Murillo 1999

Murillo, M. V. (1999). Recovering political dynamics: Teachers' unions and the decentralization of education in argentina and mexico. Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 41(1), 31-57. 

• this draws out some of the same ideas in her 2001 book, but looks at differences in education reform in Mexico and Argentina, noting the reforms occurred differently due to variation across partisan identities (of the unions), organizational fragmentation (in the unions) and leadership competition (both for union and government officials) (31)
• education reform became an important issues because education was seen as
• important to developing human capital, increasing social equity, and consolidating young democracies (33) see footnote 6 for some citations
• the public felt the edcuation systems were becoming inadequate to mee the countries' needs
• The suggestion made by many groups is that decentralized education is more responsive to local needs, and thus more efficient than hihgly centralized education systems (33-34)
• BUT unions can play an important role in enhancing or sabotaging reforms (34)
• Public sector unions:
• public sector militancy is often more visible to the general public, which would suffer from loss of delivery of public goods thanks to strikes (35)
• "Indeed, strikes often serve the dual purpose of demanding higher wages from the government and mobilizing public opinion to call for greater budget allocations for public services." (35)
• teaching is labor intensive, teachers are distributed across the country, and they can have a great affect on public opinion (36)
• a large proportion of education budgets is directed to salaries (36)
• decentralization reforms in Mexico and Argentina
• The SNTE suppressed it's opposition to decentralization and the government met some of its demands (38)
• CTERA kept unsuccessfully resisitng decentralization and was ignored by Menem (38)
• Stats:
• Law 1,420 of 1881 established free public edcuation and compulsory primary education for all Argentina (39)
• initially the federal government centralized education, by 1952 feds controlled 42.7% of primary, 64.8% of secondary, and 82.5% of vocational schools (Paglianetti 1991)
• military started to decentralize
• By 1987 the national jurisdiction had only 1.9 % of primary schools, 44.7% of secondary schools, and 37.8% vocational schools (40)
• 1991 law enacted in 1992, Law 24,049, transfered all the rest of the schools to provincial jurisdiction (40)
• history of teachers unions (42-43)
• CTERA was with CGT and PJ int eh 1980s, but broke with Menem in 1991 and formed CTA (42)
• CTERA has been strong at province level, but never really centralized enough to be strong national presence (43)
• reform
• most teachers unions rejected Menem's reform (44)
• feared financing would be hurt
• also concerned with declining real wages and wage dispersion once bargaining became decentralized
• teachers struck and demonstrated against reform
• government officials ignored militancy and demands (45)
•  decentralization DID enhance CTERA's position over other competing union confederations (45)
• CTERA joined UCR to form coalition, but meant they found few allies among the mostly PJ provincial governors who didn't want to ally with enemy party (46)
• also competition over teachers weakened all unions, meaning government had no desire to offer concessions (46)
• explaining the difference between SNTE and CTERA
• SNTE was PRI, and not fragmented, CTERA was opposition and fragmented (47-48)
• why not get allies where you can? not really a full explanation here
• conclusion:
• party loyalty can speeed reforms but hinder their effectiveness (see Murillo 2001) (49)
• when there is leadership competition, as there was for SNTE, government will make concessions to keep their leader in power
• CTERA had neither leadership competition (it seems) AND teachers unions were fragmented -- seems a bit weak here