This paper presents a data envelopment analysis (DEA)-based decision-support methodology that has been implemented and is being used by a not-for-profit organization, Fe y Alegrı´a, which runs 439 Bolivian schools reaching over 160,000 disadvantaged students in that poverty-stricken Latin American nation. Bolivia is a poor country with the highest percentage of indigenous population and the lowest per capita income in South America and as such its inhabitants are in dire need of effective educational resources to help them out of poverty. The DEA-based methodology described in this paper has offered an objective way to compare network schools among themselves and with out-of-network schools, providing a deeper understanding of school efficiency levels in the face of scarce resources, and allowing for sharing of best practices across the network. The paper introduces the educational environment in Bolivia, presents the DEA model, describes the decision support methodology, and provides two examples of its use. The first example compares Fe y Alegrı´a secondary schools with out-of-network secondary schools using publicly available data, and the second compares Fe y Alegrı´a secondary schools among themselves using a proprietary database. The paper also comments on lessons learned and the need for broad consensusbuilding and organization-wide buy-in for successful adoption and maximum impact. and a very large portion of its population live in abject poverty. In such an environment education is the only hope for low-income families to reach an improved standard of living, but sadly, in Bolivia, the poor indigenous communities have been the hardest hit by the historical dearth of institutional education resources. Fe y Alegrı´a (FyA) is a Jesuit-sponsored not-for-profit network of schools which operates throughout Bolivia and other countries (as described herein), and focuses on providing quality education to the disadvantaged, the marginalized, and the socially excluded, in an attempt to improve their lot. As described in detail in Section 3 below, FyA manages a network of 439 schools reaching over 160,000 poverty-stricken students in all regions of the country. This paper describes the development and implementation of a decisionsupport methodology in FyA-Bolivia which is being used to examine and improve school efficiencies in the low-income communities which they serve.The original objective of this project was to offer preliminary answers to two research questions. The first question was to verify whether the pedagogical and managerial techniques used in the FyA-operated schools which are perceived by FyA to be best performers indeed resulted in higher efficiency levels than other in-network schools. This inquiry into the relative performance of FyArun schools had the objective of documenting quantitatively their efficiency levels and identifying, assessing, and ultimately disseminating best practices across institutions in the network. The second research question was to confirm whether the pedagogical and manag...

Community-based management research is a collaborative effort between management, academics and communities in need with the specific goal of achieving social change to foster social justice. Because it is designed to promote and validate joint methods of discovery and community-based sources of knowledge, community-based management research has several unique characteristics, which may affect its execution. This article describes the process of a community-based management research project which is descriptive in nature and uses quantitative techniques to examine school efficiencies in low-income communities in a developing country – Bolivia. The article describes the partnership between a US-based university and a Bolivian not-for-profit organisation, the research context and the history of the research project, including its various phases. It focuses on the (yet unpublished) process of the community-based research as opposed to its content (which has been published elsewhere). The article also makes the case that the robust partnership between the US-based university and the Bolivian NGO has been a determining factor in achieving positive results. Strengths and limitations are examined in the hope that the experience may be helpful to others conducting descriptive quantitative management research using community-engaged frameworks in cross-cultural settings. Keywords: international partnership, community-engaged scholarship, education efficiency, multicultural low-income education.

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The main objective of this thesis is to analyze the relations between Executive and Legislative powers in the Argentinean provinces. Nowadays, these relations between the powers of the State in those two spheres of government are relevant subjects in the Political Science studies, which analyze presidential system at different levels. The federalism and presidentialism are frequent topics in the papers of Argentinean institutional analysis. The interactions between the spheres and powers at national or provincial levels are fundamental debates that emphasize the center role of the President in the power relation dynamics. Traditionally, scholars presupposed a predominance of federal Executive and administration. They assume that Legislative was a simple approval agency of Executive decisions, putting a veil in what really happened in both legislative and provincial levels. Recently studies demonstrate, using a legislative production analysis that Argentinean President is not almighty, as was thought to be. They found obstacles in the relation between the Executive and Legislative power, and demonstrate that the success rate rise about to the half of the bills, showing that there is no dominance of one power over another. Following these researches and the literature on the issue, this thesis looks for new approaches to study the provincial presidentialism in Argentina. The success rates of the bills presented by Governors and representatives to the provincial low chambers are used here as performance indicators. This work compares the behavior of actors at legislative office, taking into account their constitutional instruments, the electoral rules to executive and legislative positions, the difference between the legislative structure (one or two chambers), the parliamentary group of the official coalition, and the internal legislative organization depending on a more or less centralized way. It pretends to achieve their role in decision process at Argentinean provinces using all these factors that incentive Governors and representatives to higher or lower legislative production.

This article describes the analytical support a Saint Joseph's University (SJU) data mining class provided over the past three academic years to Fe y Alegría in Bolivia (FyAB), a Jesuit-sponsored institution dedicated to the education of the poor and looking for a feasible model that could help them identify which students and schools have the most need. SJU undergraduates, working without viable socioeconomic household income information for each student in the database, had to be creative in assisting FyAB using only survey data provided by Bolivian school-age pupils. Working in consultation with FyAB school representatives, their goal for each iteration was twofold: 1) create a model that provides evidence, given current sample data, of the students most in need and 2) expand it for application across the larger population of FyAB schools. Such work exemplifies, as noted by Pope Francis in his encyclical Laudato Si' (2015), the importance of equality and justice in education as instruments toward sustainability. This article thus provides context for, and a historical background of, this ongoing initiative, and describes its specific characteristics. It reviews sequential cohorts of students by semester, how the requests, focus, and models evolved with new and changing issues, and concludes by sharing a system SJU students created in the fall of 2017-an innovative web-based and easily updated visualization tool that allows for very efficient examination of survey answers-to help make initial analyses easier for those looking to implement immediate student outreach initiatives in Bolivia.