3 - Comparative Analysis of Education Reform in Central America: El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, 1990– 2010

Summary

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.