Race to the classroom: the governance turn in Latin American education. The emerging era of accountability, control and prescribed curriculum

ABSTRACT

During the first years of the new century, Latin America went through significant political changes in a period of economic growth. In education, we identify a ‘regulatory governance turn’ characterised by the emergence of four policy instruments: 1-New performance-based teaching career regulations with teachers' evaluations, 2-Curricular standards and increasing regulation via textbook provision, 3-Test-based accountability based on high-stakes assessments, 4-The formation of the ‘school unit’ as an accountable decision-making body. These policies created a new regime of accountability, control, and prescribed curriculum, which was fully developed in Chile and Mexico; and substantially in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru. Our research was based on the revision of over 500 articles and policy documents, a genealogy of the trajectories of education policies, and 134 interviews in seven countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay. We present the new policy landscape and analyse the paradoxes of the increasing regulation of classroom practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Comparative education
• education governance
• education policy analysis
• Latin America
• basic education

Acknowledgments

This article is an original contribution based on a cross-national research project called ‘Mapping Education Policy in Latin America’ (MAPEAL), developed by the Centre for the Implementation of Public Policies for Equity and Growth (CIPPEC) from Argentina with the financial support of Instituto Natura from Brazil. The first stage of the research was published as a book (Rivas 2015).

We thank every person involved in the original research starting with the team from CIPPEC, integrated by Martín Scasso, Paula Coto and Pablo Bezem; and Inés Dussel, as a leading researcher in the curricular chapter of the original research. We also acknowledge the leading researchers from each country and their institutions: María Vieites and Edna Borges from the Instituto Natura in Brasil; Matías Reeves and Catalina Estevez from Educar 2020 in Chile; María Clara Ortíz Karam and Sonia Vallejo Rodríguez from Colombia; María Balarín from GRADE in Perú; Mariali Cárdenas and Armando Estrada from México; and Antonio Romano from Uruguay.

We also thank the participants of the Advisory Council of the project, integrated by: Santiago Cueto, Pablo Gentili, Andreas Schleicher, Jorge Sequeira, José Francisco Soares, Juan Carlos Tedesco, Denise Vaillant and Emiliana Vegas. They provided us with discussions and comments on several components of the original project.

Finally, we want to thank Ignacio Barrenechea for his detailed comments on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Source: World Economic Outlook (IMF).

2. Source: UNESCO Institute of Statistics.

3. Ecuador, which was not included in the study, could be added to this list as its policy instruments match those identified here with the governance turn (Baxter 2019).