Something old, something new. Educational inclusion and head teachers as policy actors and subjects in the City of Buenos Aires

Abstract

In Argentina, ‘inclusion’ has become a central target of national and provincial educational policy since the mid-2000s. Unlike in other countries, inclusion has been associated with the transformation of upper secondary schooling into a compulsory level of education, together with the effective integration of pupils from socio-economically deprived families. This article examines how policy on inclusion is ‘done by’ and ‘done to’ head teachers in two Escuelas de Reingreso (Returning Schools) in the City of Buenos Aires. It scrutinises the usefulness of Ball and colleagues’ approach to policy in a very different context from their own. It argues that the head teachers are both policy actors and subjects. As policy actors, they creatively interpret and translate their schools’ policy mandates within specific contexts. In so doing, they produce antagonistic versions of ‘inclusion’: the ‘educational’ and ‘socio-educational’ approaches. As policy subjects, they are spoken by competing policy discourses (in a Foucaultian sense) on schooling: the ‘selection and homogenisation’ and the ‘inclusion and personalisation’ discourses. They demarcate the limits to which head teachers are able to imagine, think and do. In different ways, they contribute to the misrecognition of the centrality of teachers’ views and practices in pupils’ learning.

Keywords:

• policy
• policy subject
• policy actor
• head teachers
• City of Buenos Aires

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Stephen Ball, Annette Braun, Lucie Jarkosvka and Paul Wakeling for their insightful comments to previous versions of this paper. The author is also grateful to participants of the Sociology Research Seminar (Institute of Education, UK), the Sociology Departmental Seminar (Masaryk University, Czech Republic) and the Seminar Series at the Department of Education (University of York) for their critical engagements with previous versions of this article. The author acknowledges the support from the Department of Sociology (University of Warwick), where she is currently a visiting fellow, and from the Institute of Education, where she wrote a substantial part of this article while being Visiting Academic in 2013. She also acknowledges the CONICET for partially funding her research stay at the IOE, and the Secretaría de Ciencia y Técnica of the Universidad de Buenos Aires for funding the research project “Las identidades docentes en tiempos de fragmentación educativa. Un estudio de casos en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires”. Finally, the author specially thanks the teachers, students and pastoral assistants of the Returning Schools for their time, patience and generosity.

Notes

1. The indicator sobreedad refers to those students who are older than the school expected age of the school year they are attending. The sobreedad could be related to accessing the school system at an older age, repetition of one or more school years, or drop out from school (Ministerio de Educación 2013).

2. For instance, the lowest level of interannual school retention between 2002 and 2009 was registered in school districts located in areas with the highest levels of social and economic vulnerability.

3. For example, the Escuelas de Educación Media – municipal schools – (formerly Escuelas Municipales de Educación Media) have the highest rates of repetition and sobreedad in comparison to the technical, artistic and ‘normal’ schools. These different types of schools differ in terms of their institutional history, curricular projects, and socio-economic intakes.

4. For example, only 64% of 17-year-old students from poor families (bajo nivel socio-económico) attended secondary school in 2011, while this figure reached 98% amongst students from wealthy families (alto nivel socio-económico) (SITEAL 2012).

5. Some jurisdictions, like the province of Buenos Aires and Córdoba, have created alternative secondary schools that share some features with the RS (such as targeting out of school young people and having a more flexible academic organisation) (Terigi, Toscano, and Briscioli 2012; Toscano et al. 2012).

6. Despite this, research shows that there have been different tides of massive recruitment of head teachers (they are called ‘procesos de titularización masiva’), disregarding formal employment requirements and selection procedures (Mezzadra and Bilbao 2011). Other studies have also shown that, in specific circumstances, head teachers have been personally recruited by local educational authorities (in the City of Buenos Aires, for instance, this has been the case of the first appointed head teachers of the Escuelas Municipales de Educación Media (municipal schools). They were created in 1990 for young people ‘in risk’ in areas of the City lacking secondary schools (Más Rocha 2006).

7. From 2003 until 2007 Néstor Kirchner was president of Argentina. From 2007 onwards, his wife (Cristina Fernández de Kirchner) has been in office. These governments have deployed (although in different ways and with dissimilar degrees of effectiveness) a wide range of economic policies associated with an anti-neoliberal agenda, such as the nationalization of companies and the expansion of the state’s role in the economy (Diniz, Boschi, and Gaitán 2012; Wylde 2012).

8. For instance, Tenti Fanfani, Frederic, and Steinberg (2009) illustrate the former and the analysis of Gluz and Moyano (2013) illustrate the latter. Tenti and colleagues argue that individual schools shape the implementation of a variety of national and provincial socio-educational programs. Gluz and Moyano (2013) examine the ‘policy process of appropriation’ of the Asignación Universal por Hijo (Universal Benefit for Children) social policy in different types of schools. They argue that teachers and head teachers upheld similar views that misrecognise the social rights of vulnerable social groups and interpret this social policy as a strategy to satisfy students’ basic needs and/or as a government’s strategy to control excluded groups.

9. For instance, the office in charge of giving parents and pupils information on secondary schooling in the City had repeatedly misinformed pupils with regard to the RS ‘A’. According to its head teacher, many youngsters who visited the school thought that it was an ‘adult school’. Another example is the lack of clear information on this type of school on the City’s official web sites.

10. In ordinary secondary schools, pupils have to apply for a bursary – which is given on the basis of family income levels.

11. In ordinary secondary schools, the great majority of teachers are paid for delivered lessons or teaching time. Only a few are paid for non-contact teaching time, such as the case of form class tutors. Furthermore, the majority of the teachers are peripatetic staff who are not attached to any particular school. This has been identified as a major pedagogic and institutional problem. In the City of Buenos Aires, Law No. 2905 was passed in 2008 establishing a ‘Regulatory framework for Teaching Posts’ (Régimen de Profesor por Cargo). This new regime aims at transforming teachers’ jobs into part time or full time jobs in one school. This implies a major transformation of working teaching conditions that is still under way.

12. This is also the case in the rest of the secondary schools.

13. In the City of Buenos Aires, the great majority of state secondary schools operate in double or triple shifts.

14. At the time of fieldwork, several male pupils were living in collective residences run by professional football clubs. They had recently migrated to the City. These clubs paid for their living expenses while assessing if they were suitable for recruitment.

15. Other aspects are regulated by normative frameworks similar to those of ordinary secondary schools (such as the Estatuto del Docente – Ordenanza 40.593 and Decretos reglamentarios).

16. According to interviewed head teachers and school inspectors, this set of policy texts only offered general guidelines. After creating the schools, different type of administrative, curricular and social problems emerged and ‘solutions’ were ‘found’, whether collectively or individually – especially by head teachers at school level.

17. Bowe, Ball, and Gold (1992) distinguishes two categories of policies: writerly and readerly. The former refers to those policies that open up spaces for interpretation. The latter are more prescriptive and narrow the available interpretative options.

18. Sectores populares is a term used by academic and non-academic literature that refers to diverse urban social groups, such as the working class, the urban marginal, and the petty bourgeoisie (Roldán 2008).

19. A national and a provincial socio-educational program fosters the introduction of ‘pedagogic partnerships’ (parejas pedagógicas) as an innovative pedagogic solution to pupils’ learning and behavioural problems.

20. It is possible to trace back its first rupture to the 1980s with the elimination of academic entrance exams to secondary schools.

21. The ‘inclusive’ discursive formation is also reflected in: (1) new institutional arrangements such as the creation of alternative types of schools to ‘traditional’ ones, and national and local socio-educational programs aiming at altering traditional pedagogic methods and schools’ individualistic approach to educational engagement and behaviour; (2) the configuration of non-traditional teachers’ pedagogic identities centred around affect, care and the recognition of students’ social circumstances as central aspects of teaching and learning (author’s reference); and, (3) the emergence of educational and academic discourses in favour of the consolidation of an ‘inclusive’ secondary schooling (Terigi 2009; Tiramonti et al. 2007; Toscano et al. 2012).