Latin America’s Education Systems in Comparative Perspective, 1945–2021

• In Event: Values and Skills. The Political Economy of Education in Latin America

Abstract

Any effort to explain the dynamics of education systems in Latin America requires a strong empirical foundation. Some of the most influential political economy theories of education of the last three decades have been based on assumptions that are factually incorrect.3 The goal of this chapter is to identify the main patterns and characteristics of education systems in Latin America that need to be explained. These empirical foundations set the stage for the remainder of the book and for future research on the political economy of education in Latin America and the rest of the world.
We take advantage of large cross-national datasets assembled in the last five years to provide the most comprehensive quantitative analysis to date of how education systems in Latin America compare to the rest of the world. Whenever possible based on available data, we not only describe how Latin America compares today to the rest of the world on a wide range of education indicators, but also assess the region’s evolution over time compared to the time trends observed in other regions. We begin by characterizing Latin American education systems along two dimensions, the level of access to education and students’ skills. We document that, from the late nineteenth century to the present, Latin America has done well on indicators of access to primary, secondary, and higher education, but that when it comes to students’ skills, particularly more advanced math and science skills, Latin American countries underperform relative to other countries with similar GDP per capita. In this respect, Latin America is the embodiment of the “learning crisis” denounced by the World Bank (2017), a phenomenon defined by the fact that high levels of access to schooling often fail to translate into the acquisition of skills. We then examine three potential explanations of the region’s relatively poor performance in international comparisons of students’ skills: schools’ emphasis on teaching political values instead of skills, the characteristics of teachers and teacher unions, and the level of education expenditures. Our analysis draws on the new Varieties of Political Indoctrination in Education. and Media (V-Indoc) dataset assembled by Paglayan as part of a team led by Anja Neundorf. Covering 163 countries from 1945 to 2021, the V-Indoc dataset includes a wealth of indicators about the emphasis placed by primary and secondary schools on teaching political values, the educational requirements to become a teacher, the degree to which teacher hiring and firing decisions are based on political criteria, and the characteristics of teacher unions. This dataset enables us to provide the most systematic cross-national analysis to date on these dimensions.
Our results are somewhat surprising. First, although public primary education systems in Latin America emerged in the nineteenth century mainly to shape political values, Latin America today does not stand out relative to other developing regions in the extent to which schools emphasize the teaching of political values. Second, where Latin America does stand out is in how similar the emphasis on teaching political values is in 2021 compared to 1945. This similarity points to the persistence of education policies and practices despite the spread of electoral democracy across the region in recent decades. Third, the level of emphasis on political values does not seem to explain the region’s underperformance in skills.
We then examine how Latin America fares along two dimensions that have been found by previous research to be predictive of student learning: the characteristics of teachers and the patterns of education expenditures. First, while we do not find that teacher hiring and firing decisions in Latin America are more politicized than in other developing regions, we do find that the educational requirements to become a teacher in Latin America are remarkably low, even compared to regions with lower overall levels of educational attainment. Our analysis does not support the common claim that strong teacher unions contribute to this; if anything, the evidence suggests that stronger teacher unions are associated with more qualified teachers. Second, although on average the region devotes a slightly higher fraction of its GDP to education than other developing regions, the distribution of spending in Latin America remains slightly more regressive than in the rest of the world, reflecting in part the legacy of military regimes’ prioritization of higher education institutions.
We conclude by suggesting main lines of inquiry for future research on the political economy of education in Latin America and beyond.

Authors

• Agustina S. Paglayan, UCSD

• Katy Norris, University College London