Region's Govts Need to Develop Demand for Quality Education

By Jeffrey Puryear
Published in the Dialogue's Latin America Advisor., February 6, 2008

Region's Govts Need to Develop Demand for Quality Education

Originally published in Jeffrey Puryear’s monthly “Human Capital” column for the Dialogue's daily Latin America Advisor.

WASHINGTON, DC—A former Latin American president, reflecting on the difficulty of improving his country's schools, recently observed that: "for a politician, education costs money and produces nothing; it is a net negative process."

His comment, a harsh political judgment infused with more than a little frustration, illustrates the dilemma that political leaders face in much of the region: Genuine education reform incurs large short-term costs and no short-term benefits. Why would any politician take it on?

The costs are clear, and go beyond money. They involve confronting a variety of well-organized interest groups—principally teachers unions and public universities—that have "captured" public education in most countries. Their success is based on the fact that the clients of public schools—mostly poor families—have almost no power in the school system. They have little information on how schools are doing, scant mechanisms for influencing education policy or practice, and no tradition of citizen activism. The few parents with real power to influence schools, primarily middle- and upper-class, send their children to private schools and escape the failings of the public system.

Faced with this political vacuum, interest groups—principally teachers unions and public universities—move in, negotiate with the state (or go on strike), and manage to impose their priorities. The result is iron-clad job security for teachers regardless of performance, and free university educations for the rich. The poor lack this kind of negotiating power, and seldom go on strike (particularly to protest the poor quality of public schools). Because they lose out to groups with more political muscle, their children are left with third-rate educations in under-funded and poorly managed public primary schools.

In the face of this political imbalance, political parties could, in the name of the poor, stand up to the special interests and demand the hard decisions needed to improve public schools. This seldom happens, perhaps because party leaders perceive that doing so will cause them more trouble than doing nothing—at least in the short term. And of course presidential leadership could energize state bureaucracies and party leaders, and craft political strategies for change. But presidents realize that unions and universities are strong and well-organized while the poor are not, making the political payoff smaller than the trouble that reform initiatives will bring.

To alter this calculus, governments need to develop a stronger, more effective demand for quality education. Doing so involves at least three steps: 1) providing parents with reliable, timely, and user-friendly information on how their schools are doing; 2) establishing mechanisms for parental participation in policy decisions, giving them an involvement they are more likely to defend; and 3) giving the poor real power, by delegating (with appropriate oversight) significant decision-making authority to local entities—and by permitting poor parents to choose the school their children attend.

If the poor begin to demand quality education for their children, politicians will have an incentive to confront entrenched interest groups, and the former president's "net negative process" may well begin tipping toward positive.


Jeffrey Puryear is Vice President for Social Policy at the Inter-American Dialogue and Co-director of PREAL.