The right to education is contested in Latin America (Feldfeber, 2020; Saforcada, 2020). In recent years, significant setbacks have been observed in relation to the more universal and comprehensive policies implemented by some of the region's governments, policies that had allowed for questioning selective institutional mechanisms and greater public accountability (Gluz, Rodríguez, and Elías, 2021). In this new scenario, neoliberal and conservative think tanks, articulated in global political networks, are repositioning themselves, advocating a single discourse. The ongoing disputes can be seen within the educational field, in new public-private partnerships and processes of endogenous privatization; in the mechanisms for outsourcing state functions; and in the centrality of new public management and its expressions linked to entrepreneurship. as well as in the dissemination of individualizing perspectives that, under the guise of resilience, emotional education, leadership, and coaching, operate simultaneously in assigning responsibility for educational trajectories and devaluing the work of teachers (Feldfeber et al., 2019; Cornejo, 2018; Saforcada, 2020; Croso and Magalhães, 2016). The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic added a critical component due to the disruption of educational trajectories and the further complexity of working conditions (Oliveira, Pereira Junior, and Clementino, 2021).

This has affected teachers, with educational policies based on the delegitimization of teaching and their unions (Saforcada, 2019). Dismantling public teacher training systems or hiring professionals from other disciplines with limited, privately sourced certifications are some of the mechanisms (Bordoli, 2022). Programs like Teach for All, which originated in the US and is being implemented in several Latin American countries, exemplify this logic (Moyá, 2022). In response, student and union resistance movements are emerging or strengthening at the national, Latin American, and international levels (Cornejo et al., 2019; Imen, 2018).

Within this framework of conservative restoration and policies that promote an educational system serving the formation of a global-colonial subject, it becomes necessary to understand the vectors of dispute and the complexity of the scenario through comparative studies that can generate knowledge at the regional level and, at the same time, contribute to the formation of groups of intellectual-researcher-activists capable of strengthening the struggle for the production of meaning 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 and regional educational agendas, as well as the specificities of each country, the policies that are deployed and the progress and shortcomings in the materialization of the right to education.

Within this framework, we present the renewal of our Working Group proposal on "Educational Policies and the Right to Education." This proposal builds upon the work carried out over more than 20 years by a group of researchers within the CLACSO framework. In particular, it revisits the lines of inquiry developed during the last two periods (2016–2019 and 2019–2022), which have gained renewed relevance in the current regional and global context.

The group comprises researchers from diverse backgrounds, not only in terms of their countries of residence (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Spain, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela) but also in terms of the different types of organizations in which they work: universities, teachers' unions, social organizations, and public policy institutions. Furthermore, a significant number of them are members of the Latin American Network for Studies on Teaching Work (Red ESTRADO), created within the framework of the Working Group itself.

Over the years we have consolidated a broad network of researchers in the field of education, especially public policy, with the common purpose of contributing to the analysis of trends in educational policy in the region, to the production of information and proposals linked to the realization of the right to education, as well as to the deployment of resistance strategies against conservative advances and the violation of rights.

In previous years, we studied the forms that post-neoliberalism took in the educational field, identifying policies regarding the expansion of rights and the recognition of new indigenous, LGBTIQ+, black, etc. groups (Gentili, 2017; Gluz et al 2018; Danani et al, 2018; Feldfeber and Gluz, 2021); we advanced in the systematization of the proposals of emancipatory social movements and showed how, along with the important advances in the materialization of the right to education during the progressive governments in Latin America, privatizing 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, 2019; Bordoli and Martinis, 2021).

In recent years, the GT has focused on the reorientations of educational policies in the region, the new agendas of the right and the place of teachers' collectives in a context of conservative restoration (Martinis and Falkin, 2017; Sverdick, 2019; Feldfeber, 2020; Gluz, Rodrigues and Elías, 2021), as well as on the emergence of the pandemic, which profoundly affected educational trajectories and the conditions of teachers' work (Gluz, Rodrígues and Elías, 2020; Feldfeber, 2021).

This proposal seeks to continue and deepen the lines of work deployed by the GT, organized into three thematic axes:

1) Social inequalities and educational policies

Analysis of the complexity of the inequalities hidden behind school overcrowding and its articulation with a stratified expansion that educational policies can deepen or mitigate.

2) Old and new forms of privatization of education

Study of the old and new dynamics of privatization and commodification of basic and higher education in the region.

3) Teacher training and employment policies

Analysis of the reconfiguration of global regulatory devices for the teaching profession that standardize the task of teaching and promote a socially and culturally decontextualized pedagogical model.

In turn, we have defined five cross-cutting dimensions for the study of policies and the right to education:

1. Historical perspective on the recognition and struggles surrounding the right to education.

2. Feminist and intercultural perspectives in relation to policies and the right to education

3. Conceptual issues regarding the right to education.

4. Policies and current situation in basic education.

5. Policies and current situation in higher education.

We understand that this matrix of thematic axes and transversal dimensions configures a broad and deep work project for this new period of the GT.

The link between educational policies and the right to education is of central importance to the potential for expanding substantive democracies in our region. While we do not believe that education alone can solve all social problems, we do understand that it plays a key role in the broad and critical development of those who will participate in building just and equitable societies.

The sphere of knowledge production is central to the promotion of these social and educational processes. The proliferation of think tanks and other centers of discursive production makes it necessary to deepen the spaces for constructing critical theory capable of revealing their ideological intentions and challenging their construction of political, social, and educational meanings.

It is from this position that we maintain the three lines of work on which we intend to carry out the actions of the GT in the next three years.

1. 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 phenomenon of "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. Different ways of conceiving and acting politically on inequalities demarcate distinct conceptions of social, political, and economic rights and their guarantees, impacting the realization of the right to education. These differing perspectives include those that propose policies of decommodification and decommunitarianization to expand the commons (Feldfeber and Gluz, 2021), and those that place the conditions for enjoying the right to education on the individuals themselves, their decisions, efforts, and capabilities (Vilas, 2006; Gluz, 2018). Education becomes a field of dispute for equality in the face of policies that limit the rights of citizens (Martinis, 2022; OXFAM; 2018; Oliveira, 2018, Dubet, 2015)

Hence the relevance of academic contributions to understanding the political and multidimensional nature of inequality. Therefore, we aim to generate information on the dynamics 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). We are interested in analyzing both globally structured mechanisms and devices, as well as those that specifically affect the realization of the right to education in each country, in collaboration with the various research teams and observatories that comprise the Working Group. We will also pay attention to how the consequences of the pandemic continue to affect the right to education (Oliveira, Pereira Junior, and Clementino, 2021).

2. New and old forms of privatization and commodification of education

This line of research proposes the study of traditional modes of privatization (deregulation of the school market, transfer of services from the public to the private sector, financing of private provision), as well as the new dynamics that characterize this process (standardization through external tests coordinated by the OECD, increasingly significant participation of companies and NGOs in the field of public education, and the growing expansion of public-private partnerships). These dynamics develop alongside other recent processes of ideological control that return the politicization of issues such as comprehensive sex education to the private sphere (Castro, 2017; Frigotto, 2017). Another expression of this process is the inclusion of education among the tradable services in free trade agreements. Regarding this issue, the research proposes a critical examination of the consequences in terms of the commodification of education systems. (Saforcada et al, 2022; Oliveira et al, 2017; Cornejo, 2018; Bordoli et al, 2017)

We will continue to coordinate with movements that are working against the advance of privatization processes, such as the campaign against privatization carried out by Education International and IEAL, in line with the work produced in recent years (CLADE, 2014; Duhalde and Feldfeber, 2016. Feldfeber et al, 2018; Feldfeber, Caride and Duhalde, 2020).

3. Teacher training and employment policies

In current hegemonic discourses, the decline in educational quality is presented as an indisputable truth (Barroso & Carvalho, 2011). This argument underpins the standardized assessments that organizations like the OECD produce, apply, and disseminate (Feldfeber et al., 2018), holding teachers responsible for the results.

This dual trend (declining 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 that cast teachers under suspicion. These are new modes of regulation that permeate teacher training and practice (Birgin & De Marco, 2021). 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, 2014), 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, numerous forms of resistance and alternative projects have developed over the last two decades, drawing on long-standing regional traditions. Social movements, self-managed teacher movements, parent-teacher cooperatives, and unions play a leading role in teacher training and practice. These groups advocate for significant intervention in the public sphere to defend schools and their staff. Furthermore, it is important to mention the development of the Latin American Pedagogical Movement, a space for reflection, dialogue, analysis, and the construction of alternative pedagogical approaches.

Within these lines, we propose to deepen the production of knowledge about teaching work and teacher training policies, in line with previous work of the GT and its most recent production (Birgin, 2020; Feldfeber, 2020)

These three thematic axes will be addressed, in order to delve deeper into conceptual and analytical aspects, through five transversal dimensions: 1. policies and current situation in basic education; 2. policies and current situation in higher education; 3. historical perspective on the recognition and struggles surrounding the right to education; 4. feminist and intercultural perspectives; and 5. conceptual issues on the right to education.