Mapping the tendencies towards privatization of education in Latin America and the Caribbean

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Blaise Warren
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1 Mapping the tendencies towards privatization of education in Latin America and the Caribbean Presentation by the Latin American Campaign for the Right to Education (CLADE) Contact information: Panel: Costs and benefits of private education: Evidence from Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. CIES March, 14 th 2014, Toronto, Canada. This paper is a summary of the research entitled Mapping the tendencies towards privatization of education in Latin America and the Caribbean. The mapping was coordinated by the Latin American Campaign for the Right to Education (CLADE), along with a team of researchers from University of Campinas, in Brazil, led by Professor Theresa Adrião. The mapping was made possible thanks to the support of Open Society Foundations. CLADE is a civil society network present in 15 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, whose mission is to act in defence and promotion of the human right to education. As we understand, education must be free, available for all and the States must be both responsible and accountable for its provision. Also, citizens must participate in the design and monitoring of public policies regarding education. To speak about public education is to speak about a structured system designed to promote public debates and public interest. Public education is thus characterized as a locus of encounter, in which democratic principles prevail, without discrimination of any kind including age, belief, birth, class, race, ethnic or social origin, culture, disability, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, geographical location, language, marital status, pregnancy, religion, social status and wealth biased discrimination. In contrast, private education tends to be more restrict than public education in terms of access and permanence and to impose conditions that not necessarily will correspond to the principles listed above. This is actually a prerogative of the private: the possibility to establish its own rules, according to private interests. Privatization of education, which should not be mistaken by the simple existence of private schools, is a process in which activities and responsibilities are transferred from public to private institutions. It always involves the risk of letting private interests including profit prevail over the

2 public ones. This is why we say privatization of education represents a mitigation of public education. Stephen Ball has identified two kinds of privatization in regards to education: in short, the so-called exogenous privatization consists in the presence of private sector in public schools (as a partner or a service provider); the socalled endogenous privatization occurs when public schools start to act like businesses in what refers to management, but also to internal decisionmaking processes. To those, a third kind could be added: the privatization of decision-making processes regarding education policies. According to the Campaign, it happens when education policies and practices start to be defined according to corporate interests, thus contradicting the very definition of public good. In Latin America and the Caribbean, privatization of education benefits from a general weakness in terms of regulation. Although the region is characterized by a diversity of scenarios in which various kinds of privatization take place, the lack of appropriate regulation and public debates around privatization of education is a common pattern, which was confirmed by the research Mapping the tendencies towards privatization of education in Latin America and the Caribbean. This mapping comprehends privatization processes in 14 countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, Peru, Dominican Republic, Mexico and Nicaragua. It was based in three major procedures: 1- Analysis of legislation, in order to assess the legal frameworks regarding private education and its regulation. 2- Analysis of the enrolment ratio according to public or private school attendance (for early pre-primary, primary and secondary education) 3- Tracking of the main corporate actors in public-private partnerships by country. In addition to those procedures, a survey was conducted with members of nine civil society coalitions for the right to education and a group of academic researchers from Latin America and the Caribbean. The survey contributed to the purpose of identifying regional trends regarding the privatization of education. The period of reference for this research extends from 2007 to The primary sources of information consulted were available in public, official databases for each country, as well as UNESCO databases.

3 In terms of regional trends, it may be inferred that in most of the countries, analyzed legislation acknowledges the existence of forms of public-private partnership in education. It also establishes a series of procedures regarding the transference of public resources to the private sector. One point that deserves attention is that some of these documents even redefine public education in order to give legitimacy to public-private partnerships. According to such documents, public education is the education offered by any kind of institution receiving public financing at any level. Another trend that could be observed is that in most of the countries analyzed the private enrolment ratio is inferior to the public enrolment ratio. Whereas this information suggests a preference for public education, it also deserves more attention, especially when discussing regulation of education sector. According to Adrião, corporate interests have perceived this preference as an opportunity for businesses supplying products and services regarding public education. Besides the profits earned through the provision of such items, they also experiment an increasing in the values of their private equity funds according to enrolment rates in public education. A third regional trend emerging from the mapping is related to the corporative governance of education, or the strong presence of corporate networks in the education policies decision-making spaces. It was possible to identify the presence of such networks in 13 of the analyzed countries. Many organizations participating in these networks are active in more than one country. The corporations also finance specific programs carried out by governments, usually when they represent a chance to recover their investment afterwards. Behind the regional trends, lays a diversity of national scenarios. It is important to highlight some of them. Countries like Chile and Peru have national legislations that actually foster privatization and authorize profit in education. As a consequence, Peru has experienced a rise in private education provision and enrolment over the past 15 years. In 2010, 43% of the city of Lima enrolment in basic education was in private schools. In Chile, the General Education Law legitimates the existence of subsidized private schools and sets the rules for the provision of public resources to private schools, which are also allowed to profit from education. The establishment of a voucher-type government subsidy in the 80 s has produced an increasingly stratified school system in Chile on the basis of socioeconomic status, and it also generated a crisis in public education.

4 Brazil figures in the mapping as an interesting example of private-public partnership. Through a national program called ProUni, the State concedes full of partial scholarships, so students enrolled in private universities can pay for their education. While such program has contributed to improve access to superior education, it also represents the main source of income to many private universities. In the meanwhile, public universities struggle to survive with insufficient resources. Also in Brazil, governments are purchasing packages of education programs from private actors (usually, the owners of private education groups) what means these actors are assuming governments responsibility of defining policies and the curricula of schools. In Colombia, the city of Bogotá possess currently 50 colegios in concesión, or public schools whose management was transferred to non-profit organizations. These schools are usually administered by religious groups, without regulation, and they are known for their curriculums emphasizing religious values what means they tend to exclude students whose values differ from the schools values. Ecuador has also adopted the model of colegios in concesión and the General Education Law in this country also allows the transference of public resources to such schools. In Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, as well as in Haiti, the governments responded to the difficulty of reaching rural and indigenous areas by introducing a mode of public financing for community schools. Nevertheless, these schools are usually affected by the lack of resources and regulation. Although Haiti was not part of the mapping, it is important to note that this country is virtually affected by the inexistence of public education, 90% of its education being private, with no regulation. As a result, this is a highly stratified school system, on the basis of socioeconomic status, and also a highly excluding one. Two exceptions must be mentioned. Costa Rica s basic education is mostly public and this country does not accuse a strong tendency towards privatization. Nevertheless, the private sector is highly present in superior education. Finally, the mapping did not find privatization processes in course in Bolivia, although the country s legislation does not exclude the possibility of public financing to private education. Evidently, each one of these national contexts could be analyzed more deeply what opens a vast array of possibilities for further research. Anyway, the mapping revealed itself to be an important thermometer on the current tendencies towards the privatization of education in Latin America and the

5 Caribbean and in that sense it constitutes in itself an important instrument for political advocacy. It is clear that the privatization of education in all its forms remains an invisible issue in terms of public debates in Latin America and the Caribbean. This is why from CLADE s perspective, the mapping also revealed the urgency of amplifying the national and regional visibility of such an issue.

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