Abstract
This chapter accomplishes two tasks. First, it reevaluates what is known about the Education with Community Participation (EDUCO) program in light of the critical review provided in Chap. 5. Second, it reconsiders the influence of the impact evaluations of EDUCO in terms of national and international implications. Not only did these studies provide justification for scaling up EDUCO within El Salvador, but, internationally, they changed how international organizations and development professionals thought about decentralization and provided a basis from which these organizations and individuals could promote an extreme form of community-based management (one where parents are responsible for hiring and firing teachers, among other things). Crucially, it is also shown that, due to the knowledge base that has been created by the World Bank in the form of impact evaluations, EDUCO has taken on a life of its own and continues to live on in the literature on decentralization as well as school- and community-based management.
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- 1.
For additional detail and critique of EDUCO in practice at the community level, see Edwards (forthcoming).
- 2.
Indeed, EDUCO is concerning because of the burden that it can impose, considering that the labor contributed by parents was equivalent to work of 805 full-time staff (an amount that equals 28% of the work done by the administrative staff of the Ministry of Education) (Cuéllar-Marchelli, 2003).
- 3.
Alec Gershberg served as a senior education economist for the World Bank during the late 1990s.
- 4.
These three ministers were Abigail de Perez (minister during 1998–1999, formerly vice-minister and director of Planning for the MINED), Evelyn Jacir de Lovo (Minister during 1999–2003, formerly director of the Modernization Unit within the MINED, later working for the Organization of American States as the director of the Departamento de Desarrollo Social y Empleo), and Darlyn Meza (minister during 2004–2009, formerly vice-minister, director of Education, and coordinator of the EDUCO office). Only Rolando Marin, who briefly served served as minister during 2004, did not have a previous association with the EDUCO reform.
- 5.
See Chap. 1 for more on EDUCO’s background. For more on EDUCO’s undoing, see Edwards (2018) or Edwards, Martin, and Flores (forthcoming).
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Edwards, D.B. (2018). Reconsidering the EDUCO Program and the Influence of Its Impact Evaluations. In: Global Education Policy, Impact Evaluations, and Alternatives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75142-9_6
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