Education Privatization Trends in Latin America: Mapping Regional Patterns of Education Reform

• In Event: Public-Private Partnerships Across Geographic Contexts and Their Implications for U.S. Education Reform

Abstract

Education privatization is a global phenomenon and both private financing of education and enrolment in private schools have constantly increased since the 1990s in all world regions, but especially in Latin America. With a focus on Latin America, in this paper we analyze and systematize the diversity of policy trajectories through which education privatization advances in the region. Given its internal diversity, the region lends itself to a productive enquiry on the various conditions, rationales and policy tools behind the increasing centrality of the private sector in education provision in each country, thus avoiding sweeping generalizations, but transcending the mere sum of particularized accounts.

Analytically, this paper is informed by a cultural political economy (CPE) approach. CPE is an analytical and heuristic approach that allows us to observe how drivers of a different nature interact in the production of pro-privatization reforms through the mechanisms of variation, selection and retention. We argue that the interaction between supranational drivers (including the key role of some international organizations in the promotion of private education solutions) and more locally situated factors and contingencies is key to understanding (1) education privatization reforms more comprehensively in the region, and (2) why education privatization develops in such a polymorphic manner.

Drawing on a combination of quantitative and qualitative tools, the research turns first to a statistical examination of the evolution of private provision and participation in order to capture the different patterns of growth (or decline) in the region. This initial more descriptive approach is, secondly, fleshed out through the reconstruction of recent policy developments at a national level, informed by a systematic literature review and in-depth interviews with key informants. For the identification of the primary studies, three main sources have been considered: electronic databases, hand-searching of gray literature, and hand-searching in specialized journals. A total of 169 primary studies were ultimately selected and reviewed, allowing for the identification of relevant drivers behind different education privatization trajectories.

Our research identifies seven different trajectories conducive to privatization (i.e., clusters of frequently associated contextual factors, social mechanisms and courses of action leading to some form of education privatization). These trajectories are: privatization as a state reform, privatization as an incremental reform, privatization by default through the emergence of low-fee private schools, historical public-private partnerships, privatization by way of disaster, privatization as a latent process, and the reversal or rollback of privatization. These trajectories do not have an empirical correspondence in their pure form and, in fact, in most of the countries explored, different trajectories accumulate and sediment with time, giving rise to hybridized forms. It is precisely the dialogue between these ‘ideal’ paths and the ‘real’ national cases that allows for a more in-depth understanding of the privatization phenomenon–and particularly the drivers, contextual dispositions and multi-scalar dynamics that explain its spread in Latin America.

Demonstrating the policy processes through which privatization has advanced in Latin America is valuable beyond this region, in that it can provide insights into how privatization might advance elsewhere, including the United States.

Authors

• Antoni Verger, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Mauro Moschetti, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Clara Fontdevila, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona