The Politics of Education An overview Juan Carlos Navarro, IDB

The basics In the education sector, providers are aware and organized, beneficiaries are dispersed and for the most part receive information with a lot of ¨noise¨ True policy impacts are only visible over the long run Contracting problems (agency issues) are severe and pervasive: actions by schools and teachers are hard to monitor, size and complexity make coordination very costly, difficulty in aligning interests of agents, near impossibility to measure individual contributions to the product. No overall organizing principle (¨Christmas tree” composition) Implementation requires collaboration by many agents and presents extensive opportunities for shaping policy outcomes

The actors Main actors (veto power) The national executive The unions The reluctant participants: Sub-national power players (if federal structure is in place) Supporting roles International organizations Congress Church Civil Society (Media, NGOs…)

Actor`s preferences Executive: improvement of education as a part of larger modernization and development agendas, maintaining overall political stability, political patronage,votes, keeping budgets under control. Short-term horizon. Often, ideological Unions: job security, more jobs, control over appointments, sustained nation-wide bargaining power, better salaries. Long- term horizon. Often, ideological Sub-national power players: creation and/or expansion of opportunities for patronage, votes, avoidance of unfunded mandates and constraints on discretionary spending, improvement of local economy

Two kinds of education politics The politics of expansion: Everybody wins. No significant conflict arises. Cooperation appears naturally given alignment of preferences among actors with veto power and frontier-expansion policies. The politics of quality/efficiency: Direct conflict of interest. Organized interests clash. Cooperation only through painstaking bargaining and coalition building. Most likely result: highly inefficient equilibrium.

Implications Policy-making will be disproportionately biased in favor of policies focused on expansion and access rather than on quality and efficiency (to the point that there are cases in which contentious policies get “disguised” as expansion policies) But there is still usually some pressure built in so that an “enlightened” executive and/or technocratic elites will tackle efficiency and quality oriented reforms

Policy-making arenas Direct negotiations between unions and the executive (“smoke- filled room”) It often degenerates into open conflict in the form of strikes and disruption of civil and political order (“the street”) In decentralized settings, whichever is the primary arena for intergovernmental coordination becomes important (“the family reunion”) The service delivery agency /the school/ will be also a distinctive arena where a difference can be made ( “the street corner”) Occasionally -and occasionally only- negotiations pass through congress, particularly if the allocation of resources and responsibilities to lower levels of government is involved Occasionally, policy debate in public spaces and the media plays a role

The essential process of reform politics Difficulty of executives and unions to cooperate, stemming from: Preferences are at odds Inter-temporal deals are very difficult to reach Compliance with the terms of deals is very difficult to monitor Only exceptionally other actors get involved (no countervailing forces) Ideologies clash

Implications for policy Policy-making will tend to be rigid regarding core policies (those in which veto players have conflicting and strong preferences) and volatile in the case of all the rest Implementation will matter a lot Under-investment in capacity Little transparency in decision-making Inefficient equilibria solidify after a “contracting moment”. The system is stable at a low level of performance. Considerable risk of capture by providers, since they are in position to claim property rights over teaching positions and several aspects of decision-making in the education system.

Country-specific features interact with these characteristics By affecting the main arena in which the conflicts play out By affecting the likelihood of success of reform attempts (movement from undesirable outer characteristics of policy-making to desirable ones) Eventually, by providing avenues for education policy-making to impact the PMP at large