Full Description
Education remains one of the biggest challenges for Latin American societies. However, the factors explaining this are hardly known, less so thoroughly understood. In Skills, Values, and Development: The Political Economy of Education in Latin America, the authors approach the education problem in 21st-century Latin America by considering it as a political economy issue. This political economy approach allows refocusing research from the supply of education (educational outcomes, institutions, and reform trajectories) in existing scholarship on policy reforms, to the conflicting demands of education by different actors at the intersection of political and economic dynamics.
The book is divided into three sections: first, the authors examine how education expansion--or the lack of it--relates to common regional political trends, how these trends relate to skills, value-orientations, and developmental goals, and the conflictual dynamics between these goals. The second section of the book explores some of these issues from a historical perspective, while the final section discusses the political economy of investing in skills in the context of the region's attempts to successfully integrate itself into the knowledge economy and build more cohesive and prosperous societies. The book combines a variety of approaches and methodologies, including short and long-term perspectives, large N quantitative analyses, comparative methods, and country case studies.
Contents
Introduction
Juan A. Bogliaccini and Aldo Madariaga
Part I. Skills as Societal Values
Chapter 1: Latin America's Education Systems in Comparative Perspective, 1945-2021: Patterns and Puzzles
Agustina S. Paglayan and Katy Norris
Chapter 2: The Value(s) of Education: On the Link between Skill Formation Regimes and Mass Public Attitudes in Latin America
Marius R. Busemeyer
Chapter 3: The Neglected Middle: Education in Latin America After a Half-Century of Reform
Stephen Kosack
Chapter 4: Technocratic Reform and Value-Based Opposition: The Pedagogical Movement of Colombia
Christopher Chambers-Ju and Corrina Sullivan
Part II. The Historical Underpinnings of Education and Skills Formation
Chapter 5: Vocational Training Institutions in Latin America: Imported, Indigenous, and/or Mestizo?
Andrew Schrank
Chapter 6: Political Regimes, Reform Coalitions and Skill Formation: A Sub-national Comparative Perspective
Fulya Apaydin
Chapter 7: State Building, Education Centralization, and the Colonial Legacies of Racial Capital
David N. Lopez
Chapter 8: Early Childhood Education Policies, Delegated Provision, and Skills-Enhancing Goals in Latin America
Melina Altamirano
Part III. The Political Economy of Investment in Skills
Chapter 9: Immigrants and Refugees in the Skill Systems of Middle-Income Countries
Merve Sancak
Chapter 10: The Skills Formation Challenge in Latin America: States, Firms, and Clusters in High-Tech Sectors
Mariana Rangel-Padilla
Chapter 11: Education for all? Structural Inequality in Latin America and the Broken Promise of Mobility
Denisse Gelber and Carolina Castillo
