The proposal from the Working Group (WG) on Educational Policies and the Right to Education continues the lines of work that have been developed within the CLACSO framework for the past two decades, especially the active WG approved in the 2016-19 call for proposals. This group comprises researchers from different countries in the region who have historically come together around CLACSO's Working Groups and the Latin American Network for Studies on Teaching Work (Red ESTRADO), created within that framework. Researchers from projects and research groups at national universities in various countries—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Spain, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay—as well as teachers' unions and observatories in the region, converge here.

Over the years, we have consolidated a broad network of researchers in the field of education, particularly in public policy. The studies we conduct share the common purpose of contributing to the analysis of educational policy orientations and trends in the region, to the production of information and proposals related to the realization of the right to education, and to the development of resistance strategies against conservative advances and the violation of rights.

In previous years, we studied the forms that post-neoliberalism took in the field of education, identifying policies regarding the expansion of rights and the recognition of new groups such as Indigenous people, LGBTQ+ individuals, and Black people (Gentili, 2017; Gluz et al., 2018; Danani et al., 2018). We made progress in systematizing the proposals of emancipatory movements (popular social movements, the Latin American pedagogical movement, networks and campaigns for the right to education, among others). We also demonstrated how, alongside the significant advances in realizing the right to education during progressive governments in Latin America, privatizing, hierarchical, and exclusionary tendencies persisted in our educational systems. In fact, while several countries enacted new education laws, only a few made progress in redefining the institutional framework of the bureaucratic-administrative apparatus and the ways in which public policy is implemented, while others continued to deploy neoliberal policies based on market rationality (Saforcada and Vassiliades, 2011; Oliveira, 2015; Feldfeber and Oliveira, 2016; Feldfeber and Gluz in press)

In the last period, the GT dedicated itself to producing knowledge about the reorientations of educational policies in the region, discussing the agendas that were being defined and the place of teachers' collectives in a transition phase from progressive governments to governments led by right-wing, conservative and neocolonial social forces (Sverdick, 2018; Martinis and Falkin, 2017) that were building a community of ideas that made it possible to access the government initially via what some authors call "soft coups" and then assume a central position in electoral contests (Borón, 2013; Davies, 2016)

In this context, a setback is observed in the design of more universal and comprehensive policies that had guided some of the region's governments and that had enabled a questioning of selective institutional mechanisms and greater public accountability. Neoliberal and conservative-inspired think tanks are repositioning themselves and forming global political networks that advocate a single discourse. In the educational field, this is evident in new public-private partnerships; in the outsourcing of state functions; in the centrality of new public management and its new expressions linked to entrepreneurship; as well as in the dissemination of new individualizing explanations that, under the guise of resilience, emotional education, educational leadership, and coaching, operate simultaneously in assigning responsibility for students' trajectories and in devaluing the pedagogical work of teachers (Feldfeber et al., 2019; Cornejo, 2018; Saforcada, 2018; Croso, 2016).

This has primarily affected the teaching profession, initiating and/or perpetuating educational policies based on the delegitimization of teaching and educators' organizations (Burns and Luque, 2014). Strategies such as dismantling state-run teacher training systems or hiring teachers trained in other disciplines and promoting them with alternative certifications are some of the mechanisms currently in place. Programs like Teach for America, which originated in the US and was later implemented in several Latin American countries under the name Teach for All, exemplify this logic. 

In response, student resistance movements and teachers' unions are also emerging and/or strengthening at the national, Latin American and international levels (Cornejo et al. 2019; Imen 2018).

Within the context of a conservative restoration and policies that promote an educational system serving the formation of a global-colonial subject, it becomes necessary to understand the complexity of the scenario through comparative studies. These studies can, on the one hand, produce and disseminate knowledge regionally and, on the other, contribute to sustaining the Working Group's commitment to forming a core of intellectual-researcher-activists capable of strengthening the struggle for the production of meaning—a fundamental dimension for a cognitive subversion aimed at emancipation—and contributing to popular struggles for the realization of the right to education. We propose situating our knowledge production within the framework of political struggles for a more just social order, accompanying the understanding of the new dynamics of the production and reproduction of inequalities with renewed analytical frameworks.

We maintain a comparative perspective that makes it possible to reveal both the common patterns and the social actors that dispute the definition of global educational agendas, as well as the specificities of each of the countries, the policies that are deployed and the progress and shortcomings in the materialization of the right to education

Our interest is focused on the study of education in the context of social and political processes in the region and in each country, considering the specific public policies under development, the actors in dispute, and the resistance movements.

Three central axes organize the analysis and exchange and give continuity to the work developed over these years

1) Social inequalities and educational policies

The Working Group has been analyzing the complexity of the qualitative inequalities hidden behind school massification and its articulation with a stratified expansion that educational policies tend to deepen or attenuate, and which we intend to understand in articulation with the other two axes of analysis.

2) Old and new forms of privatization and commodification of education.

The proposal is to continue the work carried out together with national and international trade union organizations on studies that reveal the new and subtle dynamics of privatization and commodification, while strengthening participation in campaigns against privatization such as the one carried out by Education International.

3) Teacher training and employment policies

The persistence and reconfiguration of global mechanisms regulating the teaching profession, which standardize the task of teaching and promote a socially and culturally decontextualized pedagogical model that deepens the coloniality of knowledge, is a central focus of analysis. Research and exchanges of experiences articulated around the ESTRADO Network and the Latin American Pedagogical Movement guide the studies and debates in this area.

Educational policies and social inequalities.

The extraordinary concentration of global wealth in the hands of an elite and its acceleration since 2010, as well as the “captured democracies” (OXFAM, 2018), significantly affect Latin America, which remains the most unequal region in the world despite the public policies of redistribution and social recognition implemented by progressive governments that have made it possible to reduce poverty, though not necessarily inequality. Different ways of conceiving and acting politically on inequalities demarcate distinct conceptions of social, political, and economic rights and their guarantees, affecting the realization of the right to education. These differing perspectives include those who propose policies of decommodification and decommunitarianization to expand the commons, and those positions that place the conditions for enjoying the right to education on the individuals themselves, their decisions, efforts, and capabilities—positions characteristic of the new right wing, which focuses its actions on individuals rather than on the contexts and relationships in which they live (Vilas, 2006; Gluz, 2018). Education becomes a field of dispute for equality in the face of policies and social dynamics driven by elites that limit the rights of citizens (OXFAM; 2018; Oliveira, 2018, Dubet, 2015)

Hence the relevance of academic contributions to understanding the political and multidimensional nature of inequality. It is a matter of demonstrating how inequality affects “bodily well-being (vital equality) and personal autonomy (existential equality, particularly with regard to ethno-racist and familial gender structures)” (Thernborn, 2017). Regarding this issue, we propose to generate information on those dynamics that are central to our analysis of how structural discrimination underlies the processes of socialization and the construction of gender, ethnic, and socioeconomic stereotypes in the school setting: the accumulation of advantages and mechanisms of conditional expansion; inter-institutional hierarchization/fragmentation; and the forms that exclusion from school and knowledge takes (Gentili, 2017; Bottinelli, 2017; Saraví, 2015). It is important to analyze both the globally structured mechanisms and devices and those that specifically affect the realization of the right to education in each country, in conjunction with the various research teams and observatories that make up the group. 

New and old forms of privatization and commodification of education

Studies on the various forms of privatization and commodification promoted by global neoliberal education policies since the 70s and 80s (USA, UK, Australia, Chile) have demonstrated the results in terms of inequality, segregation, and fragmentation of the school system (Ball and Joudel, 2008; Ball, 2009). This line of research proposes the study of traditional modes of privatization, such as the deregulation of the school market, the transfer of services from the public to the private sector, and the financing of private provision; as well as the new dynamics that characterize this process, such as standardization through external tests coordinated by the OECD, the increasingly significant participation of corporations (including banks) and NGOs in the field of public education, and the growing expansion of public-private partnerships. Educational pre-packaged programs; software; Textbooks, the adoption and/or purchase of international educational models, the flexibilization of certain aspects of teachers' work, quality assessments, and the promotion of language and dynamics characteristic of the business world are some of the dimensions to be studied in order to make these processes visible not only locally but also regionally and transnationally. These are dynamics that can be characterized as neocolonialism, along with other recent processes of ideological control that return the politicization of issues such as comprehensive sex education, or the conception of pedagogy as a political matter in movements against what they call "gender ideology" throughout the region, or projects like Schools Without Parties in Brazil (Castro, 2017), to the private sphere. Another expression of this process is the inclusion of education among the tradable services in free trade agreements. Regarding this issue, it is proposed to critically examine the consequences in terms of the commodification of systems. (Verger et. al, 2016; Verger et. al, 2017; Oliveira et. al; 2017; Cornejo 2018; Bordoli et. al, 2017)

Finally, we will continue to coordinate with movements working against the signing of these treaties and the various privatization mechanisms, such as the anti-privatization campaign being waged by Education International globally and EI-AL at the regional level. We have produced knowledge in conjunction with social and labor movements to denounce privatization processes and their negative consequences (CLADE, 2014; Duhalde and Feldfeber, 2016; Feldfeber et al., 2018). 

Teacher training and employment policies

In the hegemonic discourses promoted by governments, international organizations, and other agencies in Latin America, the decline in current educational quality is presented as indisputable (Barroso and Carvalho, 2011). This argument underpins the standardized assessments that these same institutions produce, administer, and disseminate (Feldfeber et al., 2018), along with the attribution of responsibility for these results to teachers. The World Bank maintains that “the quality of a school is defined by the quality of its teachers” (Burns and Luque, 2014).

This dual trend (deterioration of quality, increased accountability for teachers) is, on the one hand, generated by increasingly sophisticated assessment technologies (Tenti Fanfani, 2009) linked to the production of public distrust (Rosanvallon, 2007), and on the other hand, by a proliferation of discourses, texts, and media interventions that place teaching under suspicion. These are new modes of regulation that permeate teacher training and practice. Teacher training is affected because new agendas are being designed focusing on the content prioritized by PISA, emotional education, and responsibility for one's own learning (Birgin, 2019; Martinez, 2018). In the case of teaching work, this is because it is regulated by the omnipresence of external evaluations (Sisto, 2011), continuous training through standardized platforms, and statutory modifications that make employment precarious (Oliveira, 2005; Saforcada, 2012). Added to this are civil society movements and ecclesial groups that seek ideological and political control of teaching work and the curriculum (Alvarenga et al, 2019; Frigotto, 2017).

In response, multiple forms of resistance and alternative projects have developed over the last two decades, drawing on long-standing regional traditions. Teacher training proposals (both initial and ongoing) from social movements play a leading role in teacher education. In the labor sector, self-managed teacher movements, parent-teacher cooperatives, and regional unions have all engaged in a strong public struggle to defend schools and their workers. Furthermore, it is important to mention the development of the Latin American Pedagogical Movement, a space for reflection, dialogue, analysis, and pedagogical development driven by diverse sectors and organizations of educators. This movement seeks to present alternative proposals to the privatization policies and the perpetuation of inequalities promoted by the neoliberal perspective (Education International, 2013).