Definitions and Background

Qualitative approaches seek to produce deep understandings of complex social dynamics examined in their own context. They rely on the experience of individuals and groups, considered active agents in the production of meanings that guide their actions. These experiences are retrieved directly, through varied means, including interviews, historical analysis, discourse analysis, and ethnography, carried out together or in isolation. Qualitative approaches assume that, from the individuals participating in the research, scholars learn to identify the systems of meaning people mobilize as they go about their lives.

In the case of studies on educational inequalities, qualitative and quantitative approaches in Latin America correspond to different disciplinary communities, placing sociology, anthropology, history, psychology, and education on the opposite side from economics. This follows institutional cleavages—departments, fields, and faculty—and is associated with gender and even generational divides, since, as we shall see, qualitative approaches to educational inequality were developed after a tradition of quantitative studies on the subject had already been established.

Indeed, although studies on different aspects of schooling have been produced in Latin America since at least the beginning of the 20th century, the issue of educational inequality itself has only been pursued in a more explicit and structured way, and from more diversified theoretical frameworks, beginning with the democratic opening-up of the region in the 1980s.

Before that, in the scholarly spaces progressively taking shape across the region, research on education remained a small field. In Brazil, it was dominated by psychology and developed only precariously in a few institutions. Approaches based on the social sciences have evolved in the country only since the mid-1950s, essentially through descriptive studies (Gouveia, 1971). In Argentina, there were incipient investigations before the 1960s that were informed by works in psychology, along with some in the field of sociology, which sought to define itself as a scientific discipline using quantitative approaches under the heavy influence of works produced in the United States.

This situation changed over the course of the 1960s and especially in the 1970s when international agencies such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) started to encourage studies in the region that would document the association between education and economic growth as well as between education and modernization (Resnik, 2006).

In this period, more varied and reliable data on national education systems became increasingly available while, at the same time, graduate programs expanded, increasing the supply of qualified scholars with progressively stable academic careers made possible by university expansion.

In the 1970s, for example, census data in Brazil allowed economists to identify a strong association between years of schooling and personal income (Fishlow, 1972; Langoni, 1973), contributing to what would become, 20 years later, a prolific line of studies.

In the following years, under the aegis of international organizations, general analyses of educational systems were carried out, as was the case with a pioneering study based on data from the project Development and Education in Latin America and the Caribbean, pursued between 1976 and 1981 by ECLAC under the coordination of Germán Rama, within the framework of a partnership with UNESCO/UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). This study laid the foundations for further research examining the variation in educational inequality among the countries of the region, arguing that the pattern of social stratification of each country largely determined the pattern of distribution of education, at least at the initial levels. A smaller stratification would thus correspond to a more equitable distribution of education, which could be seen in countries such as Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile, while a greater stratification would correspond to a less equitable distribution, as in the case of Brazil, for example.

Evidence of the link between school performance and social origin in countries such as France and the United States, as well as the explanatory models constructed to explain it (Baudelot & Establet, 1971; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964, 1970; Coleman, 1966) enabled the creation of theoretical approaches quickly absorbed by different countries in the continent, driving social science investigations into the segmentation of education systems in the countries of the region. Cunha (1975), for example, builds a broad demonstration for the case of Brazil, with an Argentine counterpart in Braslavsky (1986) and in studies such as that of Filmus (1988), which examines educational inequalities in students moving from primary to secondary education, and Braslavsky and Krawczyk (1988), which analyzes inequality in the distribution of education.

It is on this foundation that qualitative approaches to educational inequality have developed. From the mid-1980s onwards, they were driven by university dynamics, such as the return of many professors who had been exiled during military regimes, but also by political dynamics, among them the revival of social movements, which placed inequality at the center of the agenda. Education departments and colleges, especially those based in public universities located in major urban centers, such as Buenos Aires, La Plata, and Córdoba, in Argentina; São Paulo, Campinas, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, and Recife in Brazil; and Montevideo in Uruguay, began to stand out in this period as leading spaces for education research. It was during this period and in these institutions those studies interested in explaining the dynamics of inequality by examining schools’ “black box,” in several cases along with examining the “black box” of families, from a qualitative approach, arose.

Today, a review of this literature reveals its strengths and its contribution to our understanding of the dynamics leading to the region’s high levels of educational inequality.

Studies of Elites/Dominant Groups

In Latin America, studies on the education of elites and dominant groups have developed relatively recently, although works of historical sociology were conducted in earlier periods. This is the case, for example, of Di Tella (1969), who showed that sectors of the local elites confronted with the prospect of increasing immigration at the end of the 19th century used education, and especially secondary education, as a mechanism of social control, taking over the private school as “a life insurance for the country’s upper classes” from which the newly arrived migrant groups were effectively excluded (p. 318). This is also demonstrated in studies by Carvalho (1978, 1980) and Adorno (1988), who documented patterns of socialization and schooling among parts of Brazil’s elites in the 19th and first half of the 20th century. These studies showed, on one hand, the effect of moral, cognitive, and political integration resulting from sharing experiences in a limited number of educational institutions, as well as the effects of the intense social segregation that structured social relations. They also demonstrated the effects of increasingly unequal access to the labor market and, in the case of some groups, access to political representation. On the other hand, they documented the rare circumstances by which some outsiders managed a degree of social mobility, usually by the adoption of cultural patterns associated with the dominant classes.

Among these pioneering studies, there is no doubt that quantitative studies had the greatest impact on the academic literature of the 1990s, documenting the strong segmentation of the region’s educational systems that produced separate educational circuits based on the social position of families, such as Cunha (1975), for the Brazilian case, and Braslavsky (1985) for the Argentinian one. In this sense, rather than breaking with the quantitative approaches on which these pioneering studies are based, more recent works may be more aptly viewed as attempts to deepen and broaden the research agenda they inaugurated.

Examining the schooling of privileged groups in Latin America means examining, for the most part, private education, since public schools are attended mostly by the lower middle class and the working class, as well as poor families. The importance of private education to the region’s dominant groups has increased exponentially with the growth of national postwar education systems, largely based on the expansion of state or non-state public schools. Since, for various reasons, this expansion was not accompanied by an adequate level of state investment, there was a growing perception among public school users that the quality of public education fell as the number of students forced to rely on public education expanded. This resulted, to varying degrees and at different times in each country, in the children of elite sectors of society leaving public schools to attend a growing number of private schools.

Most recent studies on the education of dominant groups favor a broad set of themes and are the result of extensive research projects anchored in graduate programs. In Brazil, the work of Maria Alice Nogueira on the educational strategies of elites and middle-class groups was an early example. Her studies and those of her students and collaborators gave rise to a detailed inventory of the educational modus operandi of different segments of the most privileged groups (Nogueira, 1998, 2004), as well as an analysis on the ways private schools negotiate their ambiguous position between autonomy and dependence in relation to the families they are tasked with serving (Nogueira, 2005). Hers was also one of the first Brazilian groups to assess the diffusion of internationalization strategies among the upper and upper-middle classes, which were, until very recently, the prerogative of the wealthy bourgeoisie, making it possible to understand the robust and rapid growth of exchange programs and foreign trips available to these students (Prado, 2001), as well as the expansion of international and bilingual schools in Brazil, a phenomenon that accelerated in the 2000s (Aguiar & Nogueira, 2012).

The subject of elite families’ school strategies also appears in the works of Gessaghi (2010) and Villa (2012) who, through multigenerational interviews, delineate the efforts of certain members of these groups to maintain and recreate their dominant positions in Argentina, either among the families of the traditional upper classes, in the former case, or between families of jurists, in the latter.

Qualitative approaches have also led to studies on the segmentation of education systems. In Argentina, in a line of research developed at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), Ziegler (2004) outlined the variations in educational formation offered by a group of private schools in the city and the province of Buenos Aires, showing that while they catered to privileged social sectors, they set themselves apart by prioritizing different segments of the elite, allowing the incorporation of class standards through school work, even the more commonplace and banal (Tiramonti & Ziegler, 2008). This was also demonstrated by Almeida (2001), who documented how the adjustment of pedagogical strategies to parental expectations allows private schools to function as educational spaces that can be perceived as a continuation of familial socialization. Taken together, these works show how privileged families appropriate schools, placing the universalist project that was at the origin of school expansion in Latin America and other regions at the service of class interests.

These continuities between family values and school values are examined in the works of Fuentes (2015) and Servetto (2014), who analyzed elite Catholic schools in Buenos Aires and Córdoba, respectively. While the first study shows the contribution of religious and sporting practices, as well as the practices of sociability for the internalization of class values, the second documents the intense work of separation these schools carry out, reproducing the perception that there is a “we” fundamentally different from “others,” who, by not sharing beliefs and ways of life, are perceived as threatening.

This theme also appears in studies analyzing the memories of graduates from schools reserved for the elite. Through long biographical interviews, such works examine the long-term effect of school experiences. Perosa (2009), for example, shows how schooling can reinforce processes of gendered socialization that affect girls from different sectors of the most privileged groups. In the work of Méndez (2013), the effects of an education at a traditional public school in Buenos Aires focused on the formation of cultural and political elites in Argentina and the establishment of lasting bonds of friendship, which, in some cases, later translated into the bases of real power.

Another line of analysis has emerged in studies about the meanings attributed to the choice of school. Qualitative approaches based on interviews are effective ways to capture the dense web of these meanings, allowing the researcher to grapple with uncertainties, regrets, and contradictions. Since these are decisions taken in the moment, qualitative approaches based on ethnographies or observations find their greatest potential in these contexts since they can capture, without reinterpretations mediated by memory, the various factors individuals consider when making such decisions.

By documenting how privileged families move through schools, these studies foster a detailed understanding of micro processes that lead to the social segmentation of educational systems and, in particular, show how the meanings these families attribute to schooling lead to the overvaluation of private schools. From this perspective, Martínez, Villa, and Seoane (2009) investigated the elite private education circuit in the province of Buenos Aires, showing that it is a market structured as “a two-way street,” in which schools choose families as much as families choose schools. By examining communication and marketing strategies carried out by schools, this study documents the values and principles that govern the dynamics of attraction and repulsion that ultimately guide the flow of students.

Studies on the choice of school allow for the capture of values and meanings shared by families. Such insights are particularly revealing when they examine privileged families who are in the process of changing their social position, moving upward or downward. This is one of the most interesting contributions of the study by del Cueto (2007), which approached the process of families choosing schools by looking at those who moved to the gated communities that multiplied in the periphery of Buenos Aires in the 1990s as a result of changes in the productive sector that allowed certain middle groups to afford more exclusive housing, as well as urban changes that defied previous models of city organization, hitherto marked by a greater social mix. Narodowski and Schettini (2008), on the other hand, have developed one of the few works that comparatively examines the processes of school choice between groups in different social positions. A fundamental interest of this work is to show how, in addition to the strategies of families and schools, educational policies play an important role in shaping school supply, including in the private sector. They show, thus, that the abandonment of public schools by middle-class groups, as well as their refuge in private schools and the strategies of differentiation of the latter, are the result of a complex dynamic in which educational policies, family dynamics, and series of processes—linked to the educational field and to the institution itself—come together to guide, in the end, the definition of the curriculum in different schools.

Systematic studies of curricula and teachers in elite schools are not as common. One such work is the discussion of the Portuguese curriculum and the teaching of writing in the elite schools of São Paulo (Almeida, 2004) and the work done by Ziegler, Gessaghi, and Fuentes (2018) on elite schools in Buenos Aires, which demonstrates how inequality materializes through the selection of material to be taught and the training modalities offered by the schools. Ziegler (2011), finally, shows how the teachers who form the elites of Buenos Aires constitute a select group, with social backgrounds and specific training that allows them to be classified as a “teaching elite.”

The investigations mentioned so far show the configuration of a heterogeneous school space, intended to serve a heterogeneous social group that can be classified as privileged. They show that institutional diversity results from the imbrication between the strategies and expectations of the families and the educational missions of the schools. These studies show the active work these families carry out to sustain schools that meet their aspirations and expectations regarding the education of their children. Indeed, recent studies demonstrate the growing trend of social isolation between this group and those less privileged, with the latter increasingly seeking sociocultural spaces as homogeneous as possible (Almeida, 2015; Ziegler, 2007).

Studies of Working-Class and Poor Groups

Studies of less privileged groups are much more common in Brazil and Argentina than those examining privileged groups. There are several reasons for this greater volume of work. The growing attention to social inequality that accompanied the return to democracy was marked by increasing interest in the experience of less privileged groups. Many of the social scientists who took university positions during this period brought with them experiences of activism developed during the military regimes and were committed to social movements that fought for the guarantee of social rights to the most vulnerable groups. The action of international organizations was significant as well. As Finnemore (1998) shows, starting in the late 1960s, the World Bank was instrumental in expanding the notion of development, which now included references to income distribution and poverty as well. This change was accompanied by a shift in the scale of analysis. While poverty until that point had been considered a condition associated with countries as a whole, from that point on it became thought of as a condition of individual human beings.

The state reform agenda developed during this period was greatly influenced by this general picture of the production and international circulation of knowledge about poverty, generating public policies of various kinds. Educational policies, in particular, were one of the priority targets of initiatives aimed at the poorest. In this context, studies of the relationship between less privileged groups and schools have been considered by many of their own authors as significant contributions not only to the scientific field but, perhaps most important, to the political disputes taking place in these countries.

All this contributed to the development of a solid research agenda on poverty in all disciplines of the social sciences and the economy, promoting important methodological developments, including increased attention to where individuals live and socialize. This period saw a proliferation of works based on qualitative approaches exploring different dimensions of the contemporary experiences of less privileged groups. Long-term ethnographic investigations, more common in Argentina than in Brazil, and in-depth interviews, are the most common ways of producing the data used in these investigations, which examine specific situations, actors, and processes on a micro-social scale.

However, few of these studies have been dedicated to examining the dynamics that lead to educational inequalities, more often stopping at describing everyday life or examining the values espoused by young people. In the set of studies prepared to address the problem of educational inequality, one of the most important trends has been to examine day-to-day routines in school. Another strength comes from studies dedicated to showing the limits of educational institutions in offering, especially for young people, future perspectives that take into account their schooling.

The first group includes studies that investigate processes which lead to school failure and that are likely to affect the most impoverished sectors. In these cases, trajectories that present many obstacles, interruptions, reorientations, requiring more time to complete grades or, in many cases, leading to students dropping out of school are considered failures.

In Brazil, the pioneering study by Patto (1990) showed a whole generation of young researchers the promise of approaches that, based on long and meticulous observations of the daily household and school life of children “in a situation of school failure,” made it possible to demonstrate the accumulation of misunderstandings on the part of the school that explained the children’s disadvantaged position. Few studies after this have so masterfully demonstrated how the distance between school culture and the culture of the families of popular groups affect school outcomes, even though the structural causes that feed that distance—such as the social segregation that structures the education system—have not been much explored in it.

Since then, a significant number of studies have addressed the phenomenon of social exclusion in schools. Because education for children between the ages of 6 and 14 is universalized, studies that examine this stage of schooling focus mainly on understanding the dynamics that lead to the segmentation of the education system.

Thus, research on the flow of students in Rio de Janeiro schools conducted by Marcio da Costa and Marianne Koslinski, for example, led to a series of studies examining the creation of a “hidden market” in the network of public schools in the city (Costa & Koslinski, 2011, 2012). These studies, based partly on surveys, but strongly supported by interviews with teachers, school administrators, and other staff, as well as with parents of students, show that, largely due to the absence of state controls on student flow, the weight of parental activism in searching for schools with better conditions for their children is a key factor guiding the flow of students, producing a level of school segregation that is, in good measure, responsible for making the differentiation of the conditions of schooling more acute within the public school network of the city.

Likewise, Ernica and Batista’s (2012) study examined schools in the most vulnerable areas of the city of São Paulo, documenting the dynamics responsible for the low results achieved by students there. Through long observations and interviews, the authors document the accumulation of disadvantages that produce the differentiation in the school system. Schools in vulnerable regions are more isolated from other public services and families require a level of attention and help that schools are not equipped to offer.

Another set of studies analyzes school dynamics in an even finer and more sophisticated way. Some take up the notion of “school grammar” proposed by Tyack and Cuban (1995, p. 85) to think about “the ways that schools divide time and space, classify students and allocate them to classrooms, splinter knowledge into ‘subjects,’ and award grades and ‘credits’ as evidence of learning.” They also take up the concept of school culture as elaborated by Viñao Frago (2002, p. 36) to account for “the set of ideas, principles, norms, patterns, rituals, inertias, habits and practices, sedimented over time in the form of traditions, regularities, rules of the game not explicit but shared by the actors within educational institutions.”

The works of Terigi (2008), Baquero, Terigi, Toscano, Briscioli, and Sburlatti (2009), and Briscioli (2016) examined the organization of secondary school and showed that its structure and functioning produce strong selectivity, which is reflected in the trajectories and length of schooling, which can vary, especially in the case of the most vulnerable groups. These studies show how school—in particular because of its organization and its evaluation system, among other factors—contributes to failure and dropout.

Also included in this line of research is the work of the Viernes Group, which took as its object of analysis a set of schools created in 2004 by the state in the city of Buenos Aires, with the aim of improving the inclusion and graduation rates among young people from the popular classes. It is a work that examines the institutional conditions that produce or, on the contrary, challenge the processes of school failure. The schools studied had modified some aspects of the traditional school, and although they maintained the classic organization of the curriculum, they innovated by creating a more personalized structure for the students and by ensuring they employed teachers with a high degree of social and pedagogical commitment. In addition, these schools try to strengthen the learning component of the educational experience, in order to improve opportunities for students living in contexts of poverty.

Research has shown the importance of these policies in indicating the limits and potentialities of such changes. In particular, research has shown the value of personalized experiences (Nobile, 2014) to counteract the sense of failure generated by the educational system itself and has advanced analysis of the links between students and teachers in these specific situations, showing how the modes of promotion adopted by these institutions differed from those adopted by traditional schools (Ziegler, 2011). It also revealed the impact of these experiences on educational identities (Arroyo & Poliak, 2011) and, finally, indicated the limits of the democratization of the education system when policies contribute to segregating certain populations (Tiramonti, 2011).

The literature on working classes has indicated that families in that category show considerable interest in schooling and invest a lot of time, energy, and material resources to ensure that their sons and daughters can develop a long-term commitment to education. However, in both Brazil and Argentina, secondary school represents a critical point for young people in these classes who, to a large extent, drop out without completing their education or take much longer than expected to complete their studies. Some studies have been developed in both countries to understand these issues. Krichesky (2014), for example, examines the aspects of school dynamics that facilitate or make it harder for students to stay in school in Argentina. Through a study based on classroom observations and interviews, the author analyzes the teaching practices in schools in the Buenos Aires region that cater primarily to young people from the popular classes. This study shows how teaching practices that lead to meaningless and mechanical activities produce apathy among young students and drive them away from the academic culture the school should cultivate. The abandonment of school resulting from these practices reinforces the selective character of secondary school, which continues to effectively work against the realization of the right to education.

Other studies that contribute to the understanding of educational dynamics include some that address the process of stigmatization experienced by these groups, either by investigating the social segregation associated with the neighborhoods and territories they inhabit (Kessler, 2002) or by analyzing the classification systems mobilized by teachers (Kaplan, 1997), who socially locate their students, legitimizing hierarchies based on markers that express cultural differences. These sociological studies have allowed us to better understand the ways in which poverty affects the processes of schooling, including indicating the subjective implications of the dynamics of exclusion.

Duschatzky (1999) and Duschatzky and Corea (2002), in turn, show that the high value that young people experiencing poverty attribute to secondary school is not enough to overcome the institution’s inability to organize youth experiences so that, as a consequence, youth have their subjectivities shaped by initiation rites, daily interactions in the street, time spent in the neighborhood, among other factors. In this context, schools become secondary, less important spaces of socialization.

As the sense attributed to school experience by young people is treated in this literature as one of the most important explanatory elements of investment in school, studies that have sought to elucidate this question have multiplied in recent years. A longitudinal study, for example, documented the perceptions about school in two moments of the life of a group of boys and girls in the outskirts of Campinas—when they were 9 and later when they were 14 (Lima & Almeida, 2010). This study showed that younger children have the same school adherence as their parents. Long-term schooling is a central part of their plans, even including anticipating going to college. Around 14 years of age, however, the situation changes significantly and these young people start to express a desire to enter the labor market once they reach the legal age, which in Brazil is 16. How to explain this transformation? The work indicates that this is due, in large part, to the school’s difficulty in presenting young people with a projected future achieved through schooling, since their experiences with education in the public schools are marked by poor results, crowded rooms, and absenteeism. The hopes of their parents are counteracted by the cold reality these young people see among their older classmates, who face all kinds of difficulties in building sufficient schooling skills to bring them to the highest levels of education, and, thus, to the certificates that could ensure a good position in the job market.

In this context, studies that examine the trajectories of young people who, despite these numerous difficulties, have reached higher education and, in particular, the most prestigious university programs, are important to understand the conditions that make such exceptional trajectories possible. As Portes (2000), Viana (2005), and Zago (2009) show, these trajectories are the result of exceptional conditions. The families of the youngsters studied differ from those of most families of popular groups. These are families that experience greater stability in economic terms and some experience of social mobility. Moreover, due to conditions beyond their own control, they were able to offer to their sons and daughters schooling that was a little better than the average experienced by their group, taking advantage of a school supply that is not normally available to young people from this social environment. These elements contribute to students being able to exhibit a strong commitment to school work, which in turn helps them to receive particular attention from certain teachers, generating a virtuous circle of small advantages that end up making a difference in their educational trajectories.

Results of this kind indicate the need to understand the effects of social policies that aim to reduce the challenges young people from working classes face in building long educational trajectories. Gluz (2006, 2007), for example, has produced evidence on the effects of policies that link conditional economic contributions for families to their children regularly attending school. Along the same line, Giovine (2012) examined policies implemented in the province of Buenos Aires that sought to link schools to the broader range of institutions that serve the poorest families (primary healthcare, workers’ networks, and community food banks, among others). All these institutions extended different initiatives of poverty alleviation to the students. The study shows that, from the deepening of levels of social exclusion, the treatment of poverty does not take place as in previous periods, when a direct relationship of dependence was established between donor institutions and recipient subjects. Instead, changes in the early 21th century have led to the distribution of forms of intervention in poverty by a larger group of institutions located within a network of organizations through which different actors circulate; these actors require new knowledge, strategies, and practices to take ownership of the benefits at their disposal.

Perhaps the most ambitious work in this area has been an investigation that looked into the different policies that contributed to the inclusion of youth from popular classes in secondary schools in Argentina (Jacinto & Freytes, 2007), Chile (Marshall Infante, 2004), and Uruguay (Aristimuño & Lasida, 2003). These studies have shown the active role played by schools in implementing policies aimed at increasing the educational opportunities of young people in poverty, helping to diminish the effect of poverty on specific outcomes—greater equity in relation to performance, better learning outcomes—and how to adapt them, generate new learning methods, and even change their meaning.

Final Considerations

The canonical literature in this area has shown that the institution we recognize today as school took on its particular form in the late 19th century, becoming the basis upon which national education systems were consolidated in different parts of the globe. Compulsory education and the serial organization of learning knowledge that does not pertain directly to the practical world are a couple of its characteristics (Lahire, Thin, & Vincent, 1994). This literature also shows that educational inequalities derive from complex dynamics involving families’ living conditions and school organization, as well as their subjective effects on the students.

Despite a tendency toward homogenization, it remains necessary to recognize important differences among nations and among regions. In the case of Latin America, several of these differences derive from the peripheral position occupied by countries in relation to centers where educational policies, pedagogical theories, and learning models are constructed, which then circulate globally to a greater or lesser extent. As a product of local contexts, these dynamics require, in order to be properly identified and described, a fine examination of the conditions in which they take place. Qualitative approaches are particularly fruitful in this regard, allowing us to describe these dynamics and capture regularities and variations, as well as to construct hypotheses regarding causalities.

Inspired by Latin American quantitative studies, which demonstrated the association between the level of schooling of workers and their income, as well as studies produced in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, which point to the relationship between students’ social backgrounds and their performance in school, qualitative approaches were instrumental in ensuring that the Latin American context could be adequately taken into account in work on educational inequalities. They have made it possible to identify what is specific in regions marked by strong social inequality and by the absence of a well-established welfare state.

Developed mainly beginning in the 1980s, following the transformations in the scientific and political space associated with the return to democracy, studies developed in this perspective usually depart from a sociological perspective. They allow us to observe that educational expansion taking place across the region in the 20th century led to the constitution of socially segregated spaces for schooling. They also show that such segregation largely defines the operation of the school system and the school experience of children and young people, helping to set the boundaries of their school trajectories. For a part of the student population, schooling presents itself as a possible, even desirable, project. These are the ones that, for the most part, manage to develop long-term school trajectories that lead to a prized diploma. Elsewhere, however, access to schooling itself cannot be considered a guarantee. Economic and political crises lead to the reduction of state investments to a level sufficient to prevent the start or continuation of schooling for part of the population. Those who succeed in pursuing their studies for a longer time often do so under very adverse conditions, subject to a pedagogical organization marked by an inherited European approach not always suited to the ways of life of this poorer population, which arrives at school with very little exposure to academic culture.

Despite all the advances that qualitative approaches have fostered in the understanding of educational inequalities in Latin America, it is necessary to emphasize that the studies developed in this perspective are subject to their national framework, with little dialogue between the different countries and an almost total absence of comparative studies. This tends to generate an overvaluation of national dynamics, as if they are the only ones responsible for the production of local contexts. We know, however, that the intensification of the international circulation of theories, pedagogical models, and mechanisms of government, among others, strongly interfere in the configuration of the school experience of the children and young people of the region. Thus, as qualitative approaches to educational inequality have given rise to increasingly deep analyses of the internal dynamics of schools, teaching practices, and classroom interactions to which students from different social backgrounds are subjected in specific school settings, in specific regions, the comparative perspective can be mobilized at this juncture to support a research agenda around inquiries about the global dynamics that contribute to defining such local school settings. This would make it possible to examine the genesis of transformations occurring in the fundamental dimensions of schooling with regard to the reproduction of educational inequality, such as those concerning curricula and teacher training, as well as the diffusion of evaluation systems and the new forms of privatization of education, among many others.

The comparative approach seems all the more feasible now that the research community can draw on a significant accumulation of reflections on educational inequality in their respective countries, resulting from the high degree of institutionalization of research on this theme and from the visible effort made by the national research funding agencies to increase the international exchange between researchers by supporting mobility and the construction of joint research projects.