Introduction

This article presents how the privatization of education in the compulsory stage has been taking place since the end of the 20th century in countries that were part of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) since its origin—Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay.¹ It also discusses Chile, given that country’s pioneering spirit in relation to models adopted across the region. Privatization in this context is understood to encompass the set of processes discussed here, including phenomena like commodification and the establishment of public-private partnerships, measures that have directly and indirectly subordinated compulsory education to the interests of corporations, private organizations associated with them, and other private agents.

Authors such as Whitfield (2006) have also used the term, arguing that

a focus on privatisation to the exclusion of marketisation is inadequate. Privatisation and marketisation are inseparable, the latter creating the economic and ideological conditions and social relations by which further privatisation is developed.

(Whitfield, 2006, p. 4)

Along similar lines, Belfield and Levin (2002, p. 19) assert that privatization

is an umbrella term referring to many different educational programmes and policies. As an overall definition, “privatization is the transfer of activities, assets and responsibilities from government/public institutions and organizations to private individuals and agencies.” Also, privatization is often thought of as “liberalization”—where agents are freed from government regulations, or as “marketization”—where new markets are created as alternatives to government services or state allocation systems.

To characterize the privatization models employed in the educational systems considered here, we began by mapping productions and publications related to the privatization of compulsory education available in three databases for online consultation recognized by the selectivity of their productions: Web of Knowledge and later Web of Science (WoS) and the Scielo Platform—Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay.² The first two databases carry articles in English, while Scielo publishes in Portuguese and Spanish. From 1990 to 2014 the mapping focused on publications by the Web Knowledge/Web of Science (WoS) (Adrião, 2018). Materials collected on Scielo ranged from 1997 (the year it was created) to 2018.

Data from Mapeo sobre tendencias de la privatización de la educación en América Latina y el Caribe, produced by the Latin American Campaign for the Right to Education (2014),³ was also used. constitutional texts and national education legislation of each country were also consulted, as were the websites of the Ministries of Education, the press, and the most prominent private organizations operating in the field of education in each country.

Aside from Chile, the selected countries were all charter members of Mercosur. Chile was chosen for its preeminent position on this matter. Article 1 of the Mercosur Treaty provides for the free circulation of goods, services, and productive factors between countries through the elimination of customs duties and non-tariff restrictions on the circulation of goods and any other measure with equivalent effect (Tratado de Assunção, 1991). One of the consequences of this treaty was the creation, in 1991, of an Educational Sector of Mercosur, to which the Meeting of Education Ministers of Mercosur (RME) is associated.

Notwithstanding historical specificities, all five countries have relatively new constitutions: Chile (1980); Brazil (1988); Paraguay (1992); Argentina (1994) and Uruguay (1989), which consisted of a reform to the 1967 constitution. National education laws are even more recent, the oldest being those of Brazil (1996) and Paraguay (1998) followed by Argentina (2006), Chile (2009), and Uruguay (2009).

The period selected for the bibliographic survey begins in 1990, the inaugural year of the World Declaration on Education for All: Meeting Basic Learning Needs, an action plan issued by the World Conference on Education in Jomtien, Thailand. Among other guidelines, the Declaration proposed that educational policies should aim to universalize access to compulsory schooling and target public resources to this stage of education.

Studies related to the countries selected were identified by searching through keywords, abstracts, and titles including the following terms: financing, public-private partnership, privatization, charter, choice and subvention and phrases like elementary school and compulsory education.

These descriptors sought to identify works discussing forms of privatizing compulsory education, covering a variety of measures (Levin, 2001) related to the transformation of public education into a field for business (edubusiness; Hill, 2003) to strategies related to exoprivatization (Ball & Youdell, 2007) and ways of withdrawing the direct presence of the state in the provision and management of education. In addition, each of the consulted articles present at least one of the countries under analysis as an empirical field of study. Figure 1 shows the distribution of publications in the period considered in view of the empirical field analyzed.

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Figure 1. Total number of academic articles on basic education privatization identified on WoK/WoS and SciELO platforms,1990–2018*.

Note: *Paraguay is not yet a part of the Scielo platform. *‘varios’ refers to more than one country

Sources: Authors, based on Adrião (2015) and consultation of Web of Science, Web of Knowledge, and Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) platforms from Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. No record of scholarly production on Paraguay.

Of the 193 total articles published between 1993 and 2014 and searchable through the WOS databases for descriptor and country, only seven corresponded to the selected fields: four analyzing Chile, two comparing Chile to Argentina, and one about Brazil. Confirming previous research (Adrião, 2015), the quantity indicates the limited publication of work on these countries in major international journals, although the Chilean case receives more attention than others.

On SciELO, 57 publications were identified between 1997 and 2018, of which 54 met the scope of this article, demonstrating that there is scholarly production on this topic in the academic journals of greatest circulation on the continent, particularly as of the 2000s.

The largest number of articles were located using the descriptor “public-private partnership,” followed by articles located by the descriptor “privatization,” articles that analyzed parental and public grant mechanisms to private organizations, as illustrated in Figure 2.

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Figure 2. Articles published in SciELO 1997–2018 by country and descriptor.

Source: Compilation by authors

This article uses the aforementioned information and the analytical matrix presented in Table 1, resulting from a review of the literature (Adrião, 2015) and research into government and institutional documents available on the internet, to synthesize the predominant forms of education privatization of education at the compulsory stage in Mercosur countries. There are three dimensions that constitute, albeit schematically, the field of educational policy under study here: public education administration, educational supply, and curriculum development.

The article also identifies the main private actors involved in the introduction and expansion of these forms of privatizing national education in different countries.

Administration, Supply, and Elementary Education Curriculum as a Field for Privatization

Considering that this is a work of synthesis with an unavoidable degree of arbitrariness, Table 1 presents the forms of privatization that recur most in the literature, distributed in the three dimensions of educational policy considered in this reflection: educational supply, public education administration, and curriculum development.

The first dimension, related to the privatization of educational supply, is operationalized mainly through three mechanisms: public financing of private educational offerings, the provision of enrollment spaces in private schools, and school choice programs. Public financing of the private educational supply is made possible through both agreements or contracts between government entities and private providers and through the presence of fiscal incentive mechanisms for private education. To encourage the expansion of private schools, some governments have sought to stimulate for-profit schools associated with a decrease in the supply of public enrollment spots and systematic private classes or tutoring for remote teaching. When it comes to school choice, the scholarly works we consulted identified three main forms: programs that encourage enrollment in private schools contracted by the government, the adoption of vouchers, and homeschooling.

The privatization of public education administration is the second dynamic considered in this work. For the purposes of characterization, because they are generally applied simultaneously, the processes of privatizing education administration are usually observed in two spheres: in the context of public education systems or networks, assuming a systemic character and substantiating the privatization of educational administration, and within schools themselves, characterized as the privatization of school administration. In both cases, the public sector delegates decisions on the purposes of education and the processes necessary to meet its goals.

Both in systems and in individual schools understanding the depth of privatization processes requires a consideration of the nature of the private institution to which the government has delegated administrative duties: private for-profit institutions or private nonprofits. In the latter case, there has been a reported growth in the transfer of administrative duties to social investors, or philanthrocapitalists, a segment that presents itself as nonprofit despite acting according to a market logic (Bishop & Green, 2008; OECD, 2014).

Another way public education administration is privatized is through the creation of corporate governance mechanisms within the state involving representatives of companies and associated sectors.

The last dimension considered here is the privatization of curricular development. This involves the processes by which the private sector determines for schools, school networks, or public education systems the curriculum designs to be implemented. This can happen through advisory services for teacher training, the provision of educational technologies and other curricular inputs, the purchase of a set of products and services designated as private teaching systems (PTS), and through contracting processes for evaluating school performance. This amounts to the privatization of pedagogical processes, including relationships among teachers, students, and knowledge.

Types of Privatization of Educational Supply in Selected Countries

Most Prominent Private Actors in the Field of Education in Countries Under Consideration

Based on studies of the privatization of education administration in the contexts considered here, three main private segments were identified that focus on public networks and systems: venture philanthropy (OECD, 2014; Scott, 2009); corporations themselves; and the social arms of these corporations organized as foundations, institutes, and advocacy networks.

One detail that emerges from close analysis is that these organizations prioritize curricular development. The Center for Curriculum Redesign (CCR), an entity constituted by international organizations, government agencies, academic institutions, corporations, and nonprofit organizations, is one example. CCR endorsers and partners include Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Pearson, in addition to the World Bank.

Risk philanthropists (OECD, 2014), or philocapitalists (Bishop & Green, 2008), are donors whose actions are characterized as an “investment for socially-oriented business profits.” Conceptually, the idea of “risk philanthropy” became widespread after 1997 with the publication of the article “Virtuous Capital: What Foundations Can Learn from Venture Capitalists” in the Harvard Business Review (Letts et al., 1997), in which the authors identify the use by such philanthropists of tools usually used in the risk market, such as risk management and performance management considered for the purpose of solving society’s problems (Adrião, 2015, p. 211).

This segment, which links the social arms of business groups to financial returns for social investments, has been stimulated by the netFWD network linked to the OECD’s Development Center and composed of a small group of foundations. In poor and developing countries where public funding for education is limited, key objectives of this kind of investment include “optimising and accelerating the impact of philanthropy for development through the sharing of experiences and lessons, policy influence and the development of innovative partnerships” (OECD, 2014, p. 19).

In Brazil, as noted, the Lemann Foundation is a prime example, particularly through its Start-Ed Lab program, which selects and finances education entrepreneurs to develop products and services associated with the implementation of the Common National Curriculum Base (BNCC), a national reform effort led by the foundation. Foundations associated with the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industries, such as the Gates Foundation and the Telefónica Foundation, operate in Brazil by “offering” curriculum content linked to the platforms or systems that they sell.

The Natura Institute is a model of what is described as the social arm of a corporation. The institute is linked to the Brazilian business group Natura & Co. and operates transnationally in teacher training programs in countries where the company is commercially active. Its most important program is the Learning Community (Comunidade de Aprendizagem) and is present in 281 Brazilian public schools and 434 across Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.²¹ Natura also financed a map of Education Policy in Latin America (MAPEAL), the goal being to chart educational policies implemented in countries across the region that participated in the PISA in 2000 and 2012. MAPEAL, in turn, was coordinated by the Center for Implementing Public Policies for Equality and Growth (CIPPEC) in partnership with Educación 2020 (Chile), Businessmen for Education (Empresarios por la Educación) (Colombia), Vía Educación (Mexico), and GRADE (Peru). These organization are all networks of entrepreneurs who advocate for the social responsibility of member companies, a practice identified in other networks such as Todos pela Educação in Brazil (Martins, 2013), Educación 2020 (Chile), Reaching U (Uruguay), Juntos por la Educación (Paraguay), and Proyecto Educar 2050 (Argentina).

Education across the region is also frequently the object of attention from global NGOs like Teach for All, which seeks to develop leadership in classrooms and communities, accelerating the impact of social enterprises that cultivate the necessary leadership for change, and Junior Achievement, which aims to train future entrepreneurs and operates in countries with local business support.²²

Among corporations themselves, aside from the aforementioned ICT sectors, the editorial groups Pearson and Santillana, along with the educational giant Kogna, stand out.

Last but not least, investment funds are now part of the slate of private actors influencing and contesting educational policies either as “levers” for the emergence of new startups or as owners of shares in companies in the educational field. The following LAVCA statement is illustrative:

Latin American investors that seek both profits and the opportunity to expand quality education in their countries have a very large target market. The region has over 100 million students in hundreds of thousands of schools in highly fragmented systems in need of professionalization and better management. It is a perfect opportunity for private equity investors to both make money and improve the competitiveness of their societies. In fact, in LAVCA’s latest survey of 105 private equity investors from around the world, education is the third most attractive sector, after consumer/retail and financial services.²³

In Brazil, Mind Lab, a company associated with Instituto Ayrton Senna, was financed by BID Invest to implement an experimental evaluation related to the development of socio-emotional skills in 160 public schools.²⁴

Table 2 schematically summarizes the forms of privatization of compulsory education found in legislation, on government websites, and identified in the literature in different countries, presented throughout this article.

An analysis of this table demonstrates the regularity in the forms of privatization of educational supply in all five countries. The same is true when it comes to the forms of privatizing education administration through PPPs and the exercise of public school management by a private organization, in all cases not for profit. When it comes to curricula, the most common form of privatization is the implementation of curriculum designs developed or financed by companies.

Table 3, which draws on information regarding the incidence of business actors in national education between 2017 and 2018, illustrates that the same corporations are active in most countries, even though investment funds are included, at least explicitly, only in the Brazilian case. The diversity among philanthrocapitalists is explained, in part, by the national origin of the actors. On the other hand, the international NGO Junior Achievements, dedicated to programs fostering entrepreneurship, operates in every country except Uruguay. Finally, each country has a network of businesspeople intent on influencing educational policy. Argentina, with four such networks, stands out in this regard.

Final Considerations

This article has presented the main mechanisms through which key elements of public education are deliberately transferred to the private sector, a process involving the privatization of this human right (Croso & Modé, 2016).

The first aspect to be highlighted from the preceding discussion is the that basic education is not necessarily privatized in the same way in every South American context, yet such processes were identified in all education systems.

This is the case when it comes to subsidy policies for parental school-choice policies. Chile has a radical voucher model, whereas in Uruguay no such mechanism exists. Despite this difference, every country had public subsidies for private educational supply through contracts between governments and nonprofit organizations, scholarships, tax incentives for private sponsors or families, and the authorization of commercial educational services such as for-profit private lessons and tutoring. The latter has grown as a segment of edubusiness (Ball & Youdell, 2007; Dale, 1994; Hill, 2003), fueled by Mercosur agreements that liberalized distance learning.

The privatization of publicly funded education through the introduction of de-schooling measures like homeschooling, pushed by ideological and commercial conservative guidelines, has to contend with the constitutional provision of mandatory school attendance in all countries.

The study also identified differences in how school administration is privatized because, in three countries, the management of public schools by nonprofit, religious, or cooperative organizations is a constitutive part of the educational model associated with the historically limited reach of the state.

PPPs, a key mechanism in the privatization of education administration, were identified in three countries, carried out through the concession of parts of the “educational service” to corporations. This model will likely change existing formats for the provision and management of education since it involves transferring the construction and administration of a significant number of schools to the same private corporate group. The introduction of corporate management techniques, including the installation of a “co-management” approach to education, is being implemented in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. Advocacy networks made up of reformers from the business world were also observed in all the countries studied. In these cases, educational policy itself is privatized, with private actors determining the priorities, agenda, and meaning of education. Acting alone or in a network, these actors occupy and reconfigure the public space.

It is important to note that the transposition of policies developed in advanced economies, enhanced by the processes of economic globalization, is deepened in the countries examined here by the alignment of actors participating in the corporate management of education. This can be seen in the proposals for curricular reform financed by business segments discussed in this article.

Regarding the privatization of curricular development, the purchase of (private) teaching systems marketed by educational and publishing giants (Adrião et al., 2016) is, according to an IDB document, one of the 10 most promising innovation initiatives for Latin America out of a total of 120 catalogued by that organization (Cabrol, 2014). The same document, corroborating the trend described in this study, highlights the growth in the performance of telephone companies associated with government computer distribution programs, such as Telefónica in Chile and Uruguay and Vivo in Brazil (Cabrol, 2014). Each country, to some degree, adopted technologies and curricular inputs disseminated or marketed by private companies, or organizations supported by them, and by giants in the field of publishing, such as Pearson and Santillana. These groups have diversified their insertion in the entire segment, including by acquiring private schools and associating with investment funds, which measure their assets by the number of public enrollments accounted for in their businesses.

A second form of curricular privatization addressed in this article is the implementation of curriculum designs sponsored by private actors organized in advocacy networks made up of national and transnational companies and organizations, and by organizations that maintain private social investments as philanthrocapitalists, as systematized in Table 3. Every country experienced this in some way.

Philocapitalists are private actors that do not hide their intention of profiting from their involvement in social areas. This sets them apart from the traditional social or voluntary arms of business groups, which, in turn, act on the fringe of “social responsibility business” with the strategic function of enhancing the brand/product of the group to which they are linked.

To a greater or lesser extent, venture philanthropy and social investors operating in the countries examined here push for educational reforms that directly or indirectly benefit strategies and principles that contribute to their financial success or to the success of their “partner” brands and products. The study identified the actors most active in this segment in each country, with the exception of Fundação Itaú Social, present in Brazil and Uruguay. The organizations that present themselves as social arms of companies were also diverse, including the Brazilian Instituto Natura, which focuses on education in three countries: Brazil, Argentina, and Chile.

Furthermore, organizations operating globally and presenting themselves as nonprofits were active in each country, Junior Achievement, as inferred from Table 3, being a standout.

This group of private actors compete with unions, educators, and government agencies to determine the contours of educational policies. Such tensions, given cuts in public funding stemming from recent crises and fiscal adjustment policies, are likely to intensify.

In this way, these sectors that compete in one moment and serve certain strategic interests in another represent the link between segments of capital strengthened by accumulation strategies in a financialized economy (investment funds and banks) and segments that accumulate by investing in the production and development of information technologies (Adrião, 2018, p. 22).

This condition is, under the direction of philanthrocapitalists or corporations, perfectly extensible to public education systems. It is, therefore, a qualitative change in the processes of privatization compared to what was seen in the 1990s: It is not about school donation programs or volunteering, nor is it about the historic and permanent dispute between the interests of the majority and the elites over the definition of educational purposes, a dispute whose most important terrain is the classroom itself. In this context, “corporate power has become systemic, capturing one by one the different dimensions of expression and exercise of power, and generating a new dynamic, or a new architecture of actually existing power” (Dowbor, 2016).

Confronting the privatization of education in South America requires oppositions at a global level supported by locally produced empirical evidence. Indeed, it is striking how little international attention academic production on this topic has gained in inventoried and selected databases, not to mention in the construction of responses to locally implemented policies and programs. As an expression of this confrontation, it is worth remembering that, in 2005, the then ministers of education of Brazil and Argentina signed the Declaration of Brasília, excluding education from free trade agreements. In the case of Argentina, the veto was included in the National Education Law, which determined that the state will not subscribe to bilateral or multilateral free trade treaties that imply conceiving education as a profitable enterprise or that promote the commodification of public education.

It cannot be stressed enough that privatization hurts the public spirit of education by excluding legal subjects from defining its content and practice; it also hurts a conception of education as a basic human right by identifying market values, profitability, and other private interests as its guiding principles.