Vietnam has been herald as an education superstar. In just a few years, it both increased access to education and improved student learning outcomes. What explains Vietnam’s success, and can other countries learn anything from the Vietnam experience?

My guest today is Jonathan London, Associate professor of Global Political Economy at Leiden University. He has a new working paper for RISE, which stands for Research on Improving Systems of Education, entitled “Outlier Vietnam and the Problem of Embeddedness: Contributions to a critique of the political economy of learning.”   In our conversation, he details the history of Vietnam, its system of decentralization, and the process of household co-payments to education.

Citation: London, Jonathan, interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 228, podcast audio, February 15, 2021. https://freshedpodcast.com/london/