The expansion of private schooling in Latin America: Multiple manifestations and trajectories of a global education reform movement

Pro-privatization policies are at the center of global debates on educational reform processes of an increasing number of countries and regions. This chapter explores how to disassemble the nature, constraints, and variants of educational privatization in the different countries and territories in the Latin American region. It establishes a typology of trajectories of education privatization that is able to capture not only the formal processes of educational privatization, but also the contextual character in which these processes develop in the region. The chapter presents the conceptual framework and the methodology adopted in the study, both for data collection and for analysis purposes. It also presents the six different trajectories toward educational privatization that were identified in Latin America: as part of the structural reform of the State; as an incremental reform; educational privatization in Nordic welfare states; historical public-private partnerships; privatization by “default”; and privatization by way of disaster.