Education and the PMP

1. Education and the PMP • draft Juan Carlos Navarro

2. What political economy says • In the education sector, providers are aware and organized, beneficiaries are dispersed and for the most part receive information with a lot of ¨noise¨ • True policy impacts are only visible over the long run • Contracting problems (agency issues) are severe and pervasive: actions by schools and teachers are hard to monitor, size and complexity make coordination very costly, difficulty in aligning interests of agents, near impossibility to measure individual contributions to the product. • No overall organizing principle (¨Christmas tree” composition) • Implementation requires collaboration by many agents and presents extensive opportunities for shaping policy outcomes

3. Implications for education policy • Inefficient equilibria solidify after a “contracting moment”. The system is stable at a low level of performance due to a combination of: • Considerable risk of Capture by providers, since they are in position to claim property rights over teaching positions and several aspects of decision-making in the education system. • Rigid rules (low adaptability to economic shocks) produced by inability to commit on the side of the executive. This rigidity affects “core” policies: • Public-private market share • Free public education • Job stability and entry, promotion and retirement rules • Preservation of the bargaining power of the union • Precarious policy stability (high policy volatility due to political shocks) regarding “non-core” policies (all the rest) • Under-investment in capacity • Little transparency in decision-making

4. The actors • Main actors (veto power) • The national executive • The unions • The reluctant participants: Sub-national power players (if federal structure is in place) • Supporting roles • International organizations • Congress • Church • The Media

5. Actors with veto power

6. Actor`s preferences • Executive: improvement of education as a part of larger modernization and development agendas, maintaining overall political stability, political patronage,votes, keeping budgets under control. Short-term horizon. Often, highly ideological • Unions: job security, more jobs, control over appointments, sustained nation-wide bargaining power, better salaries. Long-term horizon. Often, highly ideological • Sub-national power players: creation and/or expansion of opportunities for patronage, votes, avoidance of unfunded mandates and constraints on discretionary spending, improvement of local economy

7. Two kinds of education politics • The politics of expansion: Everybody wins. No significant conflict arises. Cooperation appears naturally given alignment of preferences among actors with veto power and frontier-expansion policies. • The politics of quality/efficiency: Direct conflict of interest. Organized interests clash. Cooperation only through painstaking bargaining and coalition building. Most likely result: highly inefficient equilibrium.

8. The politics of expansion • It is particularly important -albeit not exclusive- if: • Resource constraints are not extreme. • There is expanding demand for publicly provided education • It produces impatience among political, business and technocratic elites, since it only results in quality or efficiency improvements in the very long run, leading to policies in which cooperation is harder to get

9. Implications • Policy-making will be disproportionately biased in favor of policies focused on expansion and access rather than on quality and efficiency (to the point that there are cases in which contentious policies get “disguised” as expansion policies) • But there is still usually some pressure built in so that an “enlightened” executive and/or technocratic elites will tackle efficiency and quality oriented reforms • Policy-making will tend to be rigid regarding core policies and volatile in the case of all the rest • Implementation will matter a lot

10. The essential process of reform politics • Difficulty of executives and unions to cooperate, stemming from: • Inter-temporal deals are very difficult to reach • Preferences are at odds • Compliance with the terms of deals is very difficult to monitor • Only exceptionally other actors get involved (no countervailing forces) • Ideologies clash

11. Policy-making arenas • Direct negotiations between unions and the executive (“smoke-filled room”) • It often degenerates into open conflict in the form of strikes and disruption of civil and political order (“the street”) • In decentralized settings, whichever is the primary arena for intergovernmental coordination becomes important (“the family reunion”) • The service delivery agency /the school/ will be also a distinctive arena where a difference can be made ( “the street corner”) • Occasionally -and occasionally only- negotiations pass through congress, particularly if the allocation of resources and responsibilities to lower levels of government is involved • Occasionally, policy debate in public spaces and the media plays a role

12. How does the PMP interact with these characteristics? • By affecting the main arena in which the conflicts play out • By affecting the likelihood of success of reform attempts (movement from undesirable outer characteristics of policy-making to desirable ones) • Eventually, by providing avenues for education policy-making to impact the PMP at large

13. No institutional pattern • The literatures has failed to find patterns in the relationships between institutional characteristics and the occurrence or likelihood of success of education policy reforms. Such a finding suggests that sector-specific features have a strong influence in the characteristics of policies, regardless of the institutional framework at hand: • “Episodes of reform were not systematically associated with particular economic conditions or with particular characteristics of party systems, governing coalitions or electoral cycles. Rather, the emergence of reform initiatives is almost universally traced to the interest and actions of political executives or those clearly associated with them: their concern to improve education was generally part of broader political and policy agendas they espoused and was significantly influenced by international dialogues about social policy and development” (Grindle, 2003)

14. Empirical approach • The case of decentralization reforms • The case of the introduction of incentives and evaluation for teachers

15. Cases

16. Colombia (90`s): Decentralization Outcome Rules of PM Game • Relatively strong Congress • Legislators strongly inclined to policies that provide specific regional benefits (patronage, control over federal tax receips) Arena: Congress+smoke-filled room Failure to introduce strong municipalization of education Failure to introduce capitation financing Intergovernmental transfers for education deeply distorted Union highly influential in Congress and the street Regional power players highly influential

17. Brazil: FUNDEF Outcome Rules of PM Game • Strong presidency with ability to pass its agenda through Congress • “Easy” constitutional reforms Arena: partially, “family reunion” Successful top down reform of fiscal federalism in education (improved equity and quality outcomes) Successful top down reform of distribution of responsibilities among levels of government (improved policy coordination) No strong national union Governors did not have time to organize in opposition

18. Argentina: FONID Outcome Rules of PM Game • Considerable strength of governors • Legislators strongly inclined to policies that provide specific regional benefits (patronage, control over federal tax receips) Arena: the street+smoke filled room+family reunion Incentive pay for teachers t becomes a salary premium entitlement Prolonged and destabilizing political conflict in the street Education policy ends up spilling over fiscal policy, the worst possible way Union highly influential in Congress and the street Regional power players highly influential

19. Mexico: Carrera Mag. Outcome Rules of PM Game • Strength of governors on the rise (period of divided government) • Political party (PRI) able to bridge differences between unions and executive Arena: Smoke-filled room+street corner Incentive pay for teachers is approved within the larger framework of decentralization Unions gain control of the implementation of the incentive system, and trivialize the reform Union remains unified in spite of decentralization Union highly influential in Congress and the “smoke-filled room Union highly involved in management of the system (capture)