Ecuador’s education in the post-Correa era: The dismantling of an ambitious educational reform

• In Event: Latin America’s education policy from the mid 2010s to today: A fourth wave of educational reforms?

Proposal

This paper examines evidence of the gradual dismantling over the past eight years of Ecuador’s attempt to build an Educational State (Estado educador), i.e., the most ambitious educational reform of the last quarter-century, which was implemented during Rafael Correa’s presidency, between 2007 and 2017 (Aguerrondo & Chiriboga, 2023; Baxter, 2019; Cevallos Estarellas & Bramwell, 2015; Schneider, 2024; Schneider et al., 2019). We begin by reviewing some of the literature on sustained educational reforms that are correlated with long-term improvement of student learning outcomes (Bryant et al., 2024; Mourshed et al., 2010; Schleicher, 2018). Subsequently, we identify core components of Ecuador’s 2007-2017 educational reform, which was initially legitimized by the gains measured by UNESCO assessment in 2006, 2013, and 2019.
Through interviews with diverse educational stakeholders, we trace the continuity or discontinuation of these reform components under Correa’s successors—Lenín Moreno (2017-2021), Guillermo Lasso (2021-2023), and Daniel Noboa (2023-present). We observe that policy across these governments, including education, has shared one unifying objective: the explicit rejection of the “Correa era” and a commitment to descorreizar (i.e., “to undo Correísmo”).
Our findings suggest that the 2017-2025 period has been marked by the dissolution—or at minimum, erosion through neglect—of most public policies defining Ecuador’s 2007-2017 education reform, alongside a gradual contraction of annual education budgets, from 4.61 percent of GDP in 2017 to 3.89 percent in 2023 (Datosmacro.com, 2024; World Bank, 2025).
However, this retrenchment has been justified almost exclusively by fiscal austerity arguments. Notably, no alternative ideological vision has emerged in the last few years to counter the preexisting narrative, which defined education as “a lifelong human right and an inalienable, non-derogable duty of the state,” as Ecuador’s Constitution still states (article 26).
Despite these administrations’ undeniable attempts to reduce state size and government expenditure, we document a striking absence of a well-structured alternative public discourse on education aligning with 1990s-style neoliberal reforms, as the ones that took place in Chile and in the United States, promoting academic efficiency via state rollback, deregulation and market mechanisms, such as school vouchers and school competition.

Authors

• Pablo Cevallos Estarellas, Universidad Austral

• Cinthia Chiriboga