In 1999, the Secretary of Education of Bogotá, Colombia, introduced a charter school model to the city known as Concession Schools (Colegios en Concesión, or CECs). In this model, the city built and financed new and well-resourced schools in high poverty areas with insufficient access to education that would then be managed by private organizations, though the schools would be open to all students who met requirements for proximity and poverty.  In the years since, this model has gained considerable attention within and beyond Latin America in key publications and conferences for being an innovative and successful way to implement public-private partnerships (PPPs) in the education sector in order to improve access, test scores, and student dropout rates.  

Despite the high-profile nature of this policy, previous studies have not critically evaluated the research foundation on which its fame is based; nor have previous studies examined and documented—let alone theorized—how that research has been mobilized and leveraged in the international politics of education. The present research thus asks three inter-related questions to untangle these issue:

1.     What does a critical review of the evidence reveal about what we know when it comes to the effects of the CEC program?

2.     How, where, and to what ends has the CEC program been mobilized in international discourse?

3.     What are the implications of the disconnect between the evidence base and the claims made about the CEC program in its promotion?

4.     What theoretical constructs are most promising for explaining the type of policy mobility represented by the CEC case?  

Additionally, as regards theory, and as discussed further in the findings section of this proposal, the paper engages with concept of the echo chamber in order to make sense of the mobility phenomenon witnessed in this case. The paper concludes with a discussion of the emerging literature that can help to theorize the type of policy travelling and policy mobility that is witnessed in the case of the CEC program. Literature is drawn from the fields of geography, sociology, and education policy. Promising concepts are highlighted as avenues for future empirical and theoretical work.

Goldie, D., Linick, M., Jabbar, H., & Lubienski, C. (2014). Using bibliometric and social media analyses to explore the “echo chamber” hypothesis. Educational Policy, 28 (2), 281-305.