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

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Latin America constitutes a critical space of global influence, wherein countries, regions, and states have adopted different elements, instruments, and logics of global education agendas (Edwards et al., 2022; Meade & Gershberg, 2008). These reforms, namely decentralization, school autonomy, performance-based models for teachers, and test-based accountability systems, among others, encompass a shift towards regulatory governance of education systems (Verger et al., 2019), in which actors such as new philanthropy, private companies, media organizations, or teacher unions are in dispute in this changing landscape. What links these different policy instruments, their discourses and technologies is a shared understanding of a necessary turn towards post-bureaucratic forms of governance underpinned by the neoliberal imaginary (Exley & Ball, 2011; Harber & Davies, 2006; Maroy, 2009). This is, the market logic of competition, deregulation, target setting, and performance management arise as a new horizon transforming education systems, state control, regulations, and teachers’ professionalism.
After decades of a global spread of these reforms, scholarly attention has been mainly placed on the processes of isomorphism of educational systems throughout the world (Meyer et al., 1997; Ramírez et al., 2018). Despite these concerns, recent research has rather tended to emphasize the myriad variety of policies in the education sector worldwide, showing how the national, subnational and international levels interact in complex ways and therefore, produce diverging effects at different national and subnational scales (Magetti & Gilardi, 2016; Zajda, 2018). Nevertheless, much of the research conducted on the effects of global education reform movement on Latin America has been done under a descriptive—or even normative—stance, that tends to overlook the region’s convoluted history of political and social struggle. That is, less work has been directed towards exploring and understanding the conditions and processes constituting and enabling these reforms, or the underlying mechanisms thrusting them. Some novel exemptions include emergent studies engaging in a critical depiction of education reforms in Latin American countries such as Colombia (Díaz-Ríos, 2021), Argentina (Matovich & Esper, 2022), Brazil (Avelar & Ball, 2019), the Dominican Republic (Edwards et al., 2021), as well as comparative work in the region (e.g., Rivas, 2021). In this regard, the present panel aims to contribute to this scholarship by zooming into the circumstances that enable and shape education reform processes in different Latin American countries. This overarching concern leads to the following questions, which are at the heart of the presentations that give form to the panel:

(1) How are education reforms in Latin America coming to be in contemporary times? What ideological, political and material arrangements constitute conditions for the emergence of these reforms?
(2) How do contextual specificities interact with global discourses and trends at the national and sub-national levels?
(3) To what extent are non-state actors—e.g., philanthropic organizations, NGOs, teacher unions— shaping education policy agendas? Which are the rationales, discourses, and imaginaries behind them? Which topics and problems are being devised and which are being side-lined?
(4) What policy instruments have been adopted and implemented in these different countries and why? What rationales underpinned the selection of these instruments? How did global agendas and actors shape the adoption of these instruments? What governance reforms have these instruments introduced into the different countries?
(5) Which are the novel paths of education policy within the region? How are they being resisted and by whom?

By bringing together five different papers, the panel engages with the particularities of current educational reforms in different Latin American states and sub-national scales. The range of topics includes: education sector governance, the influence of international organizations, privatization through education policymaking, the new modes of philanthropy, adoption of test-based accountability, and large transformation of teachers’ careers under a managerial logic.
The contexts covered in this panel include primarily countries—but also regions—with diverse administrative and policy designs: Chile, Argentina—and the city of Buenos Aires —, Colombia, Perú, Brazil, and Paraguay. In particular, the first paper delves into the role of dominant media in the configuration of a teacher policy ensemble in Chile by exploring the links between institutional and discourse structures over time. The second paper analyzes the development of new philanthropy in Argentina and Brazil and these actors’ educational agendas. Based on the significant divergences of this phenomenon across these countries, the authors explain such differences by examining how philanthropic influence relates to policy trajectories in the creation of nation-states, education systems and recent reforms. The third paper focuses on the Paraguayan case to examine how the involvement of non-state actors in education policymaking processes is reshaping the ways of functioning of public administrative institutions and the forces legitimating this trend. A fourth paper studies the role and uses given to data-intensive policy instruments namely, large-scale learning assessments (LSAs) in the formulation and calibration of pedagogic policies at national -Argentina- and subnational -Buenos Aires city- governments to inform policy formulation. Finally, the fifth paper looks into the actors' rationale for reforming teachers' careers in Colombia and Peru through the adoption of a new set of policy instruments, such as a new student assessments framework, a merit-based payment scheme, or teacher performance evaluations.
Besides advancing a critical engagement with the above-mentioned issues, by focusing on these cases, this panel seeks to offer a deep theoretical discussion that informs and expands the existent, emergent literature within the region. Furthermore, taking into account the historical context and ongoing global moves, the panel will reflect on the possibles new educational policy paths.

Sub Unit

• Globalization & Education SIG

Chair

• Alejandro Caravaca, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Individual Presentations

• Conditions of and for change: media’s stabilization of teacher policies in Chile - Rocio Fernandez Ugalde, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

• Philanthropic constellations in education policy: private actors’ agendas in Argentina and Brazil - Ivan Matovich, CIPPEC; Tomas Esper, Columbia University Teachers College

• Education policy and reform in Paraguay: From shadow state to neoliberal bureaucracy - Edgar Quilabert, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Mauro C Moschetti, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; D. Brent Edwards, University of Hawaii; Alejandro Caravaca, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Patricia Grillet, University of Hawaii

• Reforming teachers' careers through regulatory governance: the cases of Colombia and Peru - Tomas Esper, Columbia University Teachers College

Discussant

• Rebecca Tarlau, The Pennsylvania State University