The design of the Teacher Reform Law in Peru: An adaptation of UN agreements?

• In Event: "Teachers, Schools, and Data: Regulating Quality, Autonomy, and Reform in globalised times"

Proposal

For the past two decades, most ministries of education in Latin America have included teacher professionalization reforms among their educational policies to improve education quality (Tenti Fanfani, 2004). In the case of Peru, the Teacher Reform Law (Ley de Reforma Magisterial, in Spanish), enacted in 2012, changed the relationship between the government and public school teachers. The new teaching career is merit-based. Teachers receive incentives to get the best outcomes, and their standardized assessment results are the main factor determining entry and promotion within the public teaching career ladder (Ministerio de Educación, 2018).
Although many studies have asserted that adopting teacher professionalization reforms in Latin America was inevitably influenced by trends in the Northern Region, there are no specific details about which actors, organizations, or processes converged to make this happen and how they impacted national government decisions on teacher policies. Therefore, this case study aims to systematize the Teacher Reform Law agenda-setting process in Peru and describe its links with the proposals of international organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on the same subject.

Methodology
Qualitative content analysis is used in this study to examine the conceptions and underlying notions of teacher professionalization and teacher career across three levels: global, regional, and national. The content analysis method consists of collecting and analyzing data to understand the meanings attributed to a topic (Krippendorf, 1989) and to describe the patterns and trends found (Green Saraisky, 2016).
At the global level, the data sources are two UN Convention agreements: Dakar and Jomtien, with their corresponding Frameworks for Action. Six UNESCO OREALC (Regional Bureau for Education for Latin America and the Caribbean) agreements are included for the regional analysis level. Eight government-produced policy documents that led to enacting the Teachers Reform Law in Peru are analyzed at the national level.

Analysis

International organizations
In the case of INGOs, this study has identified an evolution of the role and value assigned to teachers throughout the period of analysis: 1990-2006. The portrayal of educators started as "unconditional valued" and evolved into a series of requirements and conditions associated with being a good teacher. In Jomtien 1990 and Quito 1991 declarations, there is a call to improve the profession's status solely because teachers deserve it. However, accountability for results assigned to teachers' jobs began to appear over the years, first modestly in Santiago 1993 and then more clearly from Kingston 1996 onwards. During this same period, there was a call to create standards and evaluation systems that would serve as inputs for assessing results. Then, the term "teacher professionalization" appeared for the first time in Santo Domingo 2000 as a commitment of all Latin American countries. It is associated with evaluation systems, recognition policies, incentives, and stimuli to generate a better social recognition of the profession.
Although the promotion of partnerships to support the implementation of teacher-related policies appears in all the INGO documents, the role of teachers in the decision-making process regarding their profession was omitted in most cases. Unfortunately, the involvement of teachers in policy had only been suggested earlier in Jomtien in 1990 and then in Dakar in 2000, both global-level documents. Surprisingly, according to UNESCO OREALC (2001), assigning a dynamic role to teachers' unions was only present at the Quito meeting in 1991 and then reappeared at the first PRELAC meeting in La Havana in 2002.

Peruvian government
Unlike the changing narrative of teachers' role over the years in INGO documents, the Peruvian government's discourse on the role of educators remained unchanged. It clearly described the structure of a teaching career since the publication of the first educational quality proposal in 2001. It included evaluation systems, differentiated salaries based on merit, accountability for results, incentives, and dismissing teachers who do not meet the career requirements.
The poor quality of education has been presented as a consequence of teacher performance since the beginning of the period analyzed. In 2003, the Peruvian government highlighted the dismal results obtained in standardized evaluations such as LLECE and PISA, and then, took it upon itself to directly link teacher performance with student results.
Although the Peruvian government explicitly states that it relies on international documents and agreements to which it is committed to implementing the teaching career, the difference in teachers' conceptions is abysmal between both parties. On the one hand, the INGOs propose an unconditional value of teachers at the beginning of the period analyzed. On the other hand, this positive valuation does not emerge during the discussion about teaching careers in the Peruvian government documents. From the beginning, the message is that the quality of education is poor, and this is due to the poor quality of teachers. Thus, the image of the teacher publicized by the government is always based on a deficit.
The borrowing and learning theory (Steiner-Khamsi, 2021) may explain this incongruity: policymakers adopt external proposals but accommodate them based on their own experience, needs, or what makes the most sense to them. The organizational structure of the Peruvian teaching career based on incentives and performance evaluations follow UNESCO OREALC proposals. However, the arguments for implementing these measures and the conceptions of teachers used by the Peruvian government are entirely different. As a country following neoliberalism tendencies since the 1990s, Peru advocated for a reduced role of the State in education. The government transferred its duty of ensuring their citizens' rights (in this case, students' rights to education) to other citizens (teachers). By blaming schools and teachers for structural deficiencies, the State seeks to retain its legitimacy in the public's eyes (Hursh, 2007).
It is also possible that the Peruvian government only discursively uses the general elements proposed in its signed agreements due to its assumed commitment. However, the real inspiration for the concrete actions or field strategies it carries out to achieve these objectives is limited by its resources.

Author

• Gabriela Chacon Ugarte, Columbia University Teachers College