Philanthropic constellations in education policy: private actors’ agendas in Argentina and Brazil

• In Event: Education Reforms in Latin America: conditions for emergency, discourses, and actors in contemporary governance transformations

Proposal

New forms of education privatization emerged during the last decades. This has enabled new formal and non-formal spaces for networking and ‘partnerships’ between state and non-state actors in which new philanthropy ‘puts to work’ resources, connections, ideas, and even income-activities (Ball, 2007; Robertson & Dale, 2013; Srivastava & Oh, 2010). Numerous works have analyzed neoliberal reforms in education across Latin America by focusing on the implications for different education levels, governance scales, and policy domains -teacher training, provision, curriculum-. (Crosso et al, 2016; Torres, 2008; Verger, et al., 2018). During the 1990s, Argentina and Brazil went through educational reforms as part of a complex and expansive ‘glocal’ political rhetoric that Ball (2013) associates with transformation, modernization, innovation, enterprise, dynamism, creativity, and competitiveness within the public sector. This meant comprehensive transformations for both education systems, affecting governance levels, public education funding, teacher policies, and curricula, among other dimensions (Gentili, 2009; Tedesco, 2012).
Amid the expansion of ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ forms of education privatization, Argentina and Brazil have shown signs of private actors’ growing participation by philanthropic activities. Yet, research has been mainly focused on particular actors, rather than in a more comprehensive configuration, and literature shows limited comparative analysis on how their activities relate to divergent historical configurations of nation-states and education systems. This work explores the ‘philanthropic constellations’ in these policy spaces and analyses the relations between new philanthropy and Argentina and Brazil’s historical configuration of education systems. The purpose of this study is to gain an in-depth understanding of private-background actors’ forms of association oriented to education policy, their approach to state actors, and, ultimately, their influence on education policy. It is here intended to offer new insights about new forms of private actors’ influence on education policy in these two countries. By focusing this research on Latin American countries, this investigation aims to enrich current discussions on network governance in education by providing new evidence on how these trends are enacted across diverse policy spaces and states reform trajectories. The study used network ethnography to assemble Social Network Analysis with an ethnographic account of the social interactions among participants. The first sample of organizations was created based on a selection of coalition partnerships and it was later expanded by including new significant actors connected to this first selection. This allowed us to characterize these actors, and trace the relationships among philanthropic organizations. A database was created to sign each organization’s activities in order to describe individual approaches and shared agendas and initiatives. Results show divergent configurations of Argentina and Brazil’s philanthropic constellations in terms of the scale and type of their operations, and the institutional design. This research provides evidence on the focus of these actors’ activities and the type of relations they establish with public sector actors (schools, municipalities, province departments, and national departments). The study stresses that both divergencies and this sector prevalence are explained are related to the different policy trajectories followed by nation-states' institutional histories in regard to the development of their education systems.

Authors

• Ivan Matovich, CIPPEC

• Tomas Esper, Columbia University Teachers College