The Changing Governance of Education: A Comparative Political Economy Perspective on Hybridity

This paper explores the changing governance of education in two distinct contexts: England and Peru. While there are major differences between these two cases, the paper argues that a common agenda can be identified where an increasing degree of organizational hybridity is patent—where the traditionally distinct goals and rationales of public and private sectors are being recombined. Although this agenda has been very differently enacted in the two contexts, it has generated similar outcomes, which include an increasing degree of fragmentation of educational services and a consequent depolitization of education. In this process, education has been transformed from a contested space of knowledge and identity formation to a commodity bought, sold, and administered through the rules of the market and has been recast as a private rather than public good. This, it is argued, is contributing to the emergence of more segregated education systems and to the rise of equally segregated societies.