ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the case of contract teacher policy in two states of India to explore why global education policies resonate and what they mean in a given context. Translation research focuses on how a borrowed global education policy was locally adapted, recontextualized, or 'translated'. Teacher accountability reforms include a wide range of policies, such as teacher licensing schemes to changing teacher evaluation systems to suspending tenure or civil service posts with contractual arrangements or short-term contracts. The contract teacher policy implementation process in the two states of India, Madhya Pradesh and Kerala, demonstrates that the global policy is borrowed selectively within the local context. The first instances of fixed-term contract employment of teachers in India were observed in the 1980s under a Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA)-funded project meant to recruit educators in remote and hard-to-reach regions of the desert state of Rajasthan.
