No one argues with the claim that education is a necessary ingredient for any recipe for economic and social development. With higher rates of literacy and numeracy, with more years of schooling, a cornucopia of benefits emerge—from lower birth rates to healthier workers to more autonomous women to more engaged citizens. And yet despite the recognition that everything good comes from education, expanding and reforming public education is a costly and contentious process in all political systems. Scholars and politicians alike are pessimistic that educational reform can be instituted. Given the costs and the conflict, what can explain successful implementation of educational reforms?

Merilee Grindle's study is a thoughtful and carefully developed analysis that explains the conditions under which educational reform has been successful in Latin America, despite the odds. In the process, the author provides us with a wise approach that focuses on the political processes of successful policymaking and implementation, rather than on the barriers to reform. Grindle, known for her work on policymaking, has recently made several calls to scholars to engage in the analysis of institutional reforms that have worked. This full-length sequel to her chapter in Joseph S. Tulchin and Allison M. Garland, eds., Social Development In Latin America: The Politics Of Reform (2000) and to her contribution to Carol Graham, Merilee Grindle, Eduardo Lora, and Jessica Seddon, Improving The Odds: Political Strategies For Institutional Reform In Latin America (1999) makes good on her plea that political scientists interested in policy need to shift their gaze from the obstacles to policy reform and focus more on explaining how it is that some reforms are actually working.

What Grindle has done here is to present, much in the vein of the process tracing one sees more and more in institutional narratives by sociologists and political scientists, the complex multifaceted stories of educational reform in the 1990s in Mexico, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. In explaining how the reforms have made it past the opposition of teachers' unions, the power of entrenched educational bureaucracies, and the self-interest of political actors, she focuses on the strategic choices of executive leaders. She is no naive policy analyst who ignores the reality that “almost any proposal to alter policies will engage interests opposed to change” (p. 196). Rather, she presents us with a carefully crafted research design that shows how leaders have been able to create strategic opportunities to open up possibilities for reform.

Do not look to this book to learn about the effectiveness of the quality-enhancing educational reforms undertaken by many Latin American governments. This is not an evaluation of educational policies per se but, rather, a study of the processes of policy change. It could as well be about welfare policy or environmental policy, although we do learn a lot about the efforts to create policies that might indeed enhance the quality and extent of public education in Latin America. The real strength of Grindle's cases is that they point to the critical importance of strong political leaders who care to force changes even if entrenched powers resist. In some ways, this is a story of strong and savvy leaders—not charismatic, perhaps, but leaders who are convinced that governance is about leading. The author does not address this angle because her focus is on the politics of reform efforts, but it is there. One senses that without Governor Hector Garcia's insistence, reforms would not have happened in Minas Gerais; or that the sheer stubbornness of Amalia Anaya, who worked with at least three different presidencies was critical in ultimately resulting in educational reforms in Bolivia. I would like to have seen more analysis of the emergence of these reform entrepreneurs, or reform-mongers, as Grindle calls them. Under what conditions do they emerge? Are there institutional contexts that are more likely to give rise to such reform leaders?

But this, after all, is more than an analysis of leaders—it is also an analysis of how strategic choices get made. The contribution of this comparative study is that while Grindle enables us to learn relevant details about Mexican and Ecuadorian presidential politics, the most important lesson is that successful policy reforms happen because of the strategic decisions of reformers. These start with choices about when and where to raise the need for reform, continue on to decisions about stepping back from advancing reforms while continuing to build support through think tanks and initiatives outside the center, and then managing the political conflict—sometimes by co-opting, sometimes by negotiating, sometimes by containing—that necessarily arises when the reform is brought back to center stage.

The argument is based on solid comparative case studies that highlight the major sources of opposition in reform efforts: the bureaucracies, political parties, and teachers' unions. Organized not by national case study but by serial examination of leadership choices, policy development, political opposition, and implementing and sustaining reforms, Grindle's book draws well-documented conclusions about the ability of reformers to stand up to opposing interests and to “capitalize on their own institutional sources of power” (p. 189). It is a comparative study in the best sense, gathering evidence and testing hypotheses by examining “sequences of strategic interactions” (Peter A. Hall, “Beyond the Comparative Method,” APSA-CP 15 [Summer 2004]: 1–4).

Scholars who are looking for rational choice explanations of reform, or for quantitative empirical analyses of institutional strength and weakness, will be disappointed in this study. What I found most engaging about Despite the Odds was its insistence that politics, and the management of conflict, really do matter. Time and again, political economists remind us that policy change—whether educational, environmental, or social—should not be able to emerge because self-interest gets in the way. And yet, in fact, change does occur. Deft handling of comparative case studies shows Grindle at her best, and demonstrates that policy reformers can and have overcome resistance, not by ignoring politics but rather by engaging it.