented in the final two chapters), by an explicit interest in explaining whether, how, and to what extent the development and implementation of education policy in the CALC region connects with the dialectic between the state and capitalism.

Thus, to restate, in addition to making visible what is often left out of view – that is, the multilevel politics behind education policies – a primary goal of this volume is to make obvious that which is typically unacknowledged or insufficiently addressed in research on education in CALC: 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

Research on education privatization in low-income country contexts has tended to distinguish between privatization processes resulting from governments enacting pro-privatization policies, on the one hand, and privatization processes that have occurred without government intervention, on the other hand (Rose, 2005; Verger et al, 2016). The latter has been characterized as ‘default’, ‘de facto’, or ‘grassroots’ privatization, emphasizing the lack of proactive policy making involved in its development, especially when compared to ‘traditional’, neoliberal policy making actively creating educational markets and encouraging different forms of private provision (Caddell and Ashley, 2006; Tooley and Dixon, 2006; Tooley, 2013). This trend of default privatization has manifested itself through the proliferation of what are frequently known as ‘low-fee (or low-cost, or affordable) private schools’, among other somewhat more idiosyncratic names (for example, ‘garage schools’ or ‘marginal schools’; see, for instance, Srivastava, 2007; Harma, 2013; Languille, 2016). In essence, low-fee private schools (LFPSs) are privately owned and privately run schools targeting lower-income households or marginalized populations that often live in areas underserved by public schools. LFPSs are most frequently an urban phenomenon and ownership can vary across different contexts ranging from enterprising individuals to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and faith-based organizations. However, in recent years, many international aid agencies, development banks, corporations, and philanthropic organizations have started to promote this type of school as a cost-effective means of extending educational access. This support has resulted in the expansion of for-profit chains of LFPSs, at times through direct funding of the LFPS sector from governments and international actors (Riep, 2014; Junemann and Ball, 2015; Srivastava, 2016).

By now, LFPSs are a widely documented phenomenon. Much research has been produced examining the origins, quality, inclusivity, and affordability of LFPSs across different contexts, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, where LFPSs account for a significant part of the schooled population (for a review, see Day Ashley et al, 2014; Tooley and Longfield, 2015; Verger et al, 2016). Some researchers have also looked at the phenomenon in South America, where they have shed light on the interdependencies between LFPS expansion and government deregulation and subsidizing in Peru and Argentina (Moschetti, 2015; Balarin, 2016; Balarin et al, 2019; Moschetti and Lauria Masaro, 2020).

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.