Abstract
This chapter transitions to the empirical of focus in this book, that is, the case of the Education with Community Participation (EDUCO) program. The first section addresses the structural context that characterized El Salvador prior to the emergence of this program, in order to understand the larger enabling and constraining factors that affected this policy’s origins and trajectory. The second section then turns to characterize the organizational and strategic relational dynamics that would not only influence EDUCO’s evolution but which are also necessary to understand in order to grasp later in this book how and why EDUCO itself has been so influential. In ways that are discussed, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank, and the United Nations Education, Science, and Culture Organization (UNESCO) were integral to the case of EDUCO.
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Notes
- 1.
These five political-military organizations were known as the Popular Forces of Liberation, National Resistance, Revolutionary Army of the People, Communist Party of El Salvador, and Revolutionary Party of Central American Workers (Montgomery, 1995).
- 2.
See Montgomery (1995, pp. 137–138, 187) for more on the agrarian reform. In short, this reform, which had first begun in 1980, sought to nationalize large farms (over 100 ha) and to transfer ownership of land to those who rented it. In early 1985, the budget for this program was eliminated by the National Assembly.
- 3.
These were followed with a “public sector modernization” loan from the World Bank in 1996. For more on the significance of these loans in the context of total aid during the 1990s, see Rosa and Foley (2000).
- 4.
There were approximately 1000 popular education teachers from the FMLN (Alvear Galindo, 2002, pp. 189, 200).
- 5.
While the EDUCO program was initially only intended as a strategy to provide education at the preschool level and in grades 1–3, it was subsequently expanded in 1994 to cover through grade 6 and then again in 1997 to cover through grade 9 (Meza, Guzmán, & Varela, 2004). After 2005, even some high schools became EDUCO schools (Gilles, Crouch, & Flórez, 2010).
- 6.
For additional details on the technical aspects of the EDUCO program, see Gilles et al. (2010).
- 7.
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Edwards, D.B. (2018). The Case of EDUCO: Political-Economic Constraints and Organizational Dynamics. In: Global Education Policy, Impact Evaluations, and Alternatives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75142-9_4
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