ABSTRACT
In recent years, a great deal has been written about the community participation program that emerged in El Salvador known as Education with Community Participation (EDUCO). The key feature of this program was the ability of parent councils to manage the school budget and to hire/fire teachers. Following on the fame that this program achieved in the 1990s and 2000s, recent studies have problematized different aspects of its history and implementation. The chapter continues with this line of research by bringing together and extending critiques that have been made across other publications. Specifically, this chapter seeks, first, to draw attention to the ways that EDUCO’s knowledge base has been mobilized, and not only by international organizations but also in the academic literature; second, to contrast this knowledge mobilization, which has presented EDUCO in a positive light, with a critical understanding of the quantitative studies of EDUCO that are used to present EDUCO as an exemplary program; and, third, to present the weaknesses of this program in practice by drawing on the (largely unknown and ignored) qualitative studies of EDUCO’s implementation. The chapter argues for a different approach to focus on community empowerment and community organizing.
