This book has emerged from the long-term engagement of the editors in research on Central America and the Latin Caribbean (CALC). There are other books about education in this region, but they are relatively few in number, and they tend not to address the issues of central concern here – namely, the way that education policy and its enactment is the result of the interaction of global forces, national actors, and local responses. Put differently, research on education in the CALC region has tended to shy away from looking explicitly at the way that education is shaped by larger political-economic forces. And, moreover, the extant scholarship has shied away from taking the additional step of interpreting global-local dynamics in relation to the dialectic of the state and capitalism. What we have in mind here is how education reform is central to resolving tensions that emerge as states and other actors seek to manage threats (for example, relating to the legitimacy of prevailing political and economic systems) that result from states’ embeddedness in the global capitalist economy.

The questions that guide this volume derive from the above observations. The chapter authors examine a variety of education policy themes, ranging from community-based management to decentralization, privatization, digital technologies, gender inequities, gang influence, peer bullying, and sexual violence, among others. In all cases, however, the chapters are concerned with rooting their analysis in a consideration of how the case of interest is influenced by larger political-economic forces. This is then followed, in the cross-case analyses (presented in the final two chapters), by an explicit interest in explaining whether, how, and to what extent the development and implementation of education policy in the CALC region connects with the dialectic between the state and capitalism.

Thus, to restate, in addition to making visible what is often left out of view – that is, the multilevel politics behind education policies – a primary goal of this volume is to make obvious that which is typically unacknowledged or insufficiently addressed in research on education in CALC: the extent to which education, in its reform and implementation (or lack thereof), is inextricably linked to and constrained by tensions and incentives produced as a result of the relationship between the state and the global capitalist economy.