The Education Systems of the Americas

This handbook focuses on and compares the education systems in the three Americas: North, Central and South America, and includes a chapter on most countries in the region. The chapters follow a common structure and include schematic diagrams of the structure of mainstream education from pre-primary to tertiary level. Each chapter starts with a description of the historical and social foundations of the education system from the post-World War II period up to today, including political, economic and cultural contexts and conditions. By highlighting important dates and structural decisions, the current education system can be understood as resulting from past developments. The first part ends with a description of the transitions to the labour market that are offered, and the way in which these are organized in the education system described. The second part consists of an overview of the institutional and organizational principles as well as the structure of education from pre-primary to tertiary level. It includes a focus on legislative bases and financial provisions for the education system and a description of the structure by using the ISCED-classification. It further includes information of the supply of human resources such as teachers and other educators. The third and final part of the handbook discusses selected educational trends and aspects. In this context, three topics are of particular interest: dealing with inequality, ICT and digitization activities, and STEM-related policies and programmes.

Sieglinde Jornitz is a senior researcher at the DIPF - Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education in Frankfurt/Main, Germany and a regular lecturer for the Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main in the field of teacher education. She has been engaged in various projects at DIPF that are focused on national, European and international developments in education and information science. Her research interests focus on education theory as much as on international and European education policy and school education. Her research combines her overall interest in national and international education policies with the analysis of specific documents from educational practice, like school interaction transcripts or images.

She is involved in projects on professionalization issues of teachers that continue the work on analyzing school lessons to contribute to a theory of teaching as part of an education theory. Being a member of the international team at DIPF, she organises various network events for bringing together German and international partners in the field of education. She is also a member of several research groups on reconstructive hermeneutics in education and on digital media.

Marcelo Parreira do Amaral is Full Professor of Education at the Institute of Education of the University of Muenster, Germany. Parreira do Amaral teaches and researches in the field of Comparative and International Education, Education Policy Studies, Lifelong Learning and Education Institutions. His current research focuses on international educational policy and governance issues at various levels and scales. More recently, he has concentrated on studying the emergence and expansion of a Global Education Industry (GEI) and on how it is transforming conceptualizations of 'good' education. His research on (new) providers and policy actors within education aims at analyzing the possible consequences for education research, policy and practice. Beyond discerning particular expressions and manifestations of the GEI phenomenon in international contexts, it also looks into the rationales, processes and impacts of the GEI developments on education systems.