4 - Deconcentration of Education in Honduras: Restriction and Ritualization of a Chimeric Reform

Summary

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.