A stronger state in education? The translation of ‘Education for All’ in Latin America

• In Event: Mechanisms and pathways of international influence in education policy: Recent work and ways forward

Proposal

Following foreign recommendations, Latin American countries undertook education reforms based on a reduced role of the state in education governance in the 1980s and 1990s: education provision was decentralized and/or privatized, schools and subnational units obtained more authority on curriculum decisions, and accountability was at least partially delegated to parents and communities. In recent decades however, some countries adopted again new reforms that seem to follow a contrasting trend with an emphasis on the recentralization of the state authority: central regulations for education provision became tighter, curriculum decisions were recentralized through the definition of common standards, and centralized tests-based accountability systems were consolidated to reward high performing teacher and schools, and punish low performance (Astiz and Wiseman 2005). These changes are not signals of a statist model’s comeback but they certainly recentralized control over education while keeping responsibilities delegated. By comparing the cases of Chile, Argentina, and Colombia, this paper examines why this transformation occurred, and how different countries translated ‘a stronger role of the state’ into new education policy decisions.

Building on insights from a critical cultural political economy approach (Robertson and Dale 2015), historical institutionalism (Pierson 2004; Mahoney and Thelen 2010), and sociological institutionalism (Garud, Hardy, and Maguire 2007; Hardy and Maguire 2008), my research suggests that negative consequences of the 1980s and 1990s education reforms, in interaction with global norms that pushed countries to guarantee the right to quality education, provided opportunities for the ‘losers’ of previous education arrangements to become institutional entrepreneurs and demand policies that recentralized the state authority over education in ways that favour their interests. This paper identifies two necessary conditions for this change to happen: 1) challengers need to get organized, which is more likely to happen when the negative consequences of the existing governance policy are concentrated in a specific group; and 2) challengers need to communicate their demands in ways that resonate with global policy ideas and persuade different domestic actors to support policy change.

I illustrate these arguments with the comparative qualitative analysis of Chile, Colombia, and Argentina. The study covers the 2000s and 2010s reform and is based on document analysis and numerous interviews with relevant education stakeholders. These three countries can be compared as most similar cases since they were all highly influenced by similar ideas in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, but they differ substantially in the way governments implemented reforms. The above-proposed conditions helped students in Chile and teachers in Argentina to push for an increase of the state authority in education provision and curriculum. By contrast, the absence of these conditions in Colombia avoided the expansion of the state action and indeed permitted a more profound decentralization and privatization of education governance.

With these cases, this paper shows how global ideas on education policy, domestic policy legacies and domestic political economy dynamics can produce policy change but also policy variation in developing countries.

Author

• Claudia Milena Diaz Rios, University of Toronto