Chapter 11: Educational Excellence versus Educational Justice: How Latin American Policymakers Respond to These Competing Demands with the Evaluative State

Throughout Latin America, policy-makers are struggling to reconcile two conflicting political pressures: (i) the push to become more globally competitive on the basis of international assessments such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), and (ii) the simultaneous need to address long-standing, entrenched inequities in both educational quality and access throughout much of the region. This chapter documents how policy-making elites throughout Latin America are trying to address these two goals by incorporating “evidence-based” policy solutions that can be empirically defended as promoting equity. However, scholars throughout Latin America argue that instead of promoting equity, an increasing focus on accountability in educational policy at the national level throughout the region has resulted instead in a shift in priorities from the governance of educational systems to evaluation of those systems, with the state functioning primarily as an Evaluative State. This argument is developed through secondary analysis of the Hispanophone and Lusophone academic education literatures of Latin America, whose robust and rigorous studies of these trends at both national and regional levels remain little explored within the Anglophone academic tradition.