Reforming teachers' careers through regulatory governance: the cases of Colombia and Peru

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

Proposal

In the last two decades, a new reform agenda around ‘School Autonomy with Accountablity’ (SAWA) has spread globally, being adopted in different countries across the globe (Verger et al., 2019). The SAWA agenda includes two complementary elements that act as the two sides of a coin: autonomy and accountability. For each element of autonomy being granted to schools and their members –budgetary, organizational, pedagogical, on staffing or teachers’ hiring/firing processes, among others– an element of accountability is in place to monitor such autonomy –financial audits, school inspections, standardized high-stakes exams, etc. This is, a new governance paradigm underpinned by a combination of new public management principles and regulatory governance instruments like standards and high-stakes assessments are changing the way schools function, impacting not only students but teachers and principals. Arguably, IGOs such as the OECD and World Bank have actively promoted the SAWA reform, both in developed and developing countries. This ongoing global reform has been widely studied in Anglo-Saxon countries (Ball, 2017), southern-European (Pagès, 2021; ), and nordic countries (Camphuijsen & Levatino, 2021). Latin American countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Colombia have also adopted some elements of the SAWA agenda (Rivas, 2021), yet these cases remain largely underexplored.
In this context, this study looks at the cases of Colombia and Peru, two countries that have focused on reforming teachers’ careers as a central aspect of their educational reforms in recent years. Colombia has largely adopted a governance turn in education, as it has long ago decentralized school governance, has placed a strong emphasis on learning standards, focused on national assessments as well as teachers' assessments. Similarly, Perú hags also decentralized education governance in the early 2000s, consolidated a large national assessment system, and in 2012 introduced an unprecedented reform to teachers' careers involving entry requirements, a new curriculum, assessments of teachers' performance, and new economic incentives. Although with different histories and traditions, both Colombia and Peru are unitarian countries with highly decentralized governance organizations, and while Colombia has recently joined the OECD, Peru is an aspiring new member. Hence, adopting a comparative case-study approach, this research aims to understand what was the rationale for the adoption of certain SAWA elements instead of others, how the institutional and political configurations of each country shaped the election of these policy instruments, and what changes these instruments have produced regarding teachers careers. To answer these questions, I adopt a policy genealogy approach (Gale, 2001) to understand each country’s institutional and governance traditions and the changes that these new instruments entailed within each country. Later, using critical discourse analysis as an analytical tool, I delve into newspaper articles and other media outlets as well as national and IGOs country-specific policy documents between 2000-2020 to scrutinize and identify patterns in the ways in which each country justifies the adoption of these new instruments. Results point to a break in the governance traditions in both Colombia and Peru and a strong influence of IGOs discourses and ideas to justify their adoption.

Author

• Tomas Esper, Columbia University Teachers College