Routes to Reform: Education Politics in Latin America

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.The key to sustained and equitable development in Latin America is high quality education for all. However, coalitions favoring quality reforms in education are usually weak because parents are dispersed, business is not interested, and much of the middle class has exited public education. In Routes to Reform, Ben Ross Schneider examines education policy throughout Latin America to show that reforms to improve learning--especially making teacher careers more meritocratic and less political--are possible. Several Andean countries and state governments in Brazil achieved notable reform since 2000, though on markedly different trajectories. Although rare, the first bottom-up route to reform was electoral. The second route was more top-down and technocratic, with little support from voters or civil society. Ultimately, by framing education policy in a much broader comparative perspective, Schneider demonstrates that contrary to much established theory, reform outcomes in Latin America depended less on institutions and broad coalitions, but rather--due to the emptiness of the education policy space--on more micro factors like civil society organizations, teacher unions, policy networks, and technocrats.

Table of Contents:
Preface Part I: Theory and Arguments 1. Introduction: The Contentious Politics of Education 2. Theorizing on Education Politics: Macro to Micro Part II: Reform Cases 3. Bottom-Up Reform in Chile: Electoral Mobilization, Policy Networks, and Civil Society 4. From Bottom-up to Top-down in Ecuador 5. Top Down Reform: Unions and Technocrats in Colombia and Peru 6.Union Blockage and Clientelist Backlash in Mexico, South Africa, Rio de Janeiro Part III: Comparisons and Conclusions 7. Brazil: Innovating in the States 8. Parties, Coalitions, and Routes to Technical Education 9. Conclusions Appendices (B-E online) A. Interviews B. Ministers of Education: Technocrats or Politicians C. Governors and Parties in Brazil, 1999-2022 D. Protests and Demands in Education E. Civil Society in Education Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Ben Ross Schneider is the Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of the MIT Chile program. Prior to joining MIT in 2008, Schneider taught at Princeton University and Northwestern University. Schneider's teaching and research interests fall within the general fields of comparative politics, political economy, and Latin American politics. His books include Business Politics and the State in 20th Century Latin America (2004), Hierarchical Capitalism in Latin America: Business, Labor, and the Challenges of Equitable Development (2013), Designing Industrial Policy in Latin America: Business-Government Relations and the New Developmentalism (2015), and New Order and Progress: Democracy and Development in Brazil (Oxford University Press, 2016). He also has published on topics such as democratization, technocracy, education politics, the developmental state, business groups, industrial policy, and comparative bureaucracy.

Review :
Anyone who studies education seriously understands that both the quantity and quality of public educational services provided by various societies and how societies allocate those services among social classes is heavily influenced by politics. In this valuable book, Ben Schneider helps us understand how politics has worked to promote educational reforms in Latin America Robust, thorough, and interesting. In Routes to Reform, Schneider asks the right questions and provides clear answers to how politics affects efforts to design and implement education outcomes in Latin America, Turkey, and South Africa. His analysis is top-notch. The road of educational reform is littered with many good initiatives that were poorly implemented. In analysing success and failure, Schneider focuses on what is often overlooked: The politics of education. He shows how the laws, regulations, structures, and resources in reform are just like the small, visible tip of a huge iceberg. The much larger invisible part under the waterline is about the beliefs, capacities, motivations, and fears of the stakeholders who are involved in education. But Schneider also shows a way forward: Through understanding the true degree of resources, power, and influence the different stakeholders have over success and failure of the reform and how much they actually care about its outcome. Through building collective ownership for change. And through strengthening capacity and creating the right policy climate. Schneider's book offers critical analysis of the complex relationship between education and politics in Latin American. Importantly, Schneider provides a refreshingly nuanced and novel analysis of the diversity of forms that teachers' unions take on throughout Latin America. He also shows how the impact of teachers' unions can only be understood by examining the influence of other actors including students leading mass mobilizations, clientelist politicians, technocrats, political parties, and importantly, powerful policy networks driven by business philanthropists. The book is a great resource for scholars of educational politics in Latin America and globally.