The Caribbean Educational Policy Space: Educational Gradualism, Zero-sum Policy Reforms, and Lesson-Drawing in Small (and Micro) States

This paper analyzes national educational policy discourse in ten of the now 15 Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries and advances that the failed socialist experiments in the small (and micro states) of Guyana, Grenada, and Jamaica during the 1980s ultimately led to the creation of the Caribbean Educational Policy Space (CEPS). CEPS is intended to engender the movement of service, goods, labor, capital, and the right to establishment – i.e. CARICOM citizens may establish companies and business enterprises in any CARICOM nation and be treated as a local national. This discursively created space that employed the external delivery mechanism of ‘lesson-drawing’ through a gradualist approach to educational reforms at both the regional level and national level or what I call educational gradualism–a zero-sum policy reform maneuver that facilitates the creation of predefined educational outcomes. A summative content analysis shows that CEPS, an unintentional byproduct of educational gradualism, was discursively framed historically by the era of ideological pluralism, legally by the 2001 Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas, substantively by the enactment of the Caribbean Single Market in 2006, and functionally through functional cooperation