EDUCATION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS (original) (raw)

EDUCATION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS

FERNANDO REIMERS

OVERVIEW

Despite more than a century of intermittent progressive policy rhetoric, schools in Latin America still marginalize the children of indigenous groups, of rural populations, and of the poor. This paradox of a resilient conservative school practice and progressive education policy rhetoric is explained by conflict among policy elites, first on the priority of educating the children of the poor at high levels more generally and second on the purposes of schooling, and by the ensuing discontinuities in policy and weak implementation of progressive aspirations.

Because educational results take time (it takes a while to build new schools, to change curricula and print new books, and for teachers to learn new ways), and because the linkages between policy rhetoric and policy implementation and outcomes also take time, the conditions in Latin American educational institutions reflect the tensions between two competing education ideologies and the cumulative influences of past projects. One ideology, a series of progressive ideas and projects, espoused that schools should build an inclusive and democratic social order, whereas another ideology, a series of conservative ideas and initiatives, saw the purposes of schools as supporting an authoritarian and exclusionary social structure. This chapter examines these time lags, tensions, and coexistence of contradictory ideologies in school practice to explicate why education policy

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1. I appreciate the generous feedback of John Coutsworth, Manuel Contreras, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Julie Reuben, and Rosemary Thorp to a draft of this chapter. Susan Kenyon provided valuable editing suggestions. ↩︎

implementation often trails policy talk in Latin America, and why shortterm victories of progressive views in policy rhetoric had limited consequences for the actual learning opportunities of marginalized children.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the nations of Latin America differed from most of the nations of Europe and the United States in the relatively low level of education of their populations and, in particular, in the deep education divides that separated the elites from marginalized groups. In spite of state-led efforts to expand access to public education, the twentieth century ended with equally important educational schisms between the Latin American nations and their northern neighbors, as well as internal divides based on social class, ethnicity, and location of residence.

This failure to close internal and external education gaps resulted from the failure of economic and political elites to reach consensus on the need to provide the children of the poor with real learning chances that would prepare them to master the core subjects in the curricula, to think for themselves, and to develop political voice and agency and from the limited channels through which the poor could hold education policymakers accountable for the learning opportunities available to their children. The centralization of education decision making early in the twentieth century weakened the voice of local communities in the affairs of schools. 1{ }^{1} Education thus became an arena ready to be captured by powerful interests, the subject of national politics rather than of community politics. Because democratic politics were exceptional throughout the century, poor parents and local communities had limited means to hold the state accountable for the dismally low learning chances available to their children. In addition, the low levels of education of poor parents themselves limited their ability to recognize the poor quality of the instruction offered to their children. It was thus that the public purposes of school systems were captured to serve the narrow interests of economic and business groups, teacher unions, politicians, and education bureaucrats. 2{ }^{2}

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1. 1{ }^{1} Carlos Newland attributes this to a profound mistrust of national governments on the part of local officials and to the structure of public financing, which depended on taxes levied on foreign trade. Carlos Newland, “Spanish American Elementary Education, 1950-1992: Bureaucracy, Growth and Decentralization,” International Journal of Educational Development 15:2 (1993): 103-24.
   2{ }^{2} There are two consequences of this lack of participation by poor parents and communities in educational governance. One is that their needs could not influence the availability and type of education for their children. It was then difficult to replace existing educational institutions with local efforts reflective of community needs and aspirations. A second consequence of the centralization of educational governance, as has been pointed out by David Plank and colleagues for Brazil, is that it could then serve the private interests of politicians and bureaucrats, stimulating corruption and clientelism. David Plank, Jose Amaral, and Antonio da Ressureição Xavier, "Why Brazil Lags Behind ↩︎

Education policy was shaped by three sets of political actors and processes: first, by national politics in which education reform was embedded. Second, by the political mobilization and exchanges of actors with vested interests in education: namely, parents, students, teachers, and administrators. Last, education reforms were influenced by cross-national and global forces as local political groups, social entrepreneurs, and international actors and institutions mobilized ideologies and resources to advance their objectives. Because of the centralization of educational governance, national-level politics and transnational influences played a greater role than local school or district-level politics in shaping the purposes of schools during the twentieth century. 3{ }^{3}

Throughout the twentieth century, the state became the most important actor in an unprecedented expansion of access to formal education in Latin America. 4{ }^{4} The main gains of the progressive projects were in this quantitative expansion. The struggle for equity was also played out, though with far less success, in reforms that aimed to incorporate into school the most marginalized groups. The oldest of these reforms, those directed toward indigenous and rural children, were highly contested, resulting in the persistent educational marginalization of these groups. The most recent of these reforms also competed with objectives to enhance the efficiency of the education system: reforms that were advanced preferentially by governments and politicians building alliances with external actors and institutions. Throughout the century, there was least progress in aligning the content of the curriculum with the aspiration to educate free minds and democratic citizens. This chapter discusses how politics shaped the struggle for educational opportunity in these various reforms.

To study the struggle between these two competing ideologies, I look at policy rhetoric, implementation, and outcomes as they illuminate the arenas where this struggle took place. Contestation generally began with the policy agenda. The paper trail of constitutions, laws, declarations, and

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1. in Educational Developments," in Nancy Birdsall and Richard Sabot, eds., Opportunity Foregone. Education in Brazil (Bahimore, MD, 1996), 117-46.
   3{ }^{3} It is possible that this “top heavy” emphasis of my analysis results from my focus on public education and on large-scale reform. I have not focused on small-scale, grassroots, and local educational initiatives where perhaps the politics are different. My choice of perspective is based on the fact that, as I demonstrate in this chapter, the state became the major agent in sponsoring education throughout the century.
   4{ }^{4} Not all education takes place in formal educational institutions. Informal and nonformal efforts play a very important role in the creation and re-creation of roles and expectations of culture and socialization and of the social and cultural capital of different social groups. ↩︎

education plans is the dominant focus of analysis in this chapter. This focus is complemented by examination of implementation, particularly as reflected in specific policies, programs, and projects and in changes in quantitative indicators of opportunity to access educational institutions as well as in changes in the educational attainment and achievement of the population.

THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC EDUCATION BEFORE THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

States became actors in the development of education because policy elites thought schools could contribute to larger social purposes, a basic tener of the progressive education ideology. Throughout the twentieth century, states supported the development of schooling for a variety of purposes, including “modernizing” societies, preparing human resources to increase the productivity of the labor force, developing national identity, or transforming the structure of opportunity and fostering social mobility, and only rarely to form democratic citizens. The twentieth-century competition between the progressive and conservative education projects focused on those objectives, on who should be educated and how, on the duration and financing of compulsory education, and on who should attend other levels and types of education and for what purpose. More recently, the differences also revolve around whether special initiatives should be supported to reach marginalized groups.

The conservative educational ideology reflected long-term trends established in colonial times. This ideology saw education as instrumental to reinforcing existing social stratification and organization. Those who thus saw their privileges as dependent on the educational marginalization of large groups of the population supported education policies with distinct exclusionary goals. 3{ }^{3} These ideas were advanced by elected officials, often authoritarian rulers, educational institutions, and a dominant culture that perceived the children of the poor as inferior, thus justifying educational apartheid.

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1. 3{ }^{3} For an extended discussion of the contribution of elite values, reflecting a feudal structure, to the underdevelopment of Latin American societies, see Seymour Lipset, “Values, Education and Entrepreneurship,” in Seymour Lipset and Aldo Solari, eds., Elites in Latin America (Oxford, 1967), 3-60. For a more recent discussion, see Howard Wiarda, The Soul of Latin America (New Haven, CT, 2002). ↩︎

During the twentieth century, this conservative ideology was challenged by a progressive alternative, which sought to expand the learning opportunities of marginalized groups. The roots of the progressive view extend back to the independence movement and to the creation of the modern republics. The operators of progressive projects were modern political parties and coalitions between an emerging group of industrialists and the newly incorporated political actors: migrants into cities and immigrants in the countries in the south. The main gains of the progressive project were the creation of public education systems; universalization of primary education; unprecedented educational expansion at all levels, with consequent intergenerational educational mobility; and a silent revolution that significantly diminished the gender gap in educational opportunity.

Whereas the conservative ideology saw education as an instrument to preserve the birth rights of elites in unequal societies, the progressive view 6{ }^{6} saw it as instrument to build a new social order, a new American identity, and, only episodically and more recently, a more just and inclusive society. The conservative view accepted that social origin should also be social destiny and that education would mediate this by excluding subdominant groups from certain levels of education or by expecting schools to develop a limited range of skills among the poor. In contrast, the progressive view espoused that schools could develop talent among all children and that in so doing they could alter the distribution of social opportunities. Often, progressives espoused broader expectations for the skills and dispositions that schools should develop, at times focusing on educating democratic citizens, whereas conservatives remained more interested in having schools prepare people for work.

The competition between these perspectives predates the twentieth century. The main progressive legacies of this early period were an ideology and a legal and institutional framework supportive of public education and of compulsory primary education. Conservative legacies included the social acceptance of unequal educational opportunities for different social groups and of education practices, especially at the lower levels, emphasizing

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1. 6{ }^{6} The roots of the progressive education ideology in Europe are in the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century and of the Unspians, Thomas More and Francis Bacon, in the sixteenth century. They established the intellectual foundations to link education and social reform. In the United States, John Dewey in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries articulated most clearly the links between education and social change. Many see him as the main figure of Progressive Education, which is linked to a larger movement of social reform known as the Progressive Movement. The roots of Progressive Education in North America predate Dewey, extending back to the ideas of Horace Mann and Francis Parker in Massachusetts. ↩︎

obedience to authority (magister dixit) and conformity, rather than independent and critical thinking.

The most established educational institutions in pre-Columbian times served to educate the ruling elites of the people of Mesoamerica and of the Incas. 7{ }^{7} This conservative ideology was replaced by another conservative set of ideas of the Spanish colonizers, who also saw the function of the (new) educational institutions as to educate the (new) elites, the Spaniards and criollos. A combination of royal mandates and religious initiatives laid the foundation for the first schools in the Spanish colonies in the Americas. The colonial conservative education view also sought to extend the Catholic faith among the people of the Americas and, consequently, the submission to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Religious orders were the first to establish and run schools and universities from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

Although it is possible to find some examples of progressive educational initiatives during this period, their scope was modest. In 1792, for example, Fray José San Alberto, Archbishop of La Plata, established the Escuela de Niñas Pobres San Alberto in Chuquisaca. 8{ }^{8} An alternative movement, led by the Jesuits, educated indigenous people in the reductions of Bolivia and Paraguay. This education for self-reliance, along with the reductions per se, was interrupted by the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767.

The dominant policy throughout much of the colonial period was one of educating the elites, and educating them for obedience to authority. The Royal Cedula of 1785 of King Carlos IV established that it was not desirable to “illustrate the Americans.” “His Majesty does not need philosophers, but good and obedient subjects.” 9{ }^{9} This Cedula authorized boroughs (parroquias) to establish religious schools, which would also teach basic literacy for the children of Spaniards and criollos.

The creation of universities for the elites was the most significant educational development of this period. As a result, universities had long been

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1. 7{ }^{7} In the Valley of Mexico, the Mexicas had separate schools for the nobles (calmecac) and the commoners (telpocheall). They instructed in the arts of war, in religious rites, and possibly in trades related to the productive specialization of the calpulli. Outstanding educational achievement allowed some commoners to ascend in the social structure. See Pablo Escalante, Educación e ideologia en el México antiguo (Mexico City, 1985), 17. Also see Alfredo López Austin, La educación de los antiguos nahuas (Mexico City, 1985), 26-8. In the Inca empire, selected women received segregated education in Aflawacs. The houses of knowledge, the Yachaywasis, were reserved for the nobles. José Juárez and Sonia Comboni, eds., Sistema educativo nacional de Bolivia (La Paz, 1997).
   8{ }^{8} Juárez and Comboni, eds., Sistema educativo nacional de Bolivia.
   9{ }^{9} Ibid. ↩︎

established and consolidated by the time national public education systems were created in the nineteenth century.

The struggle between the conservative and progressive ideologies was embedded in the larger political competition between conservatives and liberals, with liberals advocating the expansion of universal public primary education and challenging Church dominance, and conservatives espousing education controlled by the Church. In Colombia and Ecuador, for example, the dominance of the Church in the provision of education, an education that mandated teaching of Catholicism, was supported by a landed oligarchy of political conservatives. 10{ }^{10} In Mexico, after independence, liberals and conservatives agreed on the importance of education, but disagreed sharply after 1824 on the role of the Church and freedom of instruction. Although the Mexican liberals initially opposed the intervention of the state in education, in the 1830s, they proposed state-led education as a way to curb the dominance of the Church and of the conservatives. 11{ }^{11}

For the best part of the first three centuries since the establishment of the Spanish colonies in the Americas, the notion that education served to legitimate a social order and the existing social structure was unchallenged. The independence movement and the emergence of the new republics in the late 1700 s and early 1800 s introduced alternative expectations for schools.

The 1800 s were characterized by political battles among different elite groups. In some cases, these battles resulted in changes in the structure of the economy. Economic reorganization, and the accompanying urbanization, provided a receptive context for the implementation of a different educational ideology. This new ideology no longer saw educational institutions as the bulwarks of the agricultural social order of the past. Rather, educational institutions were seen as the heralds of a new urban and industrial society and as the gateways through which new social groups would move upward to senior and mid-level leadership positions in the economy and in the new political and administrative institutions.

Two core related ideas emerged in the nineteenth century that formed the basis of the developments of the twentieth century. The first was a challenge to the dominance of the church in the conduct of education (the Church, loyal to the Spanish Crown, identified with the conservative

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1. 10{ }^{10} José H. Serrano, ed., Sistema educativo nacional de la República de Colombia (Madrid, 1993), and Carlos Poveda, ed., Sistema educativo nacional del Ecuador (Quito, 1994).
   11{ }^{11} Germán Alvarez, ed., Sistema educativo nacional de México (Mexico City, 1994). ↩︎

movement). The intellectual foundation of the independence movement, which advocated an egalitarian ethic and independence of inquiry and thought, also challenged a Church identified with an authoritarian social order and with religious dogma as superior to human reasoning as basis for the construction of truth. The second idea, originating in the early period of independence, was that all should have access to primary education and that the state had a responsibility to provide that access. This idea took hold and found its way into new education laws and, in several cases, into the constitutions of the new republics. As the independent nations consolidated during the nineteenth century, the ambition of universal, publicly provided primary education gained acceptance throughout Latin America.

The postindependence movement brought clear expectations that education be central in the formation of the new Americans’ identity and in the inclusion of heretofore marginalized groups of the population for social participation. This progressive aspiration coexisted with the conservative view that saw divided education (education for the new elites, but only fundamental instruction to mestizos and the lower classes) as appropriate. The French Revolution influenced the South American independence movement with the ideals of Freedom, Equality, and Justice, shaping the aspiration to universalize access to primary education. Simón Bolívar, well versed in the works of Rousseau and the Utopians, wrote eloquently about the pivotal role of education in the newly independent nations. Two of his teachers and close associates, Simón Rodríguez and Andrés Bello, played key roles in shaping the new ideology of the role of education in the newly independent nations.

As first president of Bolivia, Bolívar appointed Simón Rodríguez as first Director General of Public Education. In a decree dated December II, 1825, they established that education, which must be general and for all, is the first duty of the government and that the health of the republic rests on the moral dispositions that the citizens acquire in schools at an early age. 12{ }^{12} In 1835 , Ecuador, another of the republics that gained independence from Spain as part of the same movement, adopted the first law of public education, establishing the directorate of education and an inspectorate system.

As a result of the influence of Bello and Sarmiento, in the mid-nineteenth century, most public schools in Chile were aimed at providing literacy skills to poor children. 13{ }^{13} Table in.I summarizes the first legal documents to recognize universal public primary education as a state responsibility.

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1. 12{ }^{12} Juárez and Comboni, eds., Sistema educativo nacional de Bolivia.
   13{ }^{13} Ivan Nuñez, ed., Sistema educativo nacional de Chile (Santiago, 1993). ↩︎

Table in.i. First legal documents proposing universal primary education in Latin America

Sources: José Juárez and Sonia Comboni, eds., Sistema educativo nacional de Bolivia (La Paz, 1997); José H. Serrano, ed., Sistema educativo nacional de la república de Colombia (Madrid, 1993); Olman Ramírez, Sistema educativo nacional de Costa Rica (Madrid, 1997); Ivan Nuñez, ed., Sistema educativo nacional de Chile (Santiago, 1993); Germán Alvarez, ed., Sistema educativo nacional de México (Mexico City, 1994); Ministerio de Educación de la República del Perú, Sistema educativo nacional del Peru (Lima, 1994); Enid Pérez, Sistema educativo nacional de Venezuela (Caracas, 1995).

This victory of progressive policy was soon followed by the creation of institutions that would make it possible to implement national education policies. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the creation of incipient national education systems and structures. This was also a time when the new nation-states launched large-scale education initiatives in

curriculum design, provision of educational materials, and teacher education. These initiatives provided the intellectual, legal, and organizational foundation that made possible the massive expansion of the twentieth century.

Transnational exchanges supported the development of public education as foreign educators played advisory and management roles in support of the emerging public education systems, facilitating the exchange of ideas, instructional materials, and practices. Venezuelan-born Andrés Bello was the first rector of the Universidad de Chile. At the time, the university was in charge of the supervision of the public education system. It trained teachers and developed curricula. Bello was among those who first advocated for education and cultural institutions to shape a new identity for the new Americans. The grammar of the Spanish language he developed challenged Spain’s Royal Academy of the Language by recognizing how language was used in Ibero-America. As rector of the Universidad de Chile, Bello instituted a contest to encourage essays on the kind of primary education system that would best fit the American social, political, and economic project. 14{ }^{14}

Argentine-born Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, also working in Chile, won this contest with an essay that argued for the common school (Educación Común), a mandatory and free center for the formation of the political identity of all the citizens of the newly independent nations. Sarmiento’s ideas on the common school were very influential in Chile (where he directed the first teacher training institution), then in Argentina (where he became Minister of Education and President) and Paraguay. 15{ }^{15} Through the works of some of his followers, like José Pedro Varela in Uruguay, these ideas extended to other countries as well. 16{ }^{16} Sarmiento visited Massachusetts, to learn firsthand of the efforts of Horace Mann to build a broad-based coalition to garner support for the “common school” and became a friend of Horace’s wife Mary Peabody Mann, with whom he maintained an active correspondence focusing on educational, scientific, and political development. 17{ }^{17} Sarmiento brought the first teachers from the United States to

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1. 14{ }^{14} Gregorio Weinberg, “Andrés Bello,” in Zaghloul Morzy, ed., Pensadores de la educación (Paris, 1993), 84 .
   15{ }^{15} Hector Bravo, “Domingo Faustino Sarmiento,” in Pensadores de la Educación, 506-7.
   16{ }^{16} Marta Demarchi and Hugo Rodríguez, “Jose Pedro Varela,” in Pensadores de la Educación, 71954 .
   17{ }^{17} Barry Velleman, ed., My Dear Sir: Mary Mann’s Letters to Sarmiento (Buenos Aires, 2001). ↩︎

Argentina. The first Argentine textbooks were translated from English and French.

The translation of textbooks and curricula and the reliance on education advisors from nations with more established public education systems were resources commonly used by those working to establish public education systems. In Bolivia, school curricula in 1879 were translated from Dutch curricula for primary schools and French textbooks of Guillet-Damitt were adopted as official textbooks. A Belgian educator directed the first normal school in Bolivia, established in 1909, with collaboration from a delegation of Chilean educators. Colombia received technical assistance from a group of German educators who, in 1867, advised the National Directorate of Public Instruction. Teacher training institutions were set up following the German model at the time. In the late nineteenth century, Ecuador, too, received a mission from Germany to reform teacher training institutions and demonstration schools and, later on, to reform the curricula.

In Chile, during the 1880s, German educators ran the teacher training institutions (escuelas normales) and reformed primary education. In 1889, they established the Pedagogical Institute to train secondary school teachers, which would later be incorporated into the Universidad de Chile as part of the faculty of philosophy and education.

Chile, in turn, through exchanges and technical assistance, supported the development of public education in other countries in Latin America. At the beginning of the twentieth century, for example, the Bolivian government provided scholarships to teachers for training in Chilean institutions. Chilean missions of education advisors worked in Bolivia at the beginning of the century with the Directorate of Primary Schools and of Languages. A group of Chilean teacher trainers also worked in teacher education. In 1935, a group of Chilean educators arrived in Costa Rica to advise on the reform of basic and secondary education and in the reestablishment of the university.

THE INTENSIFICATION OF EDUCATION POLITICS DURING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The first half of the twentieth century served to consolidate the national systems of public education initiated in the latter part of the previous century.

This resulted in an increasing centralization of education governance, severing existing ties between schools and local governments. The struggles between liberals and conservatives continued, with the conservatives representing the interests of the landed oligarchies under attack by the emergent industrialists. The specific education strategies advocated by each group changed as interests on the social outcomes of education changed. Over time, conservatives came to accept the emphasis of liberals in providing universal elementary instruction once it no longer challenged the distribution of social and economic privileges. As education strategies converged, the struggle between conservatives and liberals moved to new terrains. By the middle of the twentieth century, for instance, there was widespread acceptance of the desirability of providing universal primary education, originally a progressive idea, although this expansion was soon followed by a growing social segmentation of primary schools as a result of quality disparities. The consensus reached by elites on the importance of universal access to elementary education was not reached with regard to the purposes of that instruction and, consequently, with regard to issues of curriculum content or pedagogy. As a result, while there was subsequent progress in expanding the educational attainment of the population and in closing attainment gaps among social groups, there was not the same progress in addressing the quality of instruction or in closing quality gaps. With segemented tiers of quality at the elementary level, social divides moved up to secondary and tertiary levels or instruction as some primary school graduates were deficiently prepared to continue their education at higher levels. The victory of 100 years of progressive advocacy for universal primary education thus took place at a time when the most relevant educational levels for economic mobility became secondary and tertiary education.

Once national systems were established, all countries in Latin America began national programs of education reform. As had been the case since independence, education reforms had a clear political motivation and expressed larger political projects. As one reform rapidly succeeded another and as political competition increased, the gaps between policy rhetoric, implementation, and results increased. 18{ }^{18}

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1. 18{ }^{18} The gaps between education policy rhetoric and implementation have been observed in other regions beyond Latin America. Tyack and Cuban, for example, examining a century of education reform in the United States, conclude that the basic grammar of schooling has proved quite resistant to policy-induced change. David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia. A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge. MA, 1995), 85-109. Mark Hanson suggests that the gap between policy and implementation is particularly large in Latin America and attributes this to the fact ↩︎

The policy-implementation gap was particularly large with regard to those policy objectives upon which there was less social consensus, namely the incorporation of marginalized groups and rural and indigenous children, and with regard to providing high quality instruction to the poor. The achievement of equal educational opportunity was the most contentious of all goals proposed for education in the twentieth century. This is the reason for the large gap we observe today between progressive rhetoric and implementation results. Policy elites did not agree that equal opportunity and outcomes were desirable and they disagreed on what equality of educational opportunity meant.

The twentieth-century reforms directed at equality of educational opportunity have been of two kinds. The first and most significant reform was an unprecedented educational expansion, which established the supremacy of public education. This policy of state-led educational development came to be known as the Estado Docente and was the main victory of the progressive project during the century. The second set of reforms specifically targeted marginalized children to receive more resources, attention, and special programs. These reforms were highly contested and did not last long. The most recent iteration of these reforms was initiated during the 1990s, amidst growing emphasis on cost cutting and improving educational efficiency and competitiveness.

Undermining the gains of the quantitative expansion was a growing process of social segmentation in educational institutions. The children of dominant groups became gradually concentrated in institutions that excluded those who had gained access to education as a result of progressive victories. This social segregation occurred through patterns of residential segregation, institutional practices of discrimination in public schools, and the flight of privileged groups to private institutions. The sharp social segregation of schools struck a serious blow to the vision of the “common school” developed by the founders of public education systems, first by expanding

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1. that the colonies had to implement laws and regulations designed in Spain. Recognizing that the rulers had imperfect knowledge of the reality they were ruling over, local authorities would resort to the practice of “se acata pero no se cumple” (we accept the ruling but do not comply). Mark Hanson, Educational Reform and Administrative Development. The Cases of Colombia and Venezuela (Stanford, CA, 1986), is. Another way to interpret the facts observed by Hanson is that local elites had sufficient autonomy to advance their own agenda at the implementation stage even though the process of policy formation constrained their ability of doing so at the policy-design stage. Examples of this implementation gap were the dispositions of Kings Ferdinand the Catholic and Charles I which compelled the encomenderos to educate indigenous people in the encomienda but which were never implemented. Raul Bolaños, “Orígenes de la educación pública en México,” in F. Solana, R. Cardiel, and Raul Bolaños, Historia de la educación pública en México (Mexico City, 1981), 13-14. ↩︎

divided, rather than common, institutions, and second by allowing the development of unequal tiers of quality in these separate schools.

Progressive ideas gained space in policy rhetoric, and also action, during the first half of the century, when the confrontation with a conservative ideology was overt and when these ideas were part of a broader political struggle aimed at resolving conflicts between competing groups in society. Beginning in the 1950s, a modernizing ideology (desarrollismo) spread rapidly throughout Latin America. The dominant import substitution industrialization strategy, an ideology of state-led development, the growing process of urbanization, and the gradual mobilization of the emerging middle classes all supported educational expansion. 19{ }^{19} Important gains in access to education at all levels resulted from this convergence of social, political, and economic forces.

In the 1960s, as political elites turned to authoritarian governments to demobilize some of the most radical political groups, however, education was purposefully emptied of its progressive political content. Then a new desarrollismo emerged toward the late 1960 and 1970s; one that equated development with economic growth and that was silent about human rights, democracy, and social change. The purposes of schools would no longer be to form democratic citizens but obedient workers. Schools would focus on developing skills for economic industrialization while they conserved the values of a traditional authoritarian and stagnant social order. This emerging ideology weakened what had been a powerful mobilizing, organizing framework and rendered it helpless to resist the penetration of a neoconservative agenda during the 1980s. As import-substituting elites and politicians, who had made their careers under state-led development, came under siege during the 1980s, the struggle for equal educational opportunity suffered the most serious setback in the century. Expanding access to those groups not yet in school at each education level took a back seat to the concern with improving the quality of education and the efficiency of how education monies were spent. The purposes of schools narrowed in yet another way, by emphasizing fewer academic subjects and, in practice, low-order cognitive skills.

Neoconservatives advanced a renewed faith in markets as the best mechanisms to regulate collective action, including the distribution of public

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1. 19{ }^{19} The expansion of state bureaucracy, along with the new industries created during the century. contributed to the creation of the jobs for the new middle classes, who in turn demanded more education for their children. ↩︎

goods and services. With states under attack, public education was under stress. Public education funding was cut sharply under structural adjustment programs. The quality of education, which had already been stretched by the rapid expansion of the previous decades, declined. Efficiencyenhancing education reforms and a new concern with “quality” spread rapidly. 20{ }^{20} There was a renewed emphasis on streamlining the curriculum to basic subjects (language, math, and sciences). The new emphasis on quality was, however, intellectually flawed. In practice, quality came to mean achieving the intended objectives of the curriculum without examining whether those objectives were relevant to the new political challenges of democratic citizenship or to the new economic challenges of high valueadded competitiveness. Quality was understood more as effectiveness in achieving the objectives of the curriculum than as examining the level and pertinence of those standards. Schools were again primarily to train workers that could contribute to economic competitiveness in low-productivity industries, rather than citizens who could make societies more democratic. The century ended with renewed rhetoric addressing equality as an objective and with incipient efforts to redress the growing education divides. Unlike the ideologies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, these ideas were now embedded within larger reforms seeking to improve efficiency and were lukewarm about, when not directly opposed to, state-led educational development. They also lacked the synergies resulting from association with broader political agendas, parties, and social movements that could mobilize educationally marginalized groups.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, three countries most clearly represented those where a new economic and political order supported progressive education ideas: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. In these countries, the successful export-oriented economy and associated urbanization and large-scale immigration paved the way for a state-led national education system that sought to quickly develop a national, modern identity among

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1. 20{ }^{20} These were also the emerging concerns of education elites in the leaders of the neoconservative movement in the OECD, namely the United States and Great Britain. Some have argued that the United States sought to extend this new set of priorities to countries under its political influence. John Bock and G. Arthur, “Politics of Educational Reform: The Experience of a Foreign Technical Assistance Project,” Educational Policy 5:3 (September 1991): 312-28. Also, see Gary Orfield, “Policy and Equity: Lessons of a Third of a Century of Educational Reforms in the United States,” in Fernando Reimers, ed., Unequal Schools, Unequal Chances (Cambridge, MA: 2001), 402. Others have suggested that international banks, such as the World Bank, reflecting interbureaucratic politics, dominated by economists who shared the tenets of the neoconservative agenda, supported reforms with very narrow objectives and strategies. See Karen Mundy, “Educational Multilateralism and World Disorder,” Comparative Education Review 42 (1998): 448-78. ↩︎

all. The purpose of elementary school was largely political. An inclusive ideology spread - one that openly espoused equality of educational opportunity as a foundation of the new society. Those distant historical influences are still reflected in the higher levels of educational attainment of people in these countries and in greater educational equality relative to other countries in the region.

In Argentina between 1914 and 1930, most children gained access to elementary school. 22{ }^{22} In Chile, during the second half of the nineteenth century, enrollments in primary school increased tenfold and by 1887 , one in five children in the age group six to fourteen was in school. The expansion of education continued, in part as a result of the autonomy of the education system from larger social forces, and accelerated between 1965 and 1974 as part of two political projects - a Social Christian project under Eduardo Frei and a socialist project under Salvador Allende. This expansion would stop during the military regime of Augusto Pinochet. 23{ }^{23}

The creation of a mass-based public education system and the transition from a church-dominated to a state-dominated education system were not without conflict. Church-state relations mediated the consequences of this conflict for the new educational legislation supporting the establishment of the Estado Docente. 23{ }^{23} In Colombia, beginning in the 1930s, the state had to overcome overt resistance from the church and private groups in the integration of gender-segregated schools and in fostering greater socioeconomic integration in schools. 24{ }^{24} In Chile, the 1925 Constitution separated church and state and upheld the principle of freedom of teaching while establishing that education was a preferential matter of the state. These changes were opposed by the oligarchies, contributing to the political instability that led to the coup of 1931. 25{ }^{25}

Every political transition proclaiming radical change was accompanied by an education reform, although some of them were short-lived. In 1917, Costa Rican President Gonzalez Flores’s reformist agenda included an education reform aimed at increasing the links between schools and the

[1]

1. 22{ }^{22} Dario Pulfer and Ana Vitar, eds., Sistema educativo nacional de Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1991).
   23{ }^{23} C. Rodríguez, “Chile: System of Education,” in Torsten Husen and Neville Postlewhaite, eds., International Encyclopedia of Education (London, 1994), 738-46. See also Ivan Nuñez, ed., Sistems educativo nacional de Chile.
   23{ }^{23} T. Bruneau, The Political Transformation of the Brazilian Catholic Church (Cambridge, 1974); Daniel Levine, Churebes and Politics in Latin America (Beverly Hills, CA, 1980); and I. Vallier, Casinlicism, Social Control and Modernization in Latin America (New York, 1970).
   24{ }^{24} Serrano, ed., Sistema educativo nacional de la República de Colombia.
   25{ }^{25} Nuñez, ed., Sistema educativo nacional de Chile. ↩︎

productivity of small farmers. It sought to generate funding in farm-schools. This reform was highly contested by teachers, parents, and public opinion, and eventually by members of Congress. 26{ }^{26} The 1952 Bolivian Revolution of Victor Paz Estenssoro included education reform among the four core pillars of the revolution (along with nationalization of the mines, agrarian reform, and universal voting rights). The reform’s emphasis was to extend education to rural areas, to strengthen national identity. It created a code of education with participation of the confederation of workers, the church, private schools, and the National University. 27{ }^{27} At mid-twentieth century, the states in Costa Rica and Venezuela made educational expansion a cornerstone of democracy consolidation projects and, in the case of Cuba, of socialism. Peru would follow with an ambitious reform in 1968 that was to support a broader project of socialist political and economic restructuring. All of these countries expanded educational access significantly in the early years of the political transition.

In 1957, Costa Rica approved an education law (Ley Fundamental de Educación), which articulated a rationale for education as part of a democratic project. Venezuela’s democracy turned to schools as an instrument to reshape the nation. Primary enrollment growth increased from 7 percent per year prior to 1958 to more than 20 percent per year in the years immediately following the democratic transition. Secondary school enrollment growth doubled in this period. Growth in university enrollments increased from 12 percent per year in 1957 to 60 percent in 1959.281959 .{ }^{28}

The Cuban socialist revolution turned to education early. A 1959 education law established the creation of ten thousand classrooms and another law of December of the same year established a framework for a comprehensive education reform. These reforms increased primary education enrollments from under 50 percent in 1959 to 90 percent in the first few years of the revolution. A massive literacy campaign in 1961 and followup adult education programs targeted the more than one million adults who could not read in 1959 ( 23%23 \% of the adult population) and virtually eliminated illiteracy. A 1962 university reform law established preferential admission policies for the children of peasants and workers.

[1]

1. 26{ }^{26} Olman Ramírez, Sistema educativo nacional de Costa Rica (Madrid, 1997).
   27{ }^{27} Manuel Contreras argues that the Bolivian Education Reform of 1952 was an afterthought of the revolution and that its results failed to match its rhetoric (personal communication, January 13, 2003).
   28{ }^{28} Fernando Reimers, “Venezuela: System of Education,” in International Encyclopedia of Education, 6592. ↩︎

The Peruvian education reform of 1968 , under a socialist military government, sought to create a “new Peruvian man” in line with the aspirations of the revolution. The goals of the Peruvian education reform were to contribute to work and development, the structural transformation of society, and the creation of a self-reliant and independent Peruvian nation. This reform was highly contested, particularly its most transformative proposals calling for education for collectivist organization in farming communities and bilingual education policies. The reform restructured and expanded basic education and restructured administration in rural areas in education clusters.

Because education was so clearly perceived as serving political purposes, authoritarian governments turned to schools to facilitate acceptance of the new order. Throughout much of the twentieth century, educational institutions fulfilled their traditional role of reinforcing traditional authoritarian institutions, rather than the incipient and contested democratic practices.

Universities were particularly affected by authoritarian governments of the right or left because they often provided oppositional leadership. In Venezuela, the Central University was purged by the Christian Democratic administration in the early 1970 because the armed leftist insurgency received support from some university students and faculty. During the same period, the National University in Uruguay provided leadership to radical political opposition and was consequently targeted by security forces under authoritarian rule. The military that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983 also closely scrutinized university faculty members and students for ties to the insurgency that developed during the last few years of Perón’s regime. Many of the “disappeared” during the guerra sucia were members of the university community. The military government that ruled in Chile from 1973 to 1990 targeted universities as part of efforts to demobilize political opposition. Under the intervention of military rectors, universities shut down entire social studies programs. Many members of the academic community fled Chile in fear for their safety under the military regime. In El Salvador, toward the end of twelve years of civil war, the entire leadership of the Catholic University was assassinated by elite counterinsurgency battalions because they were perceived to provide moral leadership to the opposition during the conflict, which ended in 1992. At the end of the twentieth century, the authoritarian government of President Chávez in Venezuela actively sought to control universities to demobilize political opposition and proposed legislation that greatly increased their control by the executive. The greatest levels of ideological control on the university

community were those exerted by the regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba, where the Communist Party controlled faculty appointments, freedom of speech in universities, freedom of faculty members and students to associate and travel abroad, and employment prospects of graduates. The authoritarian intervention of universities, the constraints to academic freedom, the physical annihilation and prosecution of scholars and students, and the use of terror toward the university community (part of the larger political struggles that marked Latin America during the twentieth century) had dire and long-lasting consequences on the ability of public universities to fulfill their missions.

THE POLITICS OF BASIC EDUCATION EXPANSION DURING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND ITS RESULTS

The growth of public access was greatest in primary education because more consensus was reached among elites on the importance of extending opportunity at this level. Conflict was greater regarding the need to foster equality of access to secondary and tertiary institutions, and access in those levels correspondingly did not grow as much as it did in primary. Also, a greater percentage of students in those levels enrolled in private institutions, indicating that social demand exceeded the capacity of public institutions. But the challenges to the idea that all children should receive a quality education continued throughout the century, often overtly, most commonly in the benign neglect that produced dismal conditions in the schools attended by the children of the poor. As recently as 1991, a former minister of education of Venezuela 29{ }^{29} argued in a publication of the National Education Council, an advisory body of the Ministry of Education:

Faced with the choice of providing a first rate education to a third of the population or a mediocre education to all, I would not vacillare. I would choose a first rate education for a third of the population, because that third of the population would pull the country forward. 30{ }^{30}

Legal and constitutional changes in several countries during the 1980 s and 1990 sought to reduce state responsibility for the provision of

[1]

1. 29{ }^{29} Venezuela is one of the Latin American countries that made educational expansion an important priority during the democratic transition beginning in 1958.
   30{ }^{30} Arturo Udar Pietri, “Las dos opciones del arcangel,” Consejo Nacional de Educacion. September 6, 1991. ↩︎

education. The military government in Chile introduced drastic education reforms in the 1980s that transferred educational management to the municipalities and fostered the development of private schools through a voucher financing scheme. These, as well as the previous reforms of the national curriculum and the changes in the universities, were locked into place by an educational law passed on the last day of the military in office (March io, 1990): the Ley Orgánica Constitucional de Enseñanza (Ley 18.962). This law created a public corporation, the Consejo Superior de Educación, which includes a representative of the armed forces and with a composition that gives limited power to the executive. This body has final authority to approve fundamental changes in education, including the curricula and the creation of universities or the approval of fields of study within universities. A legal change of this nature can only be revoked by another law that would require a majority in Congress. As a result, the governments that have been elected in Chile since 1990 have been unable to alter the structural changes made by the previous administration.

A 1991 constitutional reform in Colombia supported decentralization and the participation of private providers, while containing state responsibility for the provision of public education:

The Reform required the approval of diverse political bodies. Achieving its goals and ensuring its internal coherence meant waging simultaneous battles in sundry and changing terrains in the constitutional realm by ensuring that the text of the new Constitution agreed with the desired goals, especially those regarding the intensifying of decentralization and free and open private participation in the education process… (emphasis added)

The educational reform effort brought before the Constitutional Assembly was directed at obtaining two specific objectives. First, to ensure that general norms on education (contained in Title II of the Constitution, “About rights, guarantees, and obligations”) would concur with the government’s ideas. In this area, however, the political tasks were mostly defensive; they centered on avoiding the approval of populist proposals such as the one that would establish “free and mandatory public education for all Colombians” and other similar initiatives. 31{ }^{31}

Most of the expansion in access to primary and secondary schooling was in public institutions. By the end of the century, primary education enrollments in private schools were 42 percent in Chile; between 10 and 20 percent

[1]

1. 31{ }^{31} Armando Montenegro, An Incomplete Educational Reform: The Case of Colombia (Washington. DC. n.d.), 9-to. Emphasis added. ↩︎

in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela; and less than io percent in Costa Rica, Cuba, and Mexico. The percentage of private enrollments was much higher for secondary education, but most students were still enrolled in public institutions. 32{ }^{32} Private enrollments were the highest at the university level, with 34 percent of the students enrolled in private institutions by the 1980s. This was up from 7 percent of students in private institutions in 1955. 33{ }^{33} The educational expansion meant that most children had the opportunity to exceed their parents’ educational levels. In Mexico, for example, in 1998, 40 percent of students in the sixth grade had already exceeded their fathers’ educational level. 34{ }^{34}

The growing number of education institutions, bringing together teachers, students, and parents, were arenas ripe for the emergence of political organization. Recognizing this potential, the emerging political parties and the state co-opted many of the new unions of teachers and students. The political mobilization of education stakeholders supported educational expansion with some autonomy from larger political forces. In Argentina, the 1940 s saw schools mobilize popular sectors and the emergence of teacher unions and student unions, around the student government of secondary schools (centros de estudiantes). During the 1930s, teachers in Bolivia began to organize in cooperatives, credit unions, and associations, which formed the basis of the Liga Nacional del Magisterio. President Paz Estenssoro’s education reform of 1952 included a major mobilization of the universities, trade unions, the Church, and private schools in the preparation of the first education code. 35{ }^{35} In Mexico, all teacher unions were unified in 1943 to create the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (SNTE), recognized by presidential decree in 1944 as the only entity that could represent all teachers. 36{ }^{36} The SNTE became a very important pillar of the dominance of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional of Mexican politics in the twentieth century, and it would grow to become the largest trade union in the hemisphere. In 1947, a teaching statute was approved in Uruguay that established the Teacher Assembly as a consultative forum for education policy. It also provides the framework for political and trade mobilization of teachers.

[1]

1. 32{ }^{32} UNESCO, World Education Report. The Right to Education (Paris, 2000).
   33{ }^{33} Daniel Levy, Higher Education and the State in Latin America (Chicago, 1986), 4-5.
   34{ }^{34} Reimers, Unequal Schools, Unequal Chances.
   35{ }^{35} Juárez and Comboni, eds., Sistema educativo nacional de Bolivia.
   36{ }^{36} Alvarez, ed., Sistema educativo nacional de México. ↩︎

Although some of the politics supporting the development of mass education were domestic, these were embedded and supported by international influence and politics, as had been the case during the previous century. In the late 1940 s and 1950s, a transnational coalition of interests and developments overlapped with the interests of local elites promoting import substitution industrialization to mobilize a significant educational expansion. Two powerful ideas in the field of economics would support this expansion. The first was the identification of human capital as the key factor in the economic recovery of Europe after the Second World War. The second was the idea that development could be planned. The field of international development cooperation thus emerged during the Cold War. Multilateral and bilateral development agencies began to support, with cash and technical assistance, the economic development of allies, and this included supporting educational expansion.

Somewhat independently, beginning in the 1950s, the United Nations system established an array of organizations to support the achievement of rights outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Education was recognized as a fundamental human right and United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) took on a central role in promoting the universalization of primary education and literacy.

UNESCO convened meetings of ministers and senior staff of Ministries of Education and stimulated exchanges of ideas on how to achieve the goal of universal primary education. The Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank funded loans to finance some of the infrastructural expansion, initially of the universities, then the technical training institutions and vocational tracks in high schools and, last, the primary schools. The Alliance for Progress, too, marshaled support for the education development of the Latin nations. This unprecedented convergence of interests resulted in an impressive quantitative expansion during the century. It also resulted in the adoption of common planning methodologies, a growing domination of an economic rationale for education development and, eventually, the abandonment of the view that education was a means to support political democratization or the universalization of human rights. 37{ }^{37}

The victory of the progressive project in consolidating public education systems, albeit of low quality and focusing principally on the lower levels of education, is expressed in the fact that schools are one of the national

[1]

1. 37{ }^{37} This was particularly true as authoritarian governments came onto the scene as part of the struggle against communism that played out in Latin America during the Cold War. ↩︎

institutions in which the public had most confidence at the end of the twentieth century. A sample survey administered to adults in 1998 found that 89 percent of Chileans had much or some confidence in schools, compared with 61 percent who had similar levels of confidence in the police, 57 percent in the press, 51 percent in the government, 53 percent in the army, 43 percent in Congress, or 27 percent in the political parties. In Mexico, with overall lower levels of confidence in all public institutions, 64 percent of those interviewed expressed much or some confidence in schools, compared with 45 percent in the army, 33 percent in the police, 30 percent in the government and political parties, 29 percent in the press, and 28 percent in Congress. 38{ }^{38} The preference for public provision of education services is far greater in Latin America than in the United States. Whereas 42 percent of the adults in the United States prefer government ownership of schools, the respective figures are 51 percent in Mexico, 59 percent in Ecuador and Venezuela, 62 percent in Colombia, 66 percent in Bolivia and Paraguay, 68 percent in Chile, 70 percent in Peru, 71 percent in Costa Rica, 72 percent in Argentina and Brazil, 74 percent in Guatemala, 75 percent in Panama, and 84 percent in the Dominican Republic. 39{ }^{39}

During the twentieth century, states extended not just access to primary education, but also the duration of compulsory education, from five or six years of schooling at the beginning of the twentieth century, to eight or nine years of basic instruction toward the end. In 1967, Chile was one of the first countries to extend the duration of basic education from six to eight years and to reduce secondary education from five to seven years to four to five. 40{ }^{40} By the end of the century, the duration of compulsory education was eleven years in Guatemala and Peru; ten years in Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, and Uruguay; nine years in Argentina, Chile, Cuba, El Salvador, and Paraguay; eight years in Bolivia, Brazil, and Colombia; seven years in Venezuela; and six years in Haiti, Nicaragua, and Panama. 41{ }^{41} By comparison, the duration of compulsory schooling in Germany was thirteen years; in the United Kingdom and the United States, twelve years; and in Canada, France, and Spain, eleven years.

[1]

1. 38{ }^{38} Joseph Kleiner, “Logacies of Authoritarianism,” in Roderic Ai Camp, ed., Citizen Views of Democracy in Latin America (Pittsburgh, PA, 2001), 118-38.
   39{ }^{39} Kenneth Coleman, “Politics and Markets in Latin America,” in Ai Camp, Citizen Views of Democracy in Latin America, 185-205.
   40{ }^{40} Rodríguez, “Chile: System of Education.”
   41{ }^{41} UNESCO Institute of Statistics. http://www.uis.unesco.org/en/stats/statistics/database/DBIndex. htm, accessed June 19, 2003. ↩︎

During the twentieth century, most Latin American states delivered on the promise of providing initial access to compulsory primary education to all children. A remarkable expansion of enrollments took place during the century, far exceeding the rapid population growth. This expansion of the incipient systems of education established in the nineteenth century was stimulated by import substitution industrialization and the associated urbanization of the Latin American population. Most of this expansion was in public institutions. For the progressives, this consolidation of the Estado Docente represented a victory over an education dominated by the Church, perceived to legitimize class differences (by the preferential emphasis on educating elites), differences in gender roles (by segregated education), and acceptance of the authority of the Church. 42{ }^{42}

The number of children enrolled in primary schools increased from 15 million in 1950 to 85 million in 1997; at the secondary level, enrollment increased from 2 million to 29 million; and at the tertiary level, from 300,000 to 9.4 million. 43{ }^{43}

The expansion in the capacity to enroll children in elementary school was dramatic. In 1950, none of the countries in Latin America had enough capacity to enroll all children of primary school age in school. Most could barely enroll half of them, as indicated by the gross enrollment ratios shown in Table in.2. Only Argentina and Uruguay had gross enrollment ratios in primary school of more than 90 percent. Primary school systems were large enough to incorporate between 60 percent and 76 percent of the relevant age group in Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, El Salvador, Panama, and Paraguay. In the remaining countries, fewer than three in five children of primary school age could attend school.

The differences in 1950 enrollment rates among countries reflect varying emphases of policy over the previous fifty years. Argentina and Uruguay developed inclusive educational ideologies earlier than the remaining countries and, as a result, expanded their education systems accordingly. At the lower end of the distribution of enrollment rates, Brazil, Nicaragua,

[1]

1. 42{ }^{42} The struggle between the conservative and progressive projects took place also within the Church, especially after the Puebla and Medellin Bishops’ Conferences, where a preferential option for the poor was adopted as an official framework of the Latin American Church. Some of the progressive practices are those where Church-based education organizations and social movements partner to empower marginalized groups and communities. Examples of these practices are the work of the Society of Jesus, with popular education in marginalized communities through the organization Fe y Alogria. Although the educational practice of Church-related organizations have become more diverse since Puebla, the traditional role of Church-related educational institutions was to serve the needs of the most privileged members of the Latin American societies.
   43{ }^{43} UNESCO, World Education Report, 116, Tables 3.1, 3.2, and 3.5. ↩︎

Table 11.2. Enrollment rates in primary education in Latin America, 1950-2000

Note: For the year 2000, gross and net enrollment rates are provided. See footnote 44 for a definition of gross and net enrollment rates.
Sources: Data for 1950 are from Ricardo Nassif, German Rama, and Juan Carlos Tedesco, El sistema educativo en América Latina (Buenos Aires, 1984). Data for 1965 are from World Bank, Social Indicators of Development Database. Data for 1990 are from UNESCO, The World Education Report 2000 (Paris, 2000). All other data are from the UNESCO Statistical Database: http://www.uis.unesco.org/en/stats/statistics/database/DBIndex.htm, accessed June 19, 2003 .

Colombia, Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Haiti had more exclusionary education systems. These conditions of access in 1950 influenced the ensuing development of education systems, making it more challenging for some countries to catch up with the rest in closing access gaps.

Between 1950 and 1965, the capacity of primary education systems expanded dramatically. By 1965, the gross enrollment rate exceeded

100 percent in eight countries 44{ }^{44} (Chile, Cuba, Brazil, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Panama, Paraguay, and Argentina) and 90 percent in an additional four (Peru, Venezuela, Mexico, and Ecuador). Only Guatemala and Haiti had lower rates, at 50 percent. By the end of the century, all countries but Haiti had achieved gross enrollment rates of 100 percent and net enrollment rates were close to or higher than 90 percent in all countries but Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, and Nicaragua.

Table II. 3 shows that secondary education also expanded during the twentieth century and from a much lower base than primary. However, by the end of the century, only a handful of countries were enrolling at least two thirds of the relevant age group at this level. These countries were Cuba, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Peru, and Panama. In seven countries, fewer than two of five children were enrolled at this level (Paraguay, Venezuela, El Salvador, Guatemala, Bolivia, Haiti, and Honduras). The remaining countries enrolled between half and two thirds of the children in this age group.

Two factors constrained the expansion of secondary education. First, expansion in access at the primary level was achieved with a number of measures that reduced quality, such as reducing the duration of the school day to accommodate multiple shifts in the same building, expanding the workload of teachers to teach in multiple shifts, and reducing the quality and quantity of instructional resources per student. As a result, many of the children who gained access to primary school repeated grades multiple times; thus, the number who eventually graduated from this level was only a fraction of the number who gained initial access to primary school. Second, expansion of access to secondary school was constrained by policy. The emphasis during most of the century was on the universalization of primary education and literacy, a minimalist version of the concept of equal educational opportunity. Differences among countries at the end of the twentieth century in access to secondary school were not just a result of differences in economic resources or even of how much access had been achieved by mid-century, but reflected policy priorities. For example, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay had the highest levels of access in 1950 and 1995; they were also among the countries with highest levels of income.

[1]

1. 44{ }^{44} The gross enrollment rate is the ratio of the total number of children enrolled in a level relative to the total number of children of school-going age. Because students enrolled can be younger or older than the official school-going age, this rate can exceed 100 percent. This indicator is a proxy for access and a measure of the capacity of the school system. Net enrollment rates include only children of the official school-going age in the calculations - excluding children who are overage or underage - and are therefore a better indicator of access to education. In Latin America, there are many children who are retained in the same grade from one year to the next; these repeaters who are overage explain the large discrepancy between gross and net enrollment rates. ↩︎

Table II.3. Gross enrollment rates in secondary education (in descending order by 2000 levels in Latin America and comparator countries)

Note: See footnote 44 for a definition of enrollment rates.
Sources: Data for 1950 are from Nassif, Rama, and Tedesco, El sistema educativo en América Latina. Data for 1965 are from World Bank, Social Indicators of Development Database. Data for 1990 are from UNESCO, World Education Report. The Right to Education (Paris, 2000). All other data are from the UNESCO Statistical Database. Data for Gross National Income per Capita are from World Bank, World Development Indicators Database, http://devdata.worldbank.org/data-query/, accessed June 19, 2003. Gross enrollment data for Brazil in 2000 and for 1995, from UNESCO, World Education Report. This is because in 2000, Brazil changed the way it defined the duration of primary and secondary education for the purposes of reporting to UNESCO, lowering the first level ISCEDs from six to four years, and consequently making it impossible to compare appropriately the 2000 enrollment rates - inflated because of this definitional change - with data from previous years.

At the other extreme of the distribution, Guatemala, Haiti, and Honduras were at the low end of access and income in the 1950s and also at the end of the century. By contrast, Costa Rica, with higher enrollment rates in 1950 and a level of income comparable to Colombia, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Nicaragua, had lower enrollment rates than these countries in 1997. Another example that education policy priorities, and not just initial conditions or income, influenced expansion of enrollment rates is the difference between Brazil and Peru. Both started with enrollment rates of 6 percent in 1950, but enrollment expanded significantly more in Peru, in spite of lower levels of income.

The policies affecting primary and secondary school expansion had a significant and direct impact on the number of years of schooling attained by the population and, consequently, on literacy rates and the knowledge and skills of the labor force. Women gained significantly more than men with this expansion.

As a result of the expansion of compulsory schooling toward the end of the century, those aged fifteen to twenty-four living in urban areas in most countries had attained nine to ten years of schooling on average, as seen in Table II.4. In rural areas, people had three years less of schooling on average than in urban areas. Women had more years of schooling than men in all countries in urban areas except in Bolivia, Guatemala, Mexico, and Paraguay. In these four countries, the differences were very small, and were largest in Bolivia. The same was true in rural areas, except in Bolivia, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru.

Comparing the average years of schooling attained by all groups among those aged fifteen to twenty-four with those aged twenty-five to fifty-nine, it is clear that educational attainment grew most for women and it grew more for women and men in rural areas than in urban areas. Education levels for urban men, the group with the highest levels of education among those aged twenty-five to fifty-nine, were similar to the education profile of men aged fifteen to twenty-four. For urban women, in contrast, the younger group had, on average, 0.7 more years of school. Young rural males had, on average, I. 4 more years of schooling, whereas young urban women had, on average, more than two years more schooling than their older counterparts.

The ability of the state to support increases in the educational attainment of the population makes more blatant the persistent exclusion of some children from an education of quality that would allow them the opportunity to complete the levels that most mattered for economic and social mobility. Still, at the end of the twentieth century in Latin America, among the

Table II.4. Average number of years of school attained by different population groups circa 2000

Sources: Household surveys conducted in the respective countries and processed by Economic Commission of Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Social Pisonzana 2002-2002 (Santiago, 2002), Tables 30 and 31. Data for Argentina are only for greater Buenos Aires. Data for urban Paraguay include only Asunción.
people aged fifteen to nineteen years, 3 percent had never attended school, 13 percent dropped out of school in elementary school, 8 percent dropped out upon completing elementary education (typically six years), and 9 percent dropped out during secondary education. 42{ }^{42} As a result, one in three persons did not complete a high school education.

School dropouts are disproportionately from the poorer households, first because most of them live in villages, where people are poorer, and second because, in cities, it is the poorer children who tend to drop out. There are sharp differences in the opportunities to proceed in school

[1]

1. 42{ }^{42} Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Social Pisonzana 2002-2002 (Santiago, 2002). ↩︎

between urban and rural areas. In rural areas, the odds of never entering school are 3.5 times greater than in urban areas ( 6%6 \% vs. I. 7%7 \% ), the odds of dropping out in elementary education are 2.3 times greater ( 23%23 \% vs. II%), the odds of discontinuing school upon completion of elementary education are I. 9 times greater ( 15%15 \% vs. 7%7 \% ), and those of dropping out of secondary school are the same ( 9%9 \% in each setting). As a result of the cumulative impact of these divides, the odds of never completing a secondary education are 89 percent greater for children in villages than for those who live in cities. 46{ }^{46} These rates are based on household survey data conducted in eighteen countries in the region circa 2000: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Among those living in cities, 43 percent of the school dropouts belong to the poorest income quartile. 47{ }^{47}

As a result of high school dropout rates resulting from poverty and poor education quality, the levels of educational attainment of the population are low, and there are large gaps in the educational attainment of different social groups. These gaps further economic divisions - because most income inequality relates to educational inequality - as well as social and cultural gaps. Among those aged twenty-five to fifty-nine years old, the average years of schooling attained by those living in cities versus those living in rural areas was, respectively, ten and four in Bolivia, seven and three in Brazil, eleven and seven in Chile, nine and five in Colombia, nine and six in Costa Rica, ten and six in Ecuador, eight and three in El Salvador, seven and two in Guatemala, seven and four in Honduras, nine and five in Mexico, seven and three in Nicaragua, ten and seven in Panama, nine and five in Paraguay, ten and five in Peru, nine and five in the Dominican Republic, and eight and five in Venezuela. 48{ }^{48}

Consequent with the increase in the years of education completion, literacy rates grew significantly. Whereas by the end of the twentieth century there were still nine countries in the region where more than io percent of the population declared itself illiterate, Haiti, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador had rates in excess of 20 percent. This progress was impressive relative to the levels of illiteracy at the beginning of the century, but less so relative to the levels of illiteracy in other countries. Among the comparator countries presented in Table II.5, only two (Singapore and

[1]

1. 46{ }^{46} Ibid., 25 .
   47{ }^{47} Ibid., II. 4 .
   48{ }^{48} Ibid., 251-52. ↩︎

Table II.5. Illiteracy rate for countries in Latin America and selected comparator countries by descending order in 2000

Sources: Data for 1950 and 1960 are from Nassif, Rama, and Tedesco, El sistema educativo en america latina. All other data are from the UNESCO Statistical Database.

Portugal) had illiteracy rates as high as 8 percent. The Philippines and Thailand, for example, which in 1950 had illiteracy rates as high as Ecuador, Mexico, and Colombia and slightly lower than Brazil, had reduced illiteracy more effectively than these countries by the end of the century. In the countries with high illiteracy rates, there were more illiterate women than men. Given the fact that educational attainment on average increased more for women than for men, this suggests that the most educationally mobile women were not the most marginalized.

In spite of the expansion in educational enrollments during the twentieth century, in 1999, levels of education for those twenty-five to sixty-four years old were still very low in Latin America relative to OECD countries. In Brazil, 63 percent of the population had only a primary education or less, with an additional 13 percent having some lower secondary education. In Chile, 31 percent had primary or less and 26 percent, lower secondary education. In Mexico, the respective figures were 59 and 21 percent; in Peru, 47 and 7 percent; and in Uruguay, 53 and 16 percent. These figures compare with averages for the OECD of 16 percent with primary or less and 20 percent secondary or less. In Canada, the figures were 7 and 13 percent, and in the United States, 5 and 8 percent. In other words, on average, three in five persons in the OECD countries have attained at least upper secondary education, and in Canada and the United States, four in five persons have done so. This compares with one in five persons in Mexico and Brazil, I. 5 in five in Uruguay, and two in five in Chile and Peru. 49{ }^{49}

Furthermore, the average levels of educational attainment mask deep disparities in educational opportunities of various income groups. Table II. 6 shows the different probabilities of ever enrolling in school, to be enrolled at the age of twelve, and to have completed grades six and nine at the age of between fifteen and nineteen for the richest 20 percent, the next 40 percent, and the poorest 40 percent in several countries in Latin America. Although there are disparities in the opportunity to ever enroll in school and to be enrolled at the age of twelve, the greater disparities are in the probability to have completed sixth grade or to have completed ninth grade from the age of fifteen to nineteen, suggesting how different structures of opportunity lead different income groups to have differing education profiles.

Different ethnic groups also have varying opportunities to attain higher levels of schooling. In Brazil, for example, twenty-five- to sixty-year-old

Table II.6. Probabilities of enrollment at various levels and of attaining sixth and ninth grade by income group

Source: World Bank, Educational Attainment and Enrollment Around the World, http://www. worldbank.org/research/projects/edattain/edattain.htm, accessed June II, 2002.

whites have, on average, seven years of schooling, compared with just over four for Afro-Brazilians. In Guatemala, indigenous people have two years of schooling, compared with more than five for nonindigenous. In Peru, indigenous people have less than six years of schooling, compared with more than nine for nonindigenous. In Bolivia, indigenous people have four years of schooling, compared with nine for nonindigenous. 30{ }^{30}

A 1998 survey administered to adults in Chile, Costa Rica, and Mexico found significant differences in educational attainment by skin color. Table in. 7 shows how the gaps are greater in Mexico, followed by Chile, and are less pronounced in Costa Rica. In Mexico, morenos are 64 percent more likely than whites to have completed only primary education, and mulatos are two and a half times as likely as whites to have only an elementary education. Conversely, morenos are 59 percent as likely as whites to have a college education, and mulatos only 27 percent as likely as whites to have reached college. There are corresponding similar gaps in income by color associated with these differences in educational attainment.

Along with gaps in educational attainment between the population in Latin America and those in other countries, and the equity divides in educational attainment, Latin American education systems failed to provide opportunities to learn at high levels to most students. International comparisons suggested that the quality of education in Latin America was low in literacy, math, science, and civic education.

In spite of the improvement in self-reported literacy rates, by the end of the twentieth century, the actual reading ability of Latin America students was significantly lower than that of students in other OECD and other middle-income countries. A survey of the knowledge and skills of fifteen year olds in the principal industrialized and middle-income countries conducted in 2000 and 200I assessed to what extent students near the end of compulsory education had acquired some of the knowledge and skills that are essential for full participation in society. On average, the performance of Argentinean, Brazilian, Chilean, Mexican, and Peruvian students in reading, mathematical, and scientific literacy was at the very bottom of the achievement levels of students in all of the forty-seven countries participating in the study. 31{ }^{31} Twenty-three percent of the students in Argentina

[1]

1. 30{ }^{30} Inter American Development Bank, Measuring Social Exclusion: Results from Four Countries (2001), cited in PREAL, Quedándonos atrás. Un informe delprogreso educativo en América Latina (Washington, DC, 2001), 10 .
   31{ }^{31} OECD-PISA. The OECD Program for Student Assessment, http://www.pisa.oecd.org/ accessed June II, 2002, also http://www.pisa.oecd.org/Docs/Download/ExecutiveSummaryPISAplus.pdf. accessed July 2I, 2003. ↩︎

Table II.7. Percentage of adults by highest level of education completed by color in 1998

Source: Miguel Basanez and Pablo Paras, “Color and Democracy in Latin America,” in Roderic Ai Camp, ed., Citizen Views of Democracy in Latin America (Pittsburgh, PA, 200I), 145 .
and Brazil, 20 percent of students in Chile, 16 percent in Mexico, and 54 percent in Peru could not complete the simplest reading tasks, involving just reading words fluently, locating a single piece of information, identifying the main theme of a text, or making a simple connection. This compares with 6 percent on average for all OECD countries, and 2 percent in Canada, 4 percent in Spain, and 6 percent in the United States who could not complete the simplest reading tasks. Furthermore, only 2 percent of students in Argentina, I percent of students in Chile and Mexico, 0.6 percent of Brazilian students, and o.I percent of Peruvians are capable of completing sophisticated reading tasks. This compares with io percent of the students on average for the OECD countries, 17 percent in Canada, and 12 percent in the United States. 52{ }^{52} There are similarly large differences in mathematic and scientific literacy, with Brazilian and Mexican students scoring way below students in the remaining countries in those tests.

[1]

1. 52{ }^{52} OECD-PISA, The OECD Program for Student Assessment, Table 2.1a. ↩︎

These results are consistent with those of another international study of mathematics and science achievement of students in thirty-nine countries (the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, TIMSS). Among the thirty-nine countries participating in the study, only students in South Africa, a country suffering the heavy burden of years of apartheid, scored slightly below students in Colombia. 33{ }^{33} The results in the science test were just as poor for Colombian students, with only South African students scoring below Colombian students. 34{ }^{34}

Mexico participated in the same TIMSS study but withdrew upon receiving preliminary results that placed it at the bottom of the distribution of scores. Chile participated in a repeat round of the TIMSS study, obtaining average scores far below the international average.

There is no evidence to suggest that countries that have not participated in international comparisons would fare better than those reported here. In a comparative study of student achievement in twelve Latin American countries conducted by UNESCO in 1998, the differences in average achievement between countries were less than one standard deviation. The top achievers in the fourth grade were Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, countries that performed poorly in international comparisons. Only Cuban students achieved at significantly higher levels than their counterparts in the rest of Latin America. 35{ }^{35}

The low levels of literacy and basic skills of Latin American students reflected the poor teaching conditions that resulted from ineffective and unstable policies to support opportunities to learn. In a survey of students in third and fourth grade in a number of countries in Latin America, only some of the students indicated that they understood their teachers’ lessons consistently. The percentage of students who always understood their teachers was higher in private schools and higher in urban than in rural areas, as shown in Table in.8.

The low quality of teaching was the result of insufficient instructional materials, poor preparation of teachers and principals, and poor communication between teachers and parents. These deficiencies compounded the impact of the limited circumstances in which many poor

[1]

1. 33{ }^{33} Albert Beaton et al., Mathematics Achievement in the Middle School Years: IEA’s Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), (Chestnut Hill, MA, 1996), 23.
   34{ }^{34} Albert Beaton et al., Science Achievement in the Middle School Years: IEA’s Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), (Chestnut Hill, MA, 1996), 23.
   35{ }^{35} UNESCO-OREALC, Primer estudio international comparativo sobre lenguaje, matemática y factores asociados en tercero y cuarto grado (Santiago, 1998). ↩︎

Table II.8. Percentage of third- and fourth-grade students who reported they always understood the explanations of their teachers in a survey administered by ministries of education and coordinated by UNESCO

Source: My own calculations based on data from UNESCO-OREALC, Laboratorio Latinoamericano de la Calidad de la Educación, Primer estudio internacional comparado (Santiago, 1998).
children grew, without adequate early childcare, nutrition, and stimulation. Table II. 9 shows the percentage of elementary school children who had textbooks to support literacy instruction, the most basic subject of the curriculum. It is remarkable that in so many countries these rates are below ioo percent.

The emphasis of reform during the twentieth century on elementary education arguably undermined the development of a strong civic culture and democracy. A study of the relationship between education and democratic attitudes based on a cross-national survey of forty-eight societies, including Chile, Costa Rica, and Mexico, found that more-educated individuals were more likely to support democracy. 56{ }^{56} A separate study of the same data only for the three Latin American countries concludes that although the

[1]

1. 56{ }^{56} Alejandro Moreno, “Democracy and Mass Belief Systems in Latin America,” in Citizen Views of Democracy in Latin America, 55. ↩︎

Table 11.9. Percentage of third- and fourth-grade students who reported they had a language textbook in a survey administered by ministries of education and coordinated by UNESCO

Source: My own calculations based on data from UNESCO-OREALC, Laboratorio Latinoamericano de la Calidad de la Educación, Primer estudio internacional comparado.
majority of the adults polled do not trust other people (suggesting low levels of civic culture), the 30 percent who do trust others are significantly more educated and more likely to have reached secondary education and college. 57{ }^{57} A similar increasing marginal effect of secondary education on interpersonal trust was found by Robert Putnam in the United States. 8{ }^{8}

The emphasis of most public schools on rote learning and the limited opportunities for students to learn to think for themselves further limited the preparation of democratic citizens. How could those taught to parrot poorly understood ideas and to accept that truth rests on authority rather than on evidence and reasoning value the freedom to think independently?

The climate in most schools did not favor the development of relationships of trust among students and teachers. International studies

[1]

1. 57{ }^{57} Timothy Power, “Does Trust Matter?” in Citizen Views of Democracy in Latin America, 59.
   58{ }^{58} Robert Putnam, “Tuning In, Tuning Out: The Strange Disappearance of Social Capital in America,” Political Science and Politics 27:4 (December 1995): 665. ↩︎

Table in.io. Percentage of third- and fourth-grade students who report they trust their teacher and who say they constantly fight with classmates in a survey administered by ministries of education and coordinated by UNESCO

Source: My own calculations based on data from UNESCO-OREALC, Laboratorio Latinoamericano de la Calidad de la Educación, Primer estudio internacional comparado (Santiago, 1998). Averages for all countries surveyed, unweighted. Countries in the survey are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Dominican Republic, and Venezuela.
consistently point to classroom and school climate as important predictors of civic knowledge and participation. In a survey of elementary school students, less than a third indicated that they trusted their teacher sometimes and about a third said they did not trust their teacher. About a fourth of the students said that they constantly had fights with their classmates, as shown in Table in.ro.

Confining educational opportunity to elementary education of low quality prevented the development of civic and social capital and of democratic attitudes, which was in keeping with the conservative ideology and with the designs of authoritarian governments that saw the most important purposes of education for the masses as training workers rather than democratic citizens of good judgment, capable of independent thinking, and committed to universal human rights. Several studies of the curriculum of primary education in Latin America have found it lacking in opportunities to develop democratic attitudes or understanding of basic human rights. 19{ }^{19} Teachers often show disrespect to students and the social climate in many schools is one where students learn to mistrust and fear their teachers and classmates, rather than safe communities that model democratic practices. Elementary

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1. 19{ }^{19} Eleonora Villegas-Reimers, Can Schools Teach Democratic Values? (Washington, DC, 1993), and Civic Education and the School Systems of Latin America and the Caribbean (Washington, DC, 1993). ↩︎

school teachers were also limited role models of tolerance and acceptance of differences, important civic virtues in a democracy. A random sample survey administered to public school teachers in Mexico in 2002 revealed that one in five teachers would not allow an indigenous person or a person of another race to live in their home, a third would not accept a person of another religion, and two in five would not accept a homosexual. 60{ }^{60} Surveys administered to teachers in Argentina, Peru, and Uruguay found also a high prevalence of prejudice toward a number of groups. For instance, 34 percent of the teachers in Argentina had negative views toward homosexuals and 55 percent in Peru and 20 percent in Uruguay did too. In Argentina, is percent of the teachers, 38 percent in Peru, and in percent in Uruguay had negative views toward members of other nationalities or ethnic groups. Teachers also had negative views towards people who lived in slums, 52 percent in Argentina, 16 percent in Peru, and 33 percent in Uruguay." 61{ }^{61}

An international study of civic knowledge of fourteen-year-olds, conducted in 1998 in which Chile and Colombia participated, found that students in those countries had significant lower levels of civic knowledge and skills than students in the United States and other OECD nations. For example, almost a full decade after the transition to democracy in Chile, only half of the fourteen-year-olds in that country knew that in a democracy government is carried out by elected representatives. 62{ }^{62}

Illustrative of the lack of civic effectiveness of education reforms in Latin America are the declining rates of political engagement of young people in Chile and the low levels of civic knowledge of high schools students in this country, a full decade after the transition to democracy, after a major education reform that involved a complete revamping of the curriculum and the production and distribution of new textbooks. While a third of those aged eighteen to twenty-nine participated in the referendum in 1988, just over is percent voted in the presidential elections of 1999. 63{ }^{63}

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1. 60{ }^{60} Fundación Este País, Percepción de la educación básica. Encuesta nacional sobre creencias, actitudes y valores de maestros y padres de familia de la educación básica en Mexico (Mexico, 2002).
   61{ }^{61} Emilio Tenti Fanfani, “Les immigres a l’école. La zeonophobie des enseignants en Argentine. Perou et Uruguay,” Instituto Internacional de Planificación de la Educación, Buenos Aires, 2003. http://www.iipe-huemosaires.org.ar/pdfs/docentes-inmigrantes\_frances.pdf, page 4.
   62{ }^{62} Judith Torney-Purta and Joanne Amadeo, Strengthening Democracy in the Americas through Education. Organization of American States, Washington, DC, 2004. http://www.oas.org/udsel ingles2004/executive_summary-fin.pdf.
   63{ }^{63} Cristian Cox, “Formacion ciudadana y educación escolar. La experiencia chilena,” presented at VII Reunión de la Red de Educación, February 17 and 18, 2005, Washington, DC. ↩︎

THE POLITICS OF UNIVERSITY REFORM DURING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND THEIR RESULTS

Established during colonial times to prepare the religious, political, and intellectual leadership of the Americas, universities are the oldest of Latin America’s educational institutions. The struggle between progressives and conservatives had limited impact in universities in that access to higher education remained elusive for the majority of the population in Latin America throughout the twentieth century. However, faculty and students at different times during the century framed the nature of the debate between progressives and conservatives and shaped ideas on how countries should develop, as well as what role universities should play in the development process. As part of this debate, universities opened limited access to the children of the emerging middle classes.

The public university emerged to challenge the dominance of the Catholic university. The university reform movement, begun in Córdoba in 1918, called for the autonomy of universities as a way to position them as critical interlocutors of the state. This reform, advocating greater academic freedom for faculty, would be gained with open and public contests for teaching positions. In the 1920 and 1930s, the “autonomous” universities emerged.

For most of the twentieth century, traditional public universities continued to be centers of recruitment and socialization of political leadership, as they had been in the past. They frequently challenged the state and accounted for more than one political transition. In Venezuela, for example, during the 1950s, much of the resistance to the military regime was organized by the university student movement. The key leaders of the modern political parties were leaders of the student movement. The same was true in Peru in the 1950s.

The progressive victory in universities during the twentieth century was in a limited expansion in access, which resulted in significant intergenerational educational mobility, not for the most excluded but for a small fraction of the urban middle classes. By the end of the century, the percentage of the population aged twenty-five to fifty-nine years with a college degree averaged 6 percent, and an additional 6 percent had some technical qualification reflecting some higher education. 64{ }^{64} During the century,

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1. 64{ }^{64} Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Social Panorama 200I-2002, 74. ↩︎

institutional differentiation and experimentation grew, which produced, at the same time, institutions of very high and very low quality. Some of the new institutions, many of them private, served to accommodate an unmet demand at low cost. By contrast, some of the new institutions, the experimental universities, received significant financial support from the state and from the private sector, to provide high-quality instruction with less politics than traditional public universities.

The inability of the majority of the population to access higher education and the growing social segregation and isolation of public universities reflect a multifaceted victory of the conservative project through various complementary processes. One of these was the relatively low growth of enrollment in this sector. In 1997, 9.4 million students attended higher education institutions in Latin America. Although on the surface this is a remarkable increase over the 300 thousand students enrolled in 1950, it is a very modest increase relative to the 70 million increase in primary education enrollments during the same period. During the 1980s, just as a college education became more important than ever to aspire to leadership positions and for social and economic mobility, access to this level became more constrained. The ratio of primary to university students, which had declined sharply from forty-five in 1950 to thirteen in 1980, changed only slowly to nine in 1997. The corresponding changes in the ratios of secondary to university students declined from seven to three between 1950 and 1980 and did not change thereafter. 65{ }^{65} As shown in Table in.II, by the end of the century, access to tertiary education in Latin America was significantly more constrained than access in comparator countries, a continuation of a trend characterizing most of the century.

In the mid-century, higher education was truly an opportunity for the elites, ranging from 6 to less than I percent of the relevant age group enrolled at this level. Access expanded most during the 1960 and 1970s. In spite of this expansion, by the end of the century, access to higher education was lower in Latin America than in comparator countries. Whereas more than half of the relevant age group attended a tertiary institution in Korea, the United States, Canada, Spain, Belgium, France, Portugal, and Italy, only Argentina had similar levels of access; in the rest of the countries, less than a third of the students had access to college.

Private institutions grew to fill the demand unmet by public universities. Authoritarian governments supported the expansion of private universities

[1]

1. 65{ }^{65} These figures are derived from Table in.I in this chapter. ↩︎

Table II.II. Gross enrollment ratios in tertiary education ranked by access in 2000

Source: UNESCO Statistical Database, accessed June 19, 2003.

as a convenient alternative to the more politicized and radicalized public universities, and elites saw them as convenient alternatives to protect their children from political radicalization. 66{ }^{66} These processes led to a growing social stratification of students in public and private universities and made it possible for economic and political elites to abandon public universities to the deadly mixture of underfunding, excessive isolationism, and management by incompetent demagogues because many public universities had systems of governance that rewarded political entrepreneurship over academic merits. The results curtailed the potential benefit of having achieved access to this level.

To sum up, some things changed while much remained the same during the twentieth century in Latin America. Education systems expanded, and the number of people declaring themselves to be literate increased. However, illiteracy levels remained higher than those of countries in Asia, Europe, and North America and the demonstrated reading proficiency and academic skills of Latin American students were at the bottom in all international comparisons. The opportunity to enroll in schools and universities also increased, but access to secondary and tertiary education was significantly lower than in other regions. The educational attainment of the population changed only modestly as a result of the educational expansion of the second half of the twentieth century. There were differences between countries in educational outcomes and access. Although some of these reflected earlier commitments to a progressive project, as in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, some of the greatest gains in educational opportunity were in countries where progressive education policies reflected a larger political project, such as in Costa Rica, Cuba, Peru, and Venezuela.

THE POLITICS OF TARGETED POLICIES TO REACH THE POOR

Along with the policies that supported the expansion of access to all levels of education, particularly to primary education, progressive policies sought to provide differentiated attention to marginalized populations. Initially, policies were developed to attempt to provide access to rural and indigenous children by developing alternative modalities of education. More recently, targeted policies have attempted to improve the quality of the

[1]

1. 66{ }^{66} Daniel Levy, Higher Education and the State in Latin America (Chicago, 1986). ↩︎

education provided to marginalized children and to support their enrollment in existing modalities of education. These reforms did not last long and had disappointing results.

Because the expansion of education during the twentieth century reflected the interests of urban-based political alliances and the city-based industrialization under import substitution, rural education was largely neglected during the last century. As a result, indigenous populations, most of whom lived in rural areas, were marginalized from educational expansion.

The first of two important exceptions to this trend was the expansion of rural education in Mexico while José de Vasconcelos was Secretary of Education after the revolution. In his efforts to use education as the means to create a new Mexican identity (the Raza Cósmica) and to reunify the country after the war, Vasconcelos established primary schools and teacher-training institutions in rural areas and supported “cultural missions” of teachers, university graduates, and technicians who went to rural areas to work with teachers and communities in education, health, and organized campaigns to increase productivity.

Costa Rica provides another exception to the secular neglect of rural education. At several times throughout the century, reformers tried to improve the quality of rural schools, the orientation of the curriculum to improve the productivity of small rural farmers, or the links between the curriculum and rural life.

The reforms attempting to improve the options of indigenous communities through education were rare and short-lived. Supported only by their disempowered beneficiaries and by isolated politicians and social entrepreneurs, these reforms did not have the muscle to resist the fury of the landed oligarchies who saw them as all too convenient targets to express their resistance to the progressive project. Especially contested were the educational programs to reach indigenous groups with specific objectives to foster social and political organization. 67{ }^{67}

The Jesuit reductions were arguably the earliest initiative to provide educational opportunities to indigenous children. These larger forms of social organization included schools that sought to empower the indigenous for

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1. 67{ }^{67} For an excellent discussion of the politics of indigenous education in Bolivia at the beginning of the twentieth century, see Brooke Larson, “Capturing Indian Bodies, Heartha and Minds: ‘El hogar campesino’ and Rural School Reform in Bolivia, 1920s-1940s,” in Merilee Grindle and Pilar Domingo, eds., Proclaiming Revolution: Bolivia in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 183209). ↩︎

self-reliance and collective action. The reductions of Moxos and Chiquitos in Bolivia, and the reductions in Paraguay, provided education linked to the daily needs and the local conditions where the reduction was located. There was also emphasis in artistic education, especially music. Expulsion of the Jesuits from the Americas in the eighteenth century interrupted this experiment.

At different times in Bolivia, policy elites targeted the poor in policy rhetoric. President Hernando Siles, in his inaugural speech of January 6, 1926, announced a national crusade in favor of indigenous people (Cruzada Nacional Pro-Indio), recognizing that education efforts until that point had excluded them. The crusade was launched in April of the same year but failed because of lack of popular support and, in particular, because of the opposition from the landlords. In 1931, a Bolivian educator, Elizardo Perez, argued that rural schools should be explicitly designed to serve the needs of indigenous children, establishing the School of Warisata. This school was designed to serve the territorial limits of the social and economic organization of the Aymara people - the ayllu. It was designed to promote the indigenous values of the ayllu and to serve the community by strengthening its traditions, ideals, and solidarity. It aimed to foster cooperative learning and action-based learning, strong links between schools and communities, and cooperation among teachers and students, among students, and among parents and students. It eliminated the school schedule and examinations, fostered bilingual education, the arts, and physical education, and eliminated content areas unrelated to life in the villages. The school was organized around a cluster. A number of small rural schools were attached to a cluster school. The clusters, named nucleo escolar campesino, included centers of literacy and popular education, technical schools, and teachertraining “normal” schools. This model extended to several dozen clusters, but was fiercely opposed by landowners and finally eliminated in 1941. 68{ }^{68}

In 1932, Mexico’s Secretary of Education Moises Saenz (a former student of John Dewey at Columbia University) initiated experiments in education in indigenous languages and a pilot project to promote self-reliance, political organization, and mobilization of indigenous groups in Michoacán. This experiment, admired later by President Lázaro Cárdenas, led to the creation of a separate Department for Indigenous Affairs 69{ }^{69} under Cárdenas’s regime. The experiment itself was short-lived.

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1. 68{ }^{68} Juárez and Comboni, ed., Sistema educativo nacional de Bolivia.
   69{ }^{69} Guillermo de la Peña, “Educación y cultura en el México del siglo 20,” cited by Pablo Latapi “Un siglo de educación nacional,” in P. Latapi, ed., Un siglo de educación en Mexico (Mexico, 1998), 45-83. ↩︎

In 1968, the socialist regime of General Velasco Alvarado in Peru included indigenous and rural education as an important component of the education reform. Education was to foster the process of organization of comunidades agricolas campesinas through the creation of education clusters that would work as centers of adult education and organization. In addition, the content of the curricula was changed to reflect nationalistic values, which celebrated the indigenous contribution to Peruvian identity. Bilingual education was a component of this reform, including experiments to teach Quechua and Aymara as second languages to Spanish speaking children. This reform was fiercely opposed by the Peruvian urban middle and upper classes as well as by the landowners who lost their land in the associated land reform.

Progressives targeting the education of indigenous children also advocated organizing teacher-training schools specifically to educate indigenous teachers. Bolivia, in the 1931 Plan of Teacher Education, called for the creation of normal schools for indigenous teachers. With the creation of the Department of Indigenous Affairs in Mexico in the 1940s, indigenous teacher-training schools were created. These schools, and the administrative units in charge of implementing programs specifically for indigenous children, have barely survived the open and covert confrontation of the state.

Throughout most of the century, when schools reached the localities where indigenous children lived, teaching occurred in a language that the children did not understand. Language policy was assimilationist and denied the value of indigenous cultures and languages. By teaching indigenous children in a foreign language, and doing that poorly, with badly trained teachers and in impoverished conditions, schools served to legitimize the subordinate role of indigenous communities. Throughout most of the twentieth century, bilingual education programs in Latin America have been variations of a policy of “castellanization” where instruction in the mother tongue is used to transition the child into the dominant language, to eventually abandon the mother tongue. 70{ }^{70}

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1. 70{ }^{70} Notice that in other parts of the world, such as Canada, Spain, Switzerland, or parts of the United States, bilingual education is not transitional but is “two-way,” meaning it is designed to develop full competency in two or more languages in speakers of either language. Two-way bilingual education is predicated on a model that sets cultural diversity as a strength. Transitional bilingual education accepts the dominance of one language and one culture over another and seeks to teach children these codes of power, at the expense of their cultural identity. That I consider the introduction of transitional bilingual education as a progressive practice underscores the relativity of the concept of progressive. By reference to a status quo where indigenous children were immersed in a foreign language, the dominant practice throughout most of the century, transitional bilingual education is a progressive innovation. The progressive nature of policies to expand educational opportunity to indigenous children in ways that robbed them of an indigenous identity is clearly questionable. ↩︎

Nowhere is the large role played by broader societal values and institutions in mediating the implementation of education policy more apparent than with regard to the policies aimed at improving the opportunities of students of indigenous descent. Consequently, nowhere is the gap between policy rhetoric and implementation practice larger.

During a visit I made to Chile in June of 2003, the education representative of the Ministry of Education in Temuco (the poorest province in Chile, with the highest concentration of indigenous people, Mapuches) described the challenges faced by Mapuche students. He explained that there was a growing number of Mapuche high school graduates who had the necessary scores to pass the university entrance examinations but who did not have the economic means to go to college. The number of scholarships available to support these students was extremely limited and not growing. He said, “this is an issue that is politically explosive. It is only a matter of time until these students realize that they have the skills and the desire to be college educated but that they live in a society that denies them this opportunity. I can’t understand how our political leadership does not see this.” When pressed to explain why there were not more initiatives focused on college access of Mapuches, he expanded, “I often think that deep down we don’t really believe that Mapuches have the same rights as other people. Aqui a nadie le importan los Mapuches, y en Santiago menos. No one will tell you this openly, perhaps we’ll admit this among very close friends, but I think that is the real reason why they face such poor odds.”

The view that many highly educated individuals were relatively indifferent was confirmed by the administrators and teachers of a high school for indigenous students described subsequently. They explained that most university graduates in Chile have very limited sensitivity toward the indigenous theme. This high school, run by the Catholic Church, had been selected by the Ministry of Education as one of the anticipation high schools, a flagship national program to foster excellence in secondary education (liceos Montegrande). The managers and teaching staff of this high school said it represented the vanguard of intercultural education in the country and that a good proportion of their students were children of Mapuche leaders. Although the quality of the facilities of this high school was impressive, the quality of instruction was not. In this high school, students were trained to be “assistant preschool teachers,” “assistant nurses,” and other similar occupations. No one among the staff was able to explain what the demand was for such occupations nor what kind of wages those graduates would command. It was made clear that the focus was not to prepare students for college entrance.

Amid a rhetoric of teaching students to be proud of their native language and cultural heritage and to develop self-esteem, we found a school culture of low academic expectations where students were engaged in loworder cognitive tasks. We found students in the track of assistant preschool teachers engaged doing handicrafts, and one class of students of assistant nurses playing and talking with each other as the teacher devoted his time to talk to four of them in a corner of the classroom. I interviewed a former teacher of this school, a Mapuche woman with a masters degree, who was very upfront in her criticism of the school. She said: “I know this school very well for I worked there seven years. Like the rest of the few Mapuche teachers in that school it pained me to see that we received the brightest Mapuche children and condemned them to occupations without future. Once some teachers in the school proposed creating an option to educate maids, the argument being that so many of our graduates ended up as maids in Santiago. I was furious and opposed it…I went to the newspapers. Eventually I was pushed out of the school… The option to educate maids was not approved after all but I suppose it makes no difference, that’s what many of the graduates of this high school end up doing anyway.” The persistence of race-based gaps in educational achievement, as well as the persistence of income-based achievement gaps, was indicative of the failure of the education reforms of the twentieth century to live up to the rhetoric of the policies promising equal educational opportunity.

In Brazil, language test scores of fourth grade black students in 2001 were two thirds of a standard deviation below the scores of white students. Whereas only 12 percent of the black students in this grade can read at an intermediate or higher level, 36 percent of the white students can read at those levels. 71{ }^{71}

In Mexico, language test scores of sixth-grade students in indigenous schools are two thirds of a standard deviation below the scores of students in rural schools and a full standard deviation below the scores of students in urban public schools. 72{ }^{72}

During the last decade of the century, a different set of targeted policies were advanced by governments with support of international agencies.

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1. 71{ }^{71} Paula Louzano, “Racial Inequalities in Brazilian Primary Education,” presented at the Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society, Stanford, CA, March 22-26, 2001 .
   72{ }^{72} Most scholarship describes the influence of multilateral organizations as a single phenomenon, characterizing it as the expression of a “neoliberal” project. I believe this aggregation fails to capture adequately the specific channels and purposes of these influences and fails to recognize the heterogeneity of points of view between and within international agencies. ↩︎

The onset of the debt crisis and the adjustment era of the 1980s inaugurated a new kind of role for international actors and influence. As local elites built alliances with external groups and agencies favoring the integration of Latin America into the world economy, two related but different processes of influence on the education sector gained importance. 73{ }^{73} The principal mechanism of influence was the economic adjustment process itself and the international actors it empowered. Advocates of “shock therapy” to close the fiscal and trade gaps unintentionally caused significant harm to education systems. Pressed between the rock of a cartel of creditors and financial institutions and the hard place of the entrenched interests of the most powerful domestic political groups, governments slashed education budgets, often disproportionately to the budget cuts that were administered elsewhere across the public sector. The best teachers and administrators who believed they had brighter prospects elsewhere, or who were simply too demoralized to continue to teach impoverished children in deteriorating schools, left the profession. Entire education systems were set back as a result of this influence of fiscal austerity and adjustment. 74{ }^{74}

At the end of the twentieth century, Latin American nations were spending significantly less on education than the OECD countries. At the primary level, for example, the OECD spends 19 percent of GDP per capita per student. This is also the level of spending of the United States, compared with 12 percent in Argentina and Brazil, 17 percent in Chile, and in percent in Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. 75{ }^{75}

A secondary, more complex, process of influence resulted from international institutions funding loans to finance education reform. Although international financing of education projects did not originate with the adjustment era, in a context of declining education budgets, the funds from loans and grants acquired a new importance. International agencies thus gained more leverage to influence the specifics of education policy, even though the proportion of education budgets funded with loans was

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1. 73{ }^{73} Ernesto Trevino, and German Trevino, “Estudio sobre las desigualdades educativas en Mexico: la incidencia de la escuela en el desempeno academico de los alumnus y el rol de los docents,” (Colección cuadernos de investigación #5, Instituto Nacional para la Evaluacion de la Educación, Mexico, 2004).
   74{ }^{74} Fernando Reimers, “The Impact of Economic Stabilization and Adjustment on Education in Latin America,” Comparative Education Review 35:2 (May 1991): 119-53; Deuda externa y financiamiento de la educación. Su impacto en Latinoamérica (Santiago, 1990); and “Education and Structural Adjustment in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa,” International Journal of Education and Development 14:2 (1993): 119-29.
   75{ }^{75} OECD, Education at a Glance. OECD Indicators, 2001 (Paris, 2002), 68. ↩︎

modest. Between 1991 and 1997, World Bank loans accounted for less than 3 percent of education budgets in Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The highest levels of education budgets funded with World Bank loans during the period were in Bolivia ( 7%7 \% ), Chile ( 5%5 \% ), Dominican Republic (6%), Nicaragua (8%), and Paraguay ( I2%\mathrm{I} 2 \% ). Latin America and the Caribbean received a total of more than US$i billion per year for education between 1990 and 1994, with loans from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank accounting for about three fourths of this total. 76{ }^{76}

Education specialists working in these agencies represented a diversity of views and were as likely to favor conservative as progressive projects. As a result of this diversity, these loans funded projects representing diverse objectives and approaches. They funded a number of experiments to support privatization, decentralization, and school autonomy, which converged with the efforts to tinker with efficiency that during the 1980 os replaced the interest in educational expansion of the previous decades. However, they also funded projects to expand access and to improve quality in disadvantaged communities consistent with the progressive agenda.

During the last decade of the century, another set of transnational actors supported progressive initiatives. They included United Nations organizations, particularly UNESCO, UNICEF, and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), which reacted to the perception that the adjustment of the 1980 os had eroded the social gains made since the 1950s. These organizations called attention to educational development worldwide, articulated in 1990 during the World Conference on Education for All convened in Jomtien, Thailand, and a series of follow-up conferences culminating with another World Conference on Education in Dakkar in 2000. 77{ }^{77} These institutions built coalitions with nongovernmental organizations. Together, these actors worked to influence national priorities along lines consistent with the progressive project. The last decade of the twentieth century began with a highly influential report jointly authored by the ECLAC and the regional office of UNESCO calling for renewed attention to education reform as the foundation for economic competitiveness with equity. Soon after, the governments of Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Uruguay launched policies to improve the quality of

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1. 76{ }^{76} Robert McMeekin, Coordination of External Assistance to Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (Santiago, 1995).
   77{ }^{77} Karen Mundy and Lynn Murphy, “Transnational Advocacy, Global Civil Society? Emerging Evidence from the Field of Education,” Comparative Education Review (February 2001). ↩︎

the schools attended by marginalized children. The emphasis on education as a strategy to reduce poverty was reiterated at every regional meeting of senior education officials. In 1998, the presidential summit of the Americas made education the key theme in its signed declaration, highlighting the links with poverty reduction.

Consistent with this new emphasis in policy as the century ended, governments in several countries supported initiatives to increase equity in education. Typically, these equity reforms were embedded in larger education reforms, which sought to increase quality and efficiency.

For example, after the demise of the military dictatorship in Chile in 1991, the Ministry of Education began to talk about positive discrimination - the disproportionate attention to marginalized schools - as a strategy to achieve equity in education. Soon after, government documents of Argentina and Mexico also explicitly highlighted compensatory policies as one of the strategies to achieve equity in education.

The actions that have been supported as part of reforms to increase equity aimed to improve the basic conditions in schools attended by lowincome children. These include changes in funding formula to increase per-pupil expenditures in marginalized schools, as in Brazil; construction or repair of facilities to expand access; and more and better instructional materials. Efforts to expand access have also included developing alternative modalities to offer some educational opportunities to low-income students such as various modalities of distance secondary education in rural areas in El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico or various forms of community-based courses to expand access in marginalized rural areas.

Other policies in this group have supported teacher education, teacher guides, and infrastructure, primarily in schools attended by the poor, such as a series of programs to improve marginalized rural and urban schools in Mexico; the Escuela Nueva program in Colombia to enhance the quality of rural schools; and the program to enhance the quality of the schools with lowest levels of student achievement, the P900 program in Chile.

Because these reforms have taken place embedded in larger efforts seeking overall improvement in efficiency and quality, and because the level of resources destined for inputs specifically targeted to poor students is a relatively small component of the overall level of resources for educational improvement, often these reforms have succeeded at improving the conditions of schools attended by poor children without closing the gap between these and other schools in the system. Improvements, however, have been modest. Another popular policy option to support the education

of marginalized children during the 1990s was conditional cash transfers, scholarship programs intended to provide incentives to poor families to keep their children in school. These programs were implemented on a large scale during the 1990s in Brazil and Mexico, and on a smaller scale in a number of other countries, including Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Aside from their welfare objectives, to provide income to families in extreme poverty, these programs were mainly intended to encourage school attendance, assuming that once in school children would learn valuable skills. In this sense, they were, as many other efforts during the twentieth century, helpful to support school attendance but limited in their effectiveness to influence learning, particularly because many of the children receiving these scholarships attended schools of dismal quality as discussed in this chapter.

CONCLUSIONS

Educational opportunity expanded during the twentieth century in Latin America. In some ways it expanded more dramatically than at any other time in the region’s history. It did not, however, expand significantly enough to reduce the unequal distribution of education among different social groups or to close the gaps between Latin America and the OECD.

Absent throughout most of the century was a priority to give the children of the poor equal opportunities to attend schools, high schools, and universities where they would be supported to learn content to empower them to have significantly better options than their parents to participate in society. Toward the end of the century, policy discourse, and some action, indicated that some policy elites were once again considering this objective but mostly at the basic levels of education.

Close examination of the links between policy rhetoric and results demonstrates that education policy matters. What states and societies decide to do, how they define priorities and the programs, and actions they undertake and support have transformed, in part, schools and the education profile of the population. The citizens of Latin America have more years of schooling today than a century ago. Most of them declare themselves literate, whereas many of their ancestors a century ago could not read. Most are more likely to reach higher levels of schooling than their parents. Women have gained more than men from this intergenerational educational mobility in the region.

During the twentieth century, education systems in Latin America changed much and changed little at the same time. They changed much because they expanded - always as part of larger political projects. They changed little because they relied on a dominant model of schooling that did not help many children learn much and because internal and external educational gaps remained unchanged. The purpose to make schools teach all children at high levels so they could be competent democratic citizens was frequently challenged by the purpose to have schools either serve the narrower purpose of training workers for the jobs of the past or to educate different children for differing purposes. The tension between having schools reproduce the authoritarian past versus building a different, more democratic future undermined the ability of schools to teach much to poor children.

Educational opportunity remained an elusive concept, the result of negotiation and conflict between two competing ideologies, which had emerged at independence: a conservative set of ideas that saw education as a means to preserve privilege, and a progressive alternative that saw education as the foundation to build more inclusive societies. Politics were the dominant force that defined how these two competing views were negotiated. These politics were initially domestic, but as the region opened up (again) to integrate into the world economy, they were increasingly global. Domestic politics reflected the struggles of national stakeholders and issues as well as micro-education politics, when particular education stakeholders were mobilized to advance their interests. Domestic political actors developed transnational alliances to support their position. Domestic education politics, however, were dominated by large national corporate interests (states, political parties, businesses, and unions) and had little room for teachers, parents, students, and local communities or social movements. Transnational alliances supported renewed attention to equal educational opportunity as human rights and development organizations helped focus attention on the dismally low learning chances of poor children in a region where culture, history, and institutions were at odds with the simple democratic idea that all children can learn at high levels and to think for themselves and that it is important that they do.