Why and how education reforms travel? Analyzing the diffusion of School Autonomy with Accountability in Latin America & The Caribbean (1980-2023)

• In Event: Global Education Reforms Across Time and Space: Tendencies, Drivers, and Explanations In Comparative and Historical Perspective (Part 1)

Proposal

Over the last decades, school autonomy with accountability policies (SAWA) have been at the forefront of global education reforms. SAWA constitutes a reform package grounded in managerial and neoliberal principles promising to improve education quality by stripping bureacratic inneficiencies, increasing competition and monitoring performance (Verger et al., 2019). During the 2000s, SAWA reforms were epicenter in the Global North, particularly in OECD countries (Högberg & Lindgren, 2021), later disseminating among middle and low-income countries (Hossain, 2022; Rivas, 2021). Among them, multiple Latin American & Caribbean (LAC) countries were pioneers in SAWA-like policies during the 1990s under school-based management and decentralization reforms (Barrera-Osorio et al., 2009). Surprisingly, nonetheless, there is a gap in exploring why and to what extent has the SAWA package disseminated in the region since then.

Literature on policy transfer in education has demonstrated the role of economic coercion from international organizations or of cultural isomorphism in shaping the spread of certain cultural scripts (Hossain, 2022; Furuta, 2022). However, research often focuses on single individual policies, such as standardized testing (Kamens & Benavot, 2011), whereas complex packages are underexplored. This study aims to fill this gap by examining SAWA’s dissemination across LAC, a region who suffered from managerial and neoliberal reforms in the past (Meseguer, 2004).

First, the study dissects SAWA into its main elements: (i) autonomy to enable decision-making by school agents; (ii) accountability and standardization to measure and monitor school outcomes; (iii) competition as a driver for improvement; and (iv) performance incentives to nudge agents’ behavior towards targetted outcomes (Verger et al., 2019). Then, it specifies 14 policies that operationalize SAWA’s theory of change, such as decentralization laws, large-scale standardized testing, core curricula, bonus payment for teachers or school rankings. Thirdly, to explore SAWA spread in LAC, the study analyzes a originally created dataset containing the adoption of the 14 policies across n=26 LAC countries between 1980 and 2023. The dataset was built coding country-level policy documents and international organizations publications to identify the adoption of each policy within our sample. Then, additional variables from existing dataset are used as proxies of global mechanisms (i.e. level of international assistance, participation in international testing programs) or national factors (i.e. presence of unions, ideology of the government, etc.) which could explain policy diffusion.

Initially, results show two ‘waves’ where different SAWA policies spread. The first wave, during the 1990s, reveals a rampant growth of a standardized assessments and curricular reforms followed by curricula autonomy in schools. The second wave, of a weaker intensity, shows a spread of competitive like policies (rankings, bonus payments, or the privatization of public schooling) during the 2010s. Then, using event history analysis methods, the presentation discusses effect of global mechanisms such as economic coercion, competition in international assessments, or countries’ ties with a global world culture in explaining SAWA policies’ diffusion. This paper contributes to the study of global policy transfer in education by offering an innovative account of the drivers behind the dissemination of a complex reform package in LAC.

Author

• Tomas Esper, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona