Anatomy of an Institutional Stagnation: Vested Interests, Policy Learning Failures, and the Implementation Gap in Bangladesh’s Secondary Education Reforms (2009–2024)
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https://doi.org/10.66871/trf-j.v1i4.009##semicolon##
Bureaucratic Transformation##common.commaListSeparator## Iron Triangle##common.commaListSeparator## Policy Learning##common.commaListSeparator## Implementation Gap##common.commaListSeparator## Shadow Education##common.commaListSeparator## Bangladesh##article.abstract##
This study investigates the implementation failure of Bangladesh’s srijonshil (creative) secondary curriculum between 2009 and 2024. Challenging the street-level-centric bias that locates policy failure in frontline teacher incompetence, it addresses a governance puzzle that bias leaves unexplained: why did the state decline to recalibrate its implementation tools despite a decade of convergent, self-generated, and independently corroborated evidence that most secondary teachers could not construct or interpret the mandated creative question format? Using a qualitative single-case design grounded in process tracing, the paper synthesizes secondary sources across three dimensions: policy intent, state-internal and third-party evaluative evidence, and press coverage of the shadow-education sector’s adaptation. The findings show a subsystem captured by an iron triangle of bureaucratic elites, political-executive actors, and a multi-billion-taka guidebook-and-coaching industry, in which structural inertia let vested interests convert policy complexity into a durable commercial asset rather than eliminate rote learning. Framed through Peter May’s policy-learning typology, instrumental learning was persistently marginalized in favour of symbolic and political compliance aimed at preserving legitimacy. Finally, the paper argues top-down curricular mandates fail here not for want of evidence but because the state lacks the institutional insulation to resist commercial capture and convert feedback into binding correction.
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