Educational policies and the right to education
The proposal of CLACSO Working Group on Educational Policies and the Right to Education It continues the lines of work that have been developed within the framework of CLACSO for two decades, especially the active GT approved in the 2016-19 call.
This is a collective of researchers from different countries in the region who have historically coalesced around the CLACSO 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 from 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
- Social inequalities and educational policies: The GT 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 that we intend to understand in articulation with the other two axes of analysis.
- Old and new forms of privatization and commodification of education: It is proposed 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.
- Teacher training and employment policies: The persistence and reconfiguration of global mechanisms regulating the teaching profession, which standardize the teaching task 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.
coordinate
Nora Beatriz Gluz
Institute for Human Development
National University of General Sarmiento
Argentina
Cibele Maria Lima Rodrigues
Directorate of Social Research
Ministry of Education, Federal Government
Joaquim Nabuco Foundation
Brazil
Rodolfo Elias
Research for Development.
Paraguay
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