Regulating Schools and Teachers: A Comparative Analysis of Latin America

• In Event: Nation-Building, State-Making, and Mass Schooling

Abstract

In many developing democracies, patronage politics are deeply rooted in public school systems and the education bureaucracy, which undermine the capacity of the state to enact and enforce new policies. Policy makers have made concerted efforts to update school systems, but they face concerted opposition from “vested interests” that defend these informal and irregular practices. Few scholars have analyzed what political actors defend patronage practices, and why there are sharp contrasts in how deeply they are embedded in school systems. Why are education bureaucracies in some countries prone to endemic patronage politics, while in other countries more progress has been made in eradicating them? This paper presents a comparative historical analysis of education laws in Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico from 1930 to 2010. Education laws provide analytic leverage on understanding how schools and teachers are regulated, and how informal practices persist. The argument is that how teachers are organized strongly shapes the character of patronage politics. Two different causal pathways that define the operation of mass school systems. In the first, teachers organize from below and are aligned with opposition parties. They demand labor laws to protect teachers against patronage practices. Thus teachers consistently mobilize against patronage, while regional political elites defend these practices. In the second, ruling parties organize teachers from above and incorporate teacher organizations into networks of political patronage. In this pattern, labor laws actually abet patronage practices and institutionalized informal patterns of exchange. Both teacher organizations and regional elites defend patronage. This paper makes two contributions. It uses the case of mass public education to shed light on the development trajectories of the regulatory state. It also adds to debates in historical institutionalism about the utility of the incremental vs. discontinuous change (i.e., critical junctures) approaches to political development, arguing that – indeed – the critical juncture framework is more useful for interpreting the evolution of the rules governing mass public schooling. The paper draws on 130 interviews conducted over the course of 18 months of fieldwork in all three countries.

Author

• Christopher Chambers-Ju