Gilbert Valverde

I teach in the Department of Educational Administration and Policy Studies in the School of Education at the University at Albany – State University of New York, where I am also a core member of the faculty of the Comparative and International Educational Policy Program (CIEPP).
At the University at Albany I am also an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Nelson A. Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, Graduate School of Public Affairs. I specialize in scholarship and applied research in the areas of curriculum policy, policy analysis, evaluation and indicator systems and development assistance for education. I have publications in these areas, and I have served as advisor and consultant regarding these subjects to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Governors’ Association, UNESCO, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the US Agency for International Development and to a number of international organizations, ministries of education, foundations, school districts and non-governmental organizations throughout the Americas

Many nations have placed the delivery of quality opportunities to master meaningful school subjects at high levels of rigor at the forefront of their educational policies. To accomplish this, a range of policy tools has been brought into play. These new policies do not, however, follow an exclusively ‘top-down’ model of an authoritative central government directing implementation. In addition to government actions in curricula, standards, testing regimes and the like, there are the actions of a network of public and private agencies, non-governmental organizations, public-private partnerships, international-domestic partnerships, and schools themselves. Problems that stem from this complex interaction of policy instruments are very different from those associated with top-down models of governance. The new problems require a fusion of theories and research methods that account for the performance and nature of the contemporary nation-state, its relationship to global networks of intergovernmental organizations and development aid, diverse domestic governmental and non-governmental policy actors, and the relationship between these sets of actors and their agendas and the need to guide the complex structures of social action known as educational systems. My research interest is to contribute to meeting the fascinating set of theoretical, methodological, and practical challenges that these problems pose.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS