The Political Economy of Education Reform in Latin America

• In Event: New insights on the Politics of Social Policy

Abstract

For much of the 1990s, Latin American countries experimented with transferring the responsibility of managing public schools from the central government to subnational units (such as states, municipalities, and schools). Why? Conventional wisdom stresses the fact that Latin American countries decentralized education because central governments were too inefficient to resolve longstanding problems related to access and quality. But a careful review of the evidence reveals that the education systems of Latin America were not generally in crisis. For example, between 1950 and 1990, the average illiteracy rate in the region fell from 49% to 14.5% (IADB 1996). Similarly, data show that these countries achieved notable gains in enrollment and completion rates over these years, gains that were not lost during the severe debt crisis that spanned the 1980s (World Bank 2018). Rather than a technical explanation, then, we need a political explanation to account for the reasons why Latin American countries decentralized such an important public service.
My paper advances the argument that both domestic and international incentives generated the patterns of education reform adopted by Latin American countries in the 1990s. Drawing on a statistical analysis of 18 countries over 20 years and in-depth case studies of three countries (Costa Rica, Colombia, and El Salvador) supported by interviews and archival work, I conclude that education reform in Latin America was driven in part by political processes that had little to do with public education itself. Two political logics propelled education reform in the region. First, an internal political logic in which incumbents used education reforms to weaken teachers’ unions that were aligned with the opposition. Second, an external political logic in which international organizations with significant leverage over countries proposed and funded changes to education systems. These political factors, not the underlying strengths and weaknesses of the education system, drove reform. I show that neither of these factors is necessary, but both are sufficient to explain why some countries reformed and others did not.
My research contributes to our understanding of the politics of education reform in several ways. First, by focusing on the political and electoral incentives that compel politicians to engage in politically expensive reforms, my research asks us to reassess longstanding beliefs regarding the role that teachers’ unions play in reform. Teachers are not mere obstacles to the improvement of education systems, they are often political targets of education reform. This analysis demonstrates that the political alignment(s) of teachers’ unions are a key determinant of education reform. Second, in contrast to other scholars who have interpreted education reform as a domestic process, I find that education reform has a substantial international dimension. This is true in two ways. One, international financial institutions played a role encouraging reform. Two, once a country decided to reform, the specific shape of that reform was influenced by what its neighbors had done—a form of international diffusion. Taken together, my research offers a new view of education reform in Latin America with implications for reforms, in education but also in social policy more broadly, across the rest of the world.

Author

• Thomas R. Vargas, University of Minnesota