Showing posts with label education systems. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education systems. Show all posts

Monday, January 19, 2015

Silvina and Abregú 2005


Gvirtz, Silvina, and Victoria Abregú. 2005. De la tragedia a la esperanza: hacia un sistema educativo justo, democrático y de calidad. Academia Nacional de Educación.




  • Introduction
    • education should have two goals: teach people how to learn, and teach them how to live together (6-7)
    • the school forms citiznes (7)
    • education system has high coverage but not high retention rates (9)
  • Chapter 1
    • a bit of hsitory
    • teh state was heavily involved in creating and administering the education system in the 1800s, it allowed everyone in to primary, but saved upper levels for a minority of students (16-17)
    • in teh 1960s and 1970s society changed, new technology grew, and public schoolsdidn't keep up with the times.  this was the start of the middle class c=slowly migrating to private schools (18-20)
      • this also meant the state was less able to meet its responsibility of educating studenets (20)
      • private schools were more disciminatory, if only in that their fees limited enrolment (21)
      • the dictatorships didn't do much to combat this, while democratic governments tried to recentralize schooling and fix the problem (21)
    • 1990s reform (23-32)
      • supposed to give some autonomy back to the schools, let them decide how to teach at the school level (28-29) MAYBE THIS MEANS GIVING BACK TO INDIVIDUAL TEACHERS SOME POWER AND CONTROL OVER THEIR WORK?
      • hope was to put provinces in charge of curriculum design, just have some big goals at the federal level (29-30)
        • but the fedeeral "guide" just became what everyone used as the curriculum itself (30)
      • the implementation of these reforms seemed to fall short of the goals, and in some ways just increased bureaucratization (32)
    • data on inequality of income between private and public schools, (35)
      • richer people in private schools, significantly so
    • schools don't really have much autnomy, they have been very centalzied under the provinces, even private schools! (40)
    • they also argue that there is a political problem, because the government isn't taking it's responsibility to educate everyone equally (40)
  • introduction to the second part of the book
    • this section brings up three paths that should be done in order to provide basic pilars for improving education system:
      • redefine government running or education to de-bureaucratize the system (44)
      • redefine the school as a space of socio-educative and community center, 
      • equalize conditions in all schools to allow quality education in every school
  • chapter 2
    • government needs to find a careful balance between equality of access and results of education (48)
      • government should set clear goals
      • schools should be given some flexibility to address their own peculiar needs
      • entire system should have responsibility for results of education
      • government should work to either equalize education across schools, or at leat compensate worse schools to try and make them better (48-49)
      • create incentives to allow good policies in schools to be rewarded (49)
    • community should become a collaborative partner for schools (49)
    • what the national education ministry should be donig (52-55), mostly helping, coordinating, measuring, being a resource, but not being heavy handed, but also paying for things
      • this model favors de-bureaucratization (55)
    • really important to increase teachers' capacity to teach, in schools, out of schools, and in universities (58)
    • provincial level ministiries should
      • work to coordinate the macro and the micro levels (61-2)
      • generate strategies of cooperation among schools (62)
      • create broad strategies to improve schools in their province
      • work to fund their schools
  • chapter 3
    • ideas to change the schools (and ministries) from pyrmaidal and bureaucratic to open and democratic (63)
    • need:
      • more decentralized decisionmaking, allow schools to vary their work a bit (64)
      •  start having community groups that have a voice in the schools (66-67)
      • and others
    • mostly about creating new work positions, like director of pedagogoy
    • Consejos escolares (70-73)
      • these arent' always good, might just back uup authoritarian principal (70)
      • should include parents, students, graduates, administrators, teachers, and members of the community (71)
      • not just for fundraising, but to make sure the decisions the school is tyaking are good
      • EVERYONE muist be involved, every sector, as education is something that is shared among all secotrs (72)
      • decision-making still mostly in the hands of the director(s) of the school (73)
    • change school culture (74)
      • clear goals with measurements
      • get participation of the families (75)
  • chapter 4
    • consider the school as a center of communtiy and social education 975)
    • get students, school projects involved in their community, too (79)
    • give exta aid, food, etc to schools that are in especially poor areas (80)
    • make the buildings, supplies better and equal across schools (82)
    • improve the formation and careers of teachers (84-86)
      • improve salarty (85)
      • create better career paths for them (85-86)

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Narodowski 2002


Narodowski, Mariano. 2002. "Socio-economic segregation in the Argentine education system: School choice without vouchers." Compare 32.2: 181-191.


  • Argentina has never developed school choice programs, but still experiences a great deal of social segregation in schools (182)
    • the way the supply is dfeined gives freedom of choice only to richer people
  • historically public schools were part of the building of the nation state, and families' rights to edcuation did not include school choice (183-184)
    • some discussion of law 184
    • students are expected to go to schools near their houses (184)
  • In PBA about 31% go to private school (in 2002) (186)
  • in CABA it's about 50% go to private school
  • rural school districts hav few public schools in teh first place (187)
  • private schools have greater autonomy, while public schools are highly regulated (188)
    • this means that hiring teachers is easy in private schools, as is firiing them
  • some public schools seem pretty good, and middle class families skirt the rules by trying to get into the good ones by donating to the school of some thing like that (188)
  • the poor are essentially condemned to their neighborhood school (189)

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Beech and Barrenechea 2011



Beech, Jason, and Ignacio Barrenechea. 2011. "Pro-market educational governance: is Argentina a black swan?." Critical Studies in Education 52, no. 3: 279-293.


  • Arguemnt of the article: Argentina has not done many pro-market reforms in teh education sector due to the high value Argentine society places on public education (279)
    • Some others suggest tha tneoliberalism promotes segregation and social inequalitie (280, citing Puiggros 2010, Zajda 2006)
    •  defines neoliberalsim as pro-market forms of governance"
    • decentralization is't necessarily pro-market
  • the education system in Argentina ha always been centralized (281)
    • it was a way to promote homogeneity and national identity
    • public schoolswere also important to give middle class access to political and economic power
    • public school has a strong history in Argentina, nad has been defined as state-run school as well
    • in CABA close to 50% of studetns are in private schools (282)
    • some private schoosl receive direct subsidies (19% of federal education budget in 2001 went tstriaght to prvate schools without any public oversight as to what it would be spent on , Gvirzt and Beech 2007)
    • in 2010 the state subsidized approx. 70% of private schools, Wolff de Moura and Castro 2002)
  • despite lots of rhetoric about the 1993 education reform as being neoliberal, few of the reforms were pro-market, and those that were were either limited or not implemented at all (285-287)
    • provincialization changed the locus of power, but provinces still set up basicallly hierarchical, centralized systems (286)
    • autonomy plans essnetially faile,d at best just created more bureaucracy (286)
    • schools do not manage any funds, salaries and everything are paid idrectly by the state (286)
  • "the education system has been the exception to the pro-market logic that dominated the overall ecnomic and social policies of the 1990s" (287)
    • but yet they are still suffering the segregation and achievement gap between rich and ppor (288)

Jacoby and Nitta 2012


Jacoby, Daniel F., and Keith Nitta. 2011. "The Bellevue Teachers Strike and Its Implications for the Future of Postindustrial Reform Unionism." Educational Policy: 533-563


  • Reform unionism: moving away from adversarial relationships, by breaking down barriers between workers and managers, including "management prerogatives" (536)
    • in teaching this idea meant organizing around education quality, and professionalism whereby the union would police its own standards (537)
    • teachers unions used this to immunize themselves against the critiques of industrial unionism and its adversarialness (537)
    • reform teacher unions redefine management and labr such that teachers are uderstood as porfessionals whose particiaption in school governance is essential (538)
    • but postindsutrial unionism might just be a panopticon, says some critical theorists (539)
  • What they found in Bellevue was that teachers started focusing/bargaining over wages specifically becaues they had no say in teh curriculum, or lost their say there, and without that what's left to bargain over? (547)
    • union went from helping promote, taking responsibility for student achievement to demanding a greater role for teachers' invovlement...change from helpful to a bit more advesarial in doing so (553-554)

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Narodowski and Nores 2002




Narodowski, Mariano, and Milagros Nores. 2002. "Socio-economic segregation with (without) competitive education policies. A comparative analysis of Argentina and Chile." Comparative Education 38(4): 429-451.




  • Argentina is a quasi monopoly while Chile is a quasi market (430)
  • trying to figure out why social segmentation happens pretty equally in both chile adn Argentina, despite different education systems (ie former has vouchers) (431)
  • chile (423-438)
    • some found evidence that private schools were better, but others found that controlling for SES makes this difference go away (436-8)
    • might be thaqt the market mechanism has actually brough tparity? (438)
  • Argentina
    • "After the 1950s, the educational system faced a strong legitimacy loss related to the fact that the system was not able to fulfill its promise of social mobility.\" (441)
    • in 1964 subsidies for teacher pay were finally set down in objective parameters (before they were a bit willy nilly), but even still these subsidies can get paid out in clientelistic fashion (441)
    • decentralization reforms of 1978 sent primary schools to be under provinces, 1992 was the rest of them and secondary schools.
    • "The last thrity years have generated a hyper-regulated impoverished state system coexstient with a highly autonomous and expanded private sector." (442)
    • private schools are a state subsidized exit option for students (442)
    • decentralization did not change teh form of school regulation, just its locus
    • enrollment is highly segmented by income...rich go to private, poor go to public (443)
  • Conclusions....nothing big
    • the paper suggests that vouchers themselves don't necessarily increase social segmentation in schools, since both countries have it but only Chile has vouchers (447)
    • also questions/denies the assumption that SES variables can be taken as independent from school choice variables in quant studies

Katz 1971


Katz, Michael B. 1971. Class, bureaucracy, and schools: The illusion of educational change in America. New York: Praeger University Series.

  • schools in the 20th century US have been designed with teh purpose of ulculcating values adn aceptance of the dominant classes...chicldren are taken, processed adn put into generally the same social class as their parents (xviii)
  • the system serves the interests of the powerful, so there has been no real need/desire to actually reofrm them (xxiii-xxiv)
  • arguemtn of the book is that the educational system was basicallly designed in the 19th century and hasn't been changed in any fundamental way since then

Spring 1972


Spring, Joel H. 1972. Education and the Rise of the Corporate State. Boston: Beacon Press.
  • "The coporate image of society turned American schools into the central social institution for the production of men and women who conformed to the needs and expectatins of a corporate and technocratic world" (1)
    • the corporate image of society was shared by major interest, business elites, labor unions, and political elites, as a way to deal with rapid indsutrialization and urbanization (1)
  • business leaders started on paternalistic labor relations to control working classes, and many of the activities of these programs were later adopted by the education system (22, and chapter 2 as a whole)
    • early schools were created to give their parents more times to work, improve home lives (and thus imporve efficiency), and to educate th enext genreations' workers (36-38)
  • the school was like a factory (44-45)
    • it was argued this was a great way to create a good industrial society...knowledge done by assembly line (45
  • "professionalized and bureaucratic control of education became a barrier to establishing the school as a meaningful center of community life in the city. Schools were instruments for shaping community life along lines determined by the expertise of the organizer." (89)
    • "the hard shell of bureaucracy provided protection for school systems that were basically hostile to their environments and to large numbers of the people they served (89)
  • cmprehensive high school was partially started to push back against specialization of previous schooling, specialization which "threatened the whole goal of training a self-sacrificing and cooperative individual" (108)...schools were places for socializing individuals, but doing so to create good citizens, as teh workplace was a terribly individualizing place, whichi would lead to an atomized, bad society (108-125)
    • "the parallels that can be drwn between teh socialization programs of the factory and school are not accidental. Both believed they faced the problem of internal fragmentation and both believed that the new institutions of society required a cooperative individual (124-125)
  • "The school is and has been an instrument of social, economic, and political control. It is an institution which consciously plans to turn people into something. Within this framework the school must be viewed as an instrument of power. ... The most important feature of the school in the twentieth century as its role as the major institution for socialization." (149)
    • "Schooling not only prepares for the acceptance of control by dominant elites and social structures but also can create a dependence on institutions and expertise." (152)

Saturday, November 15, 2014

Narodowski 2008


Mariano Narodowski, 2008, "School Choice and Quasi-state Monopoly Education Systems in Latin America: The Case of Argentina" 131-144  in Forsey, Martin, Scott Davies, and Geoffrey Walford. 2008. The globalisation of school choice? Oxford: Symposium Books.


  • INtroduction
    • private schooling has been on teh rise in Argentina, but the beginning of this rise precedes neoliberalism (131-132)
    • definition of state monoppoly\ (132-3), lack of autonomy of managers and centralized decisionmaking
    • quasi monopoly:
      • schools are financed and coordinated by the state, but have autonomy and have to compete for students (133)
      • but this is an ideal type, that doesn't exist in LA
      • "As I discuss below, Argetnina's and othe Latin American systems have rsponded to the 'quasi' state monopoly by reaching a sort of equilibrium, where having wealthier parents opt out of the public system has allowed the punlic system to spend more dollars per pupil that it could otherwise."
  • Privatization of the education system
    • urban areas like CABA, Rosario, Cordoba, Mendoza, Tucuman have the largest private enrollment rates, over 50% and at times as high as 70% (135, citing Narodowski 2002)
    • 92% of wealthiest fifth of population send kids to private school
    • 1966 law that allows the state to fund part or all of teachers' salaries, is only used whena  government doesn't want to pay for infrastructure (135-6)
    • CABA has about 50% private school enrollment
      • 26.8% of private schools receive 100% teachers salaries
      • 23.8% get 70-80% of salaries
      • 13.3% private get 40-60% salary
    • some studies have found that student test scores are better among private school students, but data is mostly inconsistent and hard to come by (137)
  • Key factors in the behavior of families
    • thsoe who choose private school seem to see it as fraught with difficulties, shoter school days, lots of strikes, worse supplies, fewer computers (138)
    • some studies see choice of private school as a social process of self-segregation
    • poor seem dissatisfied with public school, and would send them to private schools if they could (139)
  • School Choice in a State Quasi-Monopoly
    • it is not a monopoly, because there are so many private schools, but at the same time the other choice is unequally distributed (rich can afford it, poor can't) so it's not exactly a quasi market either
    • suggests this quasi monopoly is a reaction by the monopoly to new demands of society (140)
    • the quasi monopoly allows the middle and upper classes to fund their own edcuation, while the state can pay for education of the poor (141)
    • argues that the poorer sectors do benefit from thsi arrangment because it allows the government to spend more per student than they would if they had to teach everyone
 this is OK, but it's a little funny because it doesn't quite take into account that the middle class can still pay for bettern edcuation...the poor get better scraps, but scraps all the same

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Perazza 2011b






  • teachers laws from teh 1950s set up lots of rights/features, icnluding stability in employment, skills training, and good benefits (29)
  • ley 13047 states that government would make sure private teachers were paid as much as public school teachers (unclear if this is still in effect) (29)
  • the decentralization demanded that the provinces set up their own education systems, and to do so they had to deal with the expectations set up by the laws from the 1950s (30)
    • but they also had to do so in the context of a fiscal crisis, so they had to make cuts
  • Argentina is an interesting case, as improving teachers careers and working conditions doesn't need to be accompanied by a change in law necessarily (31)
  • these norms mean that innovations will basically always result in conflict, so the key is figuring out how to create policies that will allow for innovation but also make it match a norm so that teachers will actually implement it (32)
  • three issues to show this
    • first, evaluation of teachers
      • would be nice to have best practices
      • but these things tend to be ignored just to avoid conflict with teachers
    • second, teacher capacity
      • there is a sort of race to get credentials, but these institutions vary in quality a great deal (33)
      • need to have more structured demands of what constitutes improvement in qualifications
    • make sure raises are transparent (33)
  • when rules are made up but aren't fully explained, these become obstacle to implementation adn measurement (34)
  • the state just needs to take a more active role in the education system, set up and define the norms of the industry better! (34)

Saturday, November 8, 2014

Gentili, Suárez, Stubrin, and Gindín 2004




  • Introduction
    • 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)
  • Education conflict: creating a definition is theoretically ambitious
    • 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)
  • 1998-2003: a chronology of union action around education reforms in LA
    • 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)
  • Conclusions
    • 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)

Monday, November 3, 2014

Betancur 2008

Bentancur, Nicolás. 2008. "La nueva agenda de las políticas educativas en el Cono Sur (Argentina, Chile y Uruguay 2005-2008)." Revista Debates 2.2: 272-298.

  • Introduction
    • reforms of the 1990s tended to
      • involve centralization of curriculum creation, but decentralization of administration (273)
      • schemes of "positive discrimination" in favor of the poor
      • introduction of business ideas into education
      • expansion of the role of families and businesses in education
    • Argentina: decentalization of secondary teachings and teacher training (273-4)
    • Chile: introduction/perfection of market regulation of education (275)
    • Uruguay: maintained the national state as central head of education
    • recently all these countries have begun to talk/change these reforms again, thanks to left of center governmetns (274)
  • Argentina
    • 2006 law came out of Néstor having a big open discussion with large numbers of people in society (275)
    •  2006 law rescinded parts of 1993 law, resulted in
      • returning federal state as the guarantor of access to and right of education (276)
      • made secondary school obligatory, and created systemwhere provinces can choose to do 6 years each of primary and secodnary, ot 7 and 5 (respectively)
      • created a Consejo Federal de Educacion, with consultative councils that include teachers (276-7)
    • this reform didn't roll back decentalization totally (277)
    • nor did it end the financing of private education
    • CTERA like this reform, law included a lot of things that CTERA suggested should be in there, and it got a lot of things it has watned for a while, like (278)
      • declaration that education is a right and should be free
      • growth of financing of schools to 6% GDP (PBI)
      • the right to free teacher training
      • the right of colelctive negotiation at the provincial AND national level
      • Catholic schools were also a fan of the bill (279), more or less
  • Chile
    • student protests in 2005 demanded free schooling and transportation to school (280)
    • teachers eventually joined protests and there was a national strike
    • there was a council to solve these issues, that woudl include students, but at first it was stalled because students became a bit radicalized, and strike grew as more social groups joined the students' cause (280-1)
    • once the council finally got together, including social groups, parties, and student representatives, it became clear that everyoen was unhappy, but great divergence in ideas on how to fix the system...some wanted more martket, some wanted less (281)
    • Colegio de Profesores, union, was with the students (282) they wanted more centralization, better pay, shorter hours
    • on the other end of the spectrum, private schools wanted fewer laws, more flexibility
    • teachers groups did make some deamdns on private schools, not that thy be nationalized, but at least that they would be regulated more closely, including their entrance requirements (284)
    • government in Chile did not try to replace the private system set up by Pinochet and perfected in the 1990s, but it dis try to smooth out some of the issues with it, make it a bit more equitable (286-287)
  • Uruguay
    • new law in teh 1990s didn't change tehcentalized, hierarchical nature of education, but was undertaken without any input from social groups, and the unions were against it, so a new law in the 2000s with the new left government was likely (287-8)
    • the government convened a large Congress to figure out the new education law, parties were not allowed to be involved, only social actors, though unions were allowed and they tended to hav ea large say in the matter (288-290)
    • new law reaffirmed much of old law, and said that funding could not go below 6% GDP (292)
    • created autonomy and co-governance of schools by parents, teachers, students, and administrators (293)
  • Conclusion: is there a new paradigm of education politics in teh Southern Cone?
    • none of these reofrms were massive changes, refoundations (294)
    • non of the reforms really chagne public/private relationship in their country (295)
    • all reformers seem preoccupied with making the porcess inclusive of social actors
    • teachers and students growing in power, technocrats and private sector losing power
    • see tables on page 296 for some quick conclusions

Monday, October 27, 2014

Althusser 1972





  • Lenin wrote that philosphy teachers are petty-bourgeois lapdogs of the capitalists, teaching their ideology (33), Althusser apologizes for this, suggesting that teachers are bad only when they are caught up in the system, and some have been able to escape it (68-69)
  • the reproduction of labor poewr is done through, in addition to paying wages, the capitalist education system which has two important functions (131-132):
    • teaching students the skills they need to literally do a certain job
    • inculcating the norms and submission of their class position (132-3)
    • "...the reproduction of labour power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers..." (132) and also teaching the exploiters how to exploit (133)
  • ideological state apparatus: essentially the way the ruling ideology of the capitalist class is transferred to the rest of society...it contains in it the same contradictions that the class struggle has (149-150)
    • during feudal times this was mainly the Church, although other organizations also played a part (151)
    • educational stat apparatus became the most important one under the capitalist mode of production, replacing the Church (152)
    • some may suggest stht forms of democracy and political compeittion are actually more important, but capitalism has existed under lots of different poiltical regimes, education is the one constnt between many of them (153)
    • schools are the place where sills/knowledge are drummed into students wrapped in the ideology of the ruling (capitalist) class (155)
      • many other organizations can do this drumming, even soccer teams, but none are obligatory like school is (156)
      •  this works because the school is assumed to be a neutral realm, not one controlled by ideology (156)
    • suggests some teachers can fight the system, but most siply don't even realize they are a cog in this machine (157)

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Kosack 2012

Kosack, Stephen. 2012. The Education of Nations : How the Political Organization of the Poor, Not Democracy, Led Governments to Invest In Mass Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Chapter 1:
    • education is important for development, development without education leads to low-road economies (3)
      • Argument: Government will choose to expand quality education based on two factors: (3-4)
      • a tight but flexible skilled labor market, with little ability to attract skilled foreign workers
      • government engagement in political entrepreneurship of the poor...that is, government subsidized collective action on the part of poor people
      • looks at Ghana, Taiwan, Brazil to show theory
    • (7-8) governments don't seem to invest in education based only on the needs of businesses...shows some poorer countries spend way more on tertiary education than they should
      • most scholars think democratic regimes are more interested in educating citizens. This book suggests that overall and throughout recent history regime hasn't been as important a variable as others think (9-10)
      • he suggests that it is less the regime type and more the existence of collective action demanding education that will result in education spending (11)
      • the key is political entrepreneurship, where collective actions problems and costs are overcome (12-14)
      • government needs the support of a "vital constituency", and political entrepreneurship will determine if the poor are part of this constituency or not (14-15)
      • employer demands for labor (skilled, unskilled, trained by govt or not) also affect govt motivations for providing education (15-16)
    • (17) 3x3 matrix of when government will provide mass education. short story: any time poor are part of the vital constituency (either as part of it or as all of it) AND when employers need workers in a flexible skilled labor market
  • Chapter 2: the government's educational goals
    • education is NOT a public good (24)
    • education as "bad collateral" (Milton Friedman), and thus banks don't want to invest in individual's education (26)
    • demands of families
      • the richer the family, the more they can afford education, the more they want government to subsidize TERTIARY/higher levels of education, and low enrollments overall (30-31)
      • poor families are the opposite, they can't afford much of anything, so they want govt to spend lots of money on primary (and maybe every other level, too), high enrollments at every level (30-31)
    • demands of employers:
      • three types of demands for worker training:
        • none: from biz that either doesn't need skilled workers or can import them (34)
        • broad: biz needs skilled workers, can't import them, and wants a lot of them to lower wages of skilled workers (35)
        • selective: biz needs skilled, can't import, and can't expect wages to be lowerd (thanks to unions or govt employment or sthg) (35)
    • type of education system created depending on vital consituency:
      • bottom up = more spending on primary, when VC is only poor
      • all levels = equal spending, when VC is cross-class
      • top-down = more spending on tertiary, when VC is elites (45-48)
      •  
      • see also 69-71
  • chapter 3
    • lots of tools in the governments use, like fees, buildings, outsourcing, to point educational resources toward the vital consituency (49-60)
    • but constraints like budget size, inherited school systems, and need to keep social peace affect how govts allocate schooling resources (61-67)
  • chapters on Taiwan, Ghana, and then...
  • Brazil!
    • Vargas era
      • cross class alliance, Vargas as the political entrepreneur for the poor, but not the VERY poor (228-230)
      • Vargas and his direct successors created an All-Levels system, but enrollment was limited so basically only those in the vital constituency (workers, middle class) had access to education (about 42% enrollment rate, rural sectors had low enrollment) (235)
      • middle class had the access, also had high quality teachers, making the eudcation system pretty nice, but tradeoff was that it didn't serve many people (236-7)
    • some intra national differences during the dictatorship, state-level becomes important when federal level politics are sort of cut off (253-254)
    • top-down education system built between 1964 and 1990 to serve the agricultural elites who were the vital consituency (254-267)
      • education projects were also a great way to dole out jobs in a clientelistic style, meanign rural landowners used education spending more for the sake of remaining in power than for actual education...foreign education grants were essentially wasted funding these patronage networks (259-262)
    • soem equalizing after return to democracy, post 1990, but system still retains many of the private school advantages, better track for elites, it just opened up primary schools to more people (278-287)
    • analysis stops at 2000, so doesn't include PT's rise to power, not sure how that affects the edcuation system
  • Conclusion:
    • regime type does not predict improvements in mass education, at times democracies don't fund education and yet autocrats do (300)
    • could be that pro-poor collective action is what spurs any sort of pro-poor policymaking, rather than relying on ideological feelings of the leaders or some sort of platform: if the poor take to the streets adn demand things, they are more likely to get them! (302-4)