Joel Samoff

Prof. Joel Samoff

"An experienced educator, researcher, and evaluator, Joel Samoff combines the scholar’s critical approach and the experience of an international development adviser. With a background in history, political science, and education, he studies and teaches about education and development. Currently at the Center for African Studies at Stanford University, he has also been a faculty member at the Universities of California, Michigan, and Zambia and has taught in Mexico, Sweden, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Concerned with public policy as well as research, and especially with the links between them, Samoff works regularly with international agencies involved in African education. For the past several years he has served as the technical adviser for the multi-agency, multi-country Joint Evaluation of External Support to Basic Education. He is the North America Editor of the International Journal of Educational Development and serves on the Advisory Boards of the Comparative Education Review and Development and Change."

• Director, Concerned Africa Scholars

Selected Publications

• “From Funding Projects to Supporting Sectors? Observations on the Aid Relationship in Burkina Faso,” International Journal of Educational Development 24,4(July 2004):397-427.

• “The Promise of Partnership and Continuities of Dependence: External Support to Higher Education in Africa” (with Bidemi Carrol), African Studies Review 47,1(April 2004):67-199.

• “Institutionalizing International Influence,” in Robert F. Arnove and Carlos Alberto Torres, editors, Comparative Education: The Dialectic of the Global and the Local (Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, Second Edition, 2003), pp. 52-91.

• “No Teacher Guide, No Textbooks, No Chairs: Contending with Crisis in African Education,” in Robert F. Arnove and Carlos Alberto Torres, editors, Comparative Education: The Dialectic of the Global and the Local (Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, Second Edition, 2003), pp. 409-445.

• “Managing Knowledge and Storing Wisdom? New Forms of Foreign Aid?” (co-authored with Nelly P. Stromquist), Development and Change 32,4(September 2001):631-656.

• “Education sector analysis in Africa: limited national control and even less national ownership,” International Journal of Educational Development 19,4-5(July-September 1999):249-272.

• Coping With Crisis: Austerity, Adjustment, and Human Resources (editor) (London: Cassell, 1994).

• Education and Social Transition in the Third World (co-authored with Martin Carnoy) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

Resources and articles

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• Suzanne Grant Lewis