Educational Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship in Comparative Perspective

This course examines how social entrepreneurs have helped improve the quality of education for low-income and marginalized students. It focuses especially on initiatives undertaken in developing countries, and, for contrast, compares them with those from early-industrialized countries. Students also consider the role program theory plays in guiding those efforts in practice. They learn to assess the impact of these efforts and to improve programs based on those assessments. Students study the way social entrepreneurs generate and mobilize resources, negotiate partnerships with the public sector, and create and sustain organizations to support both innovation and the transition to institutionalization. At the beginning, the course examines the reemergence of public-private partnerships in education, and the role of social entrepreneurs in that process. Using a series of cases on social entrepreneurs and educational innovation, we discuss how program theory contributes to the success of a particular project, and examine how these projects evolve, from initial design to improving effectiveness and refining program theory, and finally to scale-up and institutionalization. The recorded lectures are from the Harvard Graduate School of Education course A-132. (4 credits)