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Privatization Reform During Latin America

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Conclusion
Since the 1980s, transnational actors have disseminated ideas of education privatization throughout Latin America. Although by similar means, these policy ideas arrived at different historical moments at Chile and Argentina. Privatization ideas made its way in Chile carried by the influential Chicago boys, during the critical juncture of the authoritarian regime. The market-based reform served the interests of the military regime, and faced very little resistance given the repression and dismantling of the teacher union, and the penetration of the economic logic in the Ministry of Education. Timing, carriers and weak opposition allowed a complete replacement of the domestic education policy. Later in democracy, state-oriented education bureaucrats were not able to reverse the policy change. Although they tried to build on the inherited model and use the state as a way to correct the failures of the education market, the inconsistency between their goals and their means ended up reproducing and strengthening the privatized model.
By contrast in Argentina, the economic perspective arrived timidly and late when the country was making its transition to democracy. The resistance of the teacher union and provincial governments towards fiscal decentralization, and the reluctance of the ministry of education to market-based reforms, refrained the government from proposing explicit privatization instruments such as vouchers. Instead, the government gradually changed

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