Notes!: Gentili, Suárez, Stubrin, and Gindín 2004

teachers have gone on strikes a lot in LA recently, as have university students (1252)
these fights and negotiations happened in places where the economy was in crisis, the education sector wasn't in great shape, and many went through processes of reform to improve education system (1253)
authors suggest that the conflict over education system is about the fact that many of the reforms were very ambitious and didn't take into account economic crises that came or traditions of the sector
these authors want to create an integrated theory about teacher protest, not just assume it's all about salary (1253-4)

it seems cyclical (1254)
it's hard to divorce it from larger economic crises that occurred
but a big part of the problem is that tensions would arise with any reform, but in this case most of the reforms didn't include teachers at all, which provoked greater protest (1256-7)
the lack of democratic discussion about education reform was a common issue throughout the region (1257)

thinking about education conflict as a place for active adn dynamic contestation that creates the agents and strategies of the agents....that is to say, it's not a place of pure reaction due to sructural factors (1258)
obviously this also means that interests will conflict and will be complex, even within what one might imagine would be a similar group....it's economic and poltiical but also has to do with cultural and psychology of a person/group
aha....1257-1260 is sort of relating the various theories of social conflict, transplanting them to education a bit, and then saying the authors are going to look across LA to see which themes come up most often (1260)

education reform processes have generated a lot of conflict in LA, pretty much across the board, though reactions to this conflict have differed (1261)
863 conflicts during this time, 40% of which were started by base-level unions (1262)
during this time 54% of the conflicts were aimed at teh central government, while 31% were at provincial governments (the latter usually from decentralized education systems
none were exclusively against private schools!

private school unions tend to be less combatitive
when they are combative, it's usually as part of larger confederations that are dominated (in numbers) by public school teachers (1263)
private-school battles are usually very small and circumscribed
most often working conditions and salary are basically set by the state anyway, so it makes more sense to go after government, and to do so you need lots of help, not just private sector (1263)

Argentina had the most conflict, with 1491 days lost in this time period (1264)
data! (1265)
the reforms were not undertaken in a democratic way, which resulted in higher levels of conflict, though all the governments who undertook these reforms were certainly democratically elected (for the most part) (1266)
of the actiosn taken

79% had labor demands
28% were based on larger demands of education politics, like those against decentralization
12% were against teh political system en total

usually salary demands were linked to larger, more theoretical demands
teachers strikes have a very high level of adhesion in teh region (1266-7)
unions led practically all the manifestations, and a lot of them included wage/pay demands (1268)

much of the traditions and norms of education and education politics were greatly changed by the reforms across LA, and they did so with very little consultation with the teachers (1269)
this resulted in a lot of conflcit aroudn education, which tended to become the center of even larger social conflcits (1270)

Notes!