Politics of Education in Latin America: Reforms, Resistance and Persistence studies current efforts to transform education systems, teachers’ labor relations, and educational practices. The education systems of the region are involved in political disputations between the globalization and domestic demands.

This book synthesizes and analyzes the complex map of educational reforms in Latin America in the first two decades of the 21st century. The book offers insights into the agendas, processes and political economy of educational reforms in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. Written by renowned contributors from each country, chapters present systematic, critical and reflective accounts of an intense period of education reforms. The book fills a gap in educational research and provides a systematic study that compares the cases analyzed. The first broad, comparative collection of its kind, the book is well-suited to courses in international and comparative education policy.

The purpose of this contributed volume is to examine the links among research, policy, and change in education in Latin America in the context of the relationships between the economy, politics, and the state in the 1980s. The case analyses will discuss the challenges these societies face in education in their progression towards the twenty-first century. In its various sections, the book addresses the following questions: How did education respond during the 1980s to the major sociopolitical and economic changes that affected these countries? How did the changes in the 1980s affect the relationships between education, society, and the state, and what lessons can be learned from the interaction between research and policy that may help in understanding the developmental role of education in the 1990s? And is educational research and policy helping to improve the social condition of minorities in Latin America? This volume will be of interest to scholars and policymakers in Latin American studies, educational research, education policy, and educational planning.

In 2012, Chicago's school year began with the city's first teachers' strike in a quarter century and ended with the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history. On one side, a union leader and veteran black woman educator drew upon organizing strategies from black and Latinx communities to demand increased school resources. On the other side, the mayor, backed by the Obama administration, argued that only corporate-style education reform could set the struggling school system aright. The stark differences in positions resonated nationally, challenging the long-standing alliance between teachers' unions and the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Todd-Breland recovers the hidden history underlying this battle. She tells the story of black education reformers' community-based strategies to improve education beginning during the 1960s, as support for desegregation transformed into community control, experimental schooling models that pre-dated charter schools, and black teachers' challenges to a newly assertive teachers' union. This book reveals how these strategies collided with the burgeoning neoliberal educational apparatus during the late twentieth century, laying bare ruptures and enduring tensions between the politics of black achievement, urban inequality, and U.S. democracy.

Latin America higher education has undergone an astonishing transformation in recent years, highlighted by the private sector's growth from 3 to 34 percent of the region's total enrollment. In this provocative work Daniel Levy examines the sources, characteristics, and consequences of the development and considers the privatization of higher education within the broader context of state-society relationships. Levy shows how specific national circumstances cause variations and identifies three basic private-public patterns: one in which the private and public sectors are relatively similar and those in which one sector or the other is dominant. These patterns are analyzed in depth in case studies of Chile, Mexico, and Brazil. For each sector, Levy investigates origins and growth, and then who pays, who rules, and whose interests are served. In addition to providing a wealth of information, Levy offers incisive analyses of the nature of public and private institutions. Finally, he explores the implications of his findings for concepts such as autonomy, corporatism, and privatization. His multifaceted study is a major contribution to the literature on Latin American studies, comparative politics, and higher education.

This history of popular education looks at one of the most successful social movements to use popular education, the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) in Brazil. It highlights the importance of popular education to the "new" social movements based around identity, such as women's and indigenous organizations

Both financial and political factors impede the positive role of education in social and economic development in Latin America. This book argues that the inefficient operation of its education system constitutes one reason why Latin America is increasingly marginal on the world scene.