What happened is that I had been working in various roles with educational projects in Chichicastenango for more than five years by the time I got around to starting systematic research for a dissertation about public school administration there.  So I was already familiar enough with the realities and problems of education in the municipality that fieldwork supplied me with a lot of good anecdotes and interesting testimony, but didn’t result in many eureka experiences.  The biggest surprise actually came during an intensive year of write-up after fieldwork was finished, when I realized that the U.S. (and any number of other countries) have the same problems Guatemala has. 

The surprise partly sprang from own unshaken impression of Guatemala as an exotic little country that on one hand is a banana republic converted to maquiladora host, and on the other hand remains a stronghold of Native American culture.  It could hardly be more different than Philadelphia or Dallas.  But there it was, on TV and in print, one news story after another about the struggling education systems of D.C., New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Denver, and apparently almost everywhere else in the U.S.  All the stories sounded very strangely similar to what I was writing about Guatemala and Chichicastenango: public education systems plagued by a range of issues related to administrators whose own competence is far from assured seeking to assure that teachers are qualified, accountable, and effective. 

Or to say it another way, reformers in both countries seemed to talk less about education of students than about management of teachers, with the real story being a bottom-to-top power struggle within the education system hierarchy.   And underlying the struggles were the same themes:  poorly performing teachers protected by unassailable civil service laws; administrative bodies that have a strong vested interest in appearing to embrace reform while making sure things don’t change too much; and policymakers driven by political and ideological considerations that trump or compromise effective reform design and implementation. 

Also in both countries, problems are chronic, marked more by new reform programs and vocabulary than by sustainable real improvements.  At the time I wrote up my dissertation about one municipality in Guatemala, the urgent national reform program in the US was President Obama’s “Race to the Top” program, which was (and still is) supposed to correct the defiencies in the reforms begun by President Bush in his “No Child Left Behind” program.  Even as the Bush and Obama administrations promoted their own programs, meanwhile, debate continued about reform strategies begun under earlier administrations.  These include, among others, magnet schools, charter schools, and education vouchers, all of which remain controversial not only because they are seen by critics as undermining the traditional public school system, but because administration would be trimmed and teachers would lose some or all civil service style protections. 

There are other deeply rooted parallels between education reforms in the U.S. and Guatemala.  In historical terms, the US Department of Education was established in 1867, only five or so years before the creation of the Guatemalan Ministry of Education.  The mission of both agencies was to ensure that as many people as possible received the best education possible, and was guided by the explicit assumption that more and better education could rescue impoverished communities from brutal socioeconomic challenges, and, as well, save them from their own defective cultures.  Neither country talks too much about changing the culture of communities, nowadays, although the language of reform used in both continues to imply and sometimes explicitly suggest that, with help, children can overcome their cultural environments.

The U.S., with its dynamic economy and a strong, stable government, was able to claim by the 1950s that it had the best public school system of any country in the world.  That’s not true anymore.  The constant refrain by reformers from the president down to local parents is how far the U.S. educational institution has fallen in relation to other countries, and that the country can’t even supply its own needs for highly-skilled workers.  Guatemala, with its tiny comatose economy and rapid-fire string of corrupt, weak, and repressive governments, was less successful early on.  Only in the last half-decade has Guatemala bothered to claim that nearly all kids have access to elementary school.  Unlike the U.S., there’s no question that Guatemala currently has the best school system it has ever had, although it still has a long way to go to catch up with the United States … or for that matter, even other developing countries. 

But however their current education systems compare, calls for reform and improvement in both countries sound curiously similar.  And in both countries, efforts to enhance education quality have been slow, contentious, and inconsistent across time and place.  Now, given the atmosphere of austerity and ideological conflict that characterizes both countries, the reforms in progress are likely not sustainable.