Bordering State and Society: Community Schools in Zambia

Abstract

Amidst an international push for education for all, people in Zambia began building their own schools most notably in the 1990s. These so-called community schools make up a significant portion of the country's primary school system and potentially represent fundamental changes in the border between state and society in providing education. In this dissertation, I question: why community schools exist in Zambia and continue to operate; how they have been rationalized by the state and public; what learning outcomes result from a bordering between government and community schools. Using a mixed methods framework grounded in critical realism, I analyzed policies, interviews, public opinion surveys, and literacy and numeracy assessment data. I found that community schools existed prior to the 1990s, but in a politically different way. After 1991, these schools grew organically nationwide, amidst an economic crisis, structural adjustment policies, and an unprecedented drop in education financing. In the following decades, the Zambian state promoted different borderings between itself and society, from promoting an explicit neoliberal view of parental responsibility in education to supervising a parallel system of state and community schools. While I find evidence that state and community schools serve similar populations, students who attend community schools have significantly lower learning outcomes even after controlling for factors that should explain the difference. At the same time, there are additional inequities in this parallel system related to the location of schools and the household socio-economic status of students. Findings are significant for both theory and practice: among other implications, this study points to the opportunities for mixed methods research in education, and highlights how conceptions of state and society in schooling – whether made explicit or not – can have political and practical consequences.