The Governance Platform for Improving Education: A Comparative Multi-level Case Study in Federal Countries

• In Event: Systemic Educational Improvement: New comparative theoretical debates and empirical findings

Proposal

Ideas about educational improvement are contextual and contested. This study proposes a critical and pragmatic framework to analyze systemic improvement considering the paradoxes and limitations of quantitative sources. The study compared 83 subnational educational systems of three federal countries in Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.
For the selection of the cases we used a mixed methods approach. First, we systematized the statistical information on the available indicators of access to education, academic progression, and learning outcomes in the three countries’ 83 subnational education systems in the period 2004-2019. Our methodological strategy used a complementary qualitative source: the expert interview method (Meuser and Nagel, 2009). Interviews were conducted with 30 experts to identify improvement cases.
The mixed-methods approach allowed us to select four cases of systemic improvement both in terms of quantitative educational indicators and highlighted by local experts: Ceará and Pernambuco from Brazil, Puebla from México, and Córdoba from Argentina.
The four subnational cases studied stand out in the construction of state capacities to develop sustained policies over time. We hypothesize that systemic improvement of education in Latin America requires constructing an educational governance platform that favors the design and implementation of legitimate and effective policies.
Our research advanced on this background with an empirical study based on the four subnational systemic improvement cases in Latin America. We found a specific network of four predominant dimensions present in the analyzed cases:
(1) Political priority to education.
(2) Understanding the culture of the educational system.
(3) Clear goals and a theory of change.
(4) Incrementalism and realism in the implementation process.
Contrary to the well-known "McKinsey report" findings (Mourshed et al., 2010), we found no single policy formula to improve educational systems. The four most notable cases of large subnational educational systems show different paths in different contexts. Furthermore, applying formulas and recipes seems to be a reverse path followed by the cases analyzed. Instead of starting from a synoptic approach defined ex-ante, we found an incrementalism approach that generated spiral government capacities to institutionalize improvement processes.
Our analysis emphasizes the typical process of building an "educational governance platform" that consolidates incremental policies and generates trust in the actors to work together. This vision is close to the cultural approaches of educational reforms that analyze educational systems’ complexity (Fullan, 2016; Snyder, 2013; OECD, 2015; Sabelli, 2006; Burns and Koster, 2016). These approaches highlight the importance of creating a coherent, shared vision by multiple education system actors.
Our hypotheses of systemic improvement relate a recent framework based on three key elements: trust, accountability, and capacity (Ehren and Jaqueline Baxter, 2021). However, we also approach the need to adapt this framework in the context of Latin America, a region with widespread poverty, inequality, and political instability.

Author

• Axel Rivas, Universidad de San Andres