Educational Policies in a Digital Age: Comparative Views from Latin America

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This proposed panel presents five papers that focus on education policies in Latin America that aim to improve student learning and digital skills. The graduate students presenting the papers are all Latin Americans, from Brazil and Mexico, and the papers are all based on original research using quantitative and qualitative analysis. The studies represent voices from the Global South—studies that both report on ongoing reforms in two of the largest countries in the Global South, Brazil and Mexico, and suggest the kinds of local interventions that might serve to improve learning in Latin America’s schools.

Consistent with the theme of this year’s CIES conference, two of the papers study issues directly related to education in a digital society. The first of these assesses the challenges associated with implementing a school program in Mexico that relies heavily on educational technology in areas where students lack access to technological devices and stable internet connectivity or have never been exposed to these resources. The paper reviews the empirical research on whether such programs have any impact on students’ educational outcomes and also discusses whether such programs significantly improve digital literacy for low-income students.

The second of these digital policy papers compares AI policies in higher education institutions across the U.S. and Brazil, showing that institutions worldwide are adopting diverse approaches to its usage and examining how these policies reflect broader socio-political and geographical contexts. The study will show that context is important in developing equitable, context-sensitive AI policies in higher education and that, therefore, its findings are expected to highlight the need for a nuanced understanding of AI's role in global education and the importance of developing equitable, context-sensitive AI policies.

The three other papers in this panel address equally important educational policy interventions. One paper investigates a major secondary education reform in Brazil, which creates several different tracks to replace the single track within comprehensive high schools. This new model allows teachers, schools, and state secretariats of education to develop the tracks’ curricula and pedagogical guidelines on their own as well as in partnership with external organizations, both public and private. Such flexibility has consequently opened new opportunities for education non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to systematically introduce their programming to Brazilian classrooms, facilitating state-wide changes to high school education through NGO-state partnerships. The paper proposes to track the development of these partnerships by conducting a networking analysis using data on contracts between NGOs and state secretariats.

Another proposed paper aims to develop an analytical framework for evaluating institutional collaborative architectures in Brazilian education policy. Since Brazil is a federal country, like Mexico and Argentina, the question of collaborative structures within the decentralized governance of educational systems has enormous importance for the functioning and effectiveness of national education policy in such large countries. The paper will use the framework it develops to examine which collaborative architectures have the most potential for impact in socioeconomic and racial educational equity promotion in Brazil and which attributes in collaborative architectures induce equity in education policymaking, among other questions. It also to this year’s CIES conference theme through an assessment of how digital technologies contribute to effective collaboration in education policymaking.


The fifth policy paper proposed as part of this panel studies the possible relation in Brazil between a recently popular and potentially important policy intervention—namely curricula for socio-emotional learning (SEL)—and student achievement outcomes as measured by a national test. Since, as noted, Brazil is a federal country, with educational policy largely set by states and municipalities, SEL has been introduced in Brazilian schools mainly at the state level and varies from state to state. The paper uses this variation to try to understand whether the variation in policies is correlated with student test scores in reading and mathematics.

The panel provides an unusual opportunity for participants to gain insight into the kind of educational policies taking place in these large Global South countries and what they may or may not mean for education worldwide, especially in contrast with developed country educational policies.

Sub Unit

• Latin America SIG

Chair

• Martin Carnoy, Stanford University

Individual Presentations

• Citizenship Education through NGO-State Partnerships: Networks for “Good Citizenship” in Brazilian High Schools - Giácomo Rabaiolli Ramos, Stanford University

• How does social and emotional learning affect the performance of students? Evidence from Brazil - Julia Lima da Fonseca

• Digital Education Policy in Brazil (2014-2024): Stakeholder Dynamics and Policy Evolution - Marina Novaes; Karen Hoshino, Stanford University