From the Rockies to the Andes: The charter school experiment in the Argentinian political context

© 2016, Centro de Estudos Educacao e Sociedade - CEDES. All rights reserved. In 1999, the Province of San Luis (Argentina) approved the creation of the so-called ‘Escuelas Experimentales Autogestionadas’ inspired by the North-American charter schools but with important differences. This article explores the circumstances under which the project was dismantled and abandoned prematurely. The study included a thorough documental analysis and interviews with leaders of the project, former officials of the Ministry of Education and members of the associations that ran these schools. We found strong incompatibilities between the guiding principles of the project, i.e. democratization, cooperativeness, autonomy and plurality, the practices of the provincial rentier political system, and the structures and traditional logics of power bureaucratically organized at the national level.