Privatizing Trends in Education in the Americas and Resistance From Teachers' Unions

• In Event: Who Profits From Public Education? The Role of Teachers' Unions in Resisting Privatization

Abstract

The Covid19 pandemic made visible the great inequality in access to education for millions of children and youth in the world, and revealed the difficult conditions of many teachers to carry out our work. While heterogeneity is great in the Americas, the privatization of education advances rapidly. School closures and the prevalence of digital platforms to continue learning from home alerted us to the great power of transnational information technology corporations and the importance of schools as community centers.

This presentation aims to show how the privatization of education has taken place in the American continent and how unions and social movements have resisted it. We define privatization of education as both an endogenous (privatization "in" education) and an exogenous (privatization "of" education) process. Using this framing of privatization, in this presentation we engage the activities of teacher unions that use the interpretative advances of the Latin American Alternative Pedagogical Movement in their resistances to privatization in and of education.

We triangulated data from primary sources (surveys of teachers and union leaders) and secondary sources in a mixed quantitative and qualitative methods approach to systematize the experiences of teachers’ struggles for education. Secondary sources included research studies on the educational context done by the Initiative for Democratic Education in the Americas (IDEA Network), and unions that are a part of this network, as well as information provided in webinars organized by the IDEA Network.

This presentation shows the relevance of articulating the analysis of educational reality based on the work of research professors and trade union and social organizations that fight for education as a social right. It provides a more comprehensive vision of the problems and processes of privatization in and of education in the Americas and gives guidelines to develop proposals from the subjects of education, contributing to more democratic and egalitarian societies. (Note: Summary has been translated from Spanish. This paper will be presented in Spanish, with simultaneous translation in English).

Authors

• Edgar Isch, Initiative for Democratic Education in the Americas (IDEA Network)

• Miguel Angel Duhalde, Confederation of Education Workers of the Argentine Republic - CTERA

• Maria de la Luz Arriaga, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México