The Origins and Legacies of Mass Public Education

Where did public school systems come from? Why did states invest in building systems of mass public education, which are expensive to set up? Several scholars have taken up these questions, including work by economic historians (Engerman et al. Reference Engerman, Mariscal, Sokoloff, Eltis, Lewis and Sokoloff2009) who look at how initial conditions of inequality shaped the subsequent development of public schools. The innovation of Agustina Paglayan in Raised to Obey is to consider public education expansion as directly related to state building, in tones that echo Charles Tilly. The expansion of primary schools, she argues, was part of a nation-building project with an authoritarian ethos; this was not usually about industrialization and demands from business leaders for a literate and skilled workforce. Instead, it aimed to achieve political indoctrination, where values like obedience, social order, and discipline were to be instilled in unruly lower-class children. Schooling was intended to legitimize the state and its monopoly on violence. The book explores the origins of mass public education, as well as its expansion and regulation across the globe. Particular attention is given to regional leaders like Prussia in Western Europe and Argentina and Chile in Latin America which expanded education earlier than peer countries.

The argument is ambitious and suggests that internal conflict is central to the story. Fear of unrest creates the conditions for an elite coalition to support mass education, which is costly and goes hand in hand with regulating schools. In other words, Paglayan is reviving social control theory (not unlike Michel Foucault) but she makes such a theory more vivid with an impressive array of evidence including quantitative, cross-national analysis of 109 countries from 1820 to the present. This is paired with historical, archival evidence from specific cases to highlight causal mechanisms. It brings in detailed archival work from Chile and Argentina, especially the books, articles, and regulations that highlight the core value of obedience behind early reforms. Raised to Obey is helpful for reconsidering contemporary debates about the politics of improving the quality of education. Poorly functioning public schools in Latin America that fail to address the “learning crisis,” Paglayan convincingly argues, should not be surprising, given that these schools were never intended to train skilled workers or cultivate citizens; rather they aimed to instill values of docility and obedience to the state (Paglayan Reference Paglayan2024, 21).

Charles Tilly’s famous argument about state making and war making centered on Western Europe and was ultimately about the building of a Weberian bureaucracy. Raised to Obey makes a related argument about threats against the internal order and the imperative to build a centralized bureaucratic apparatus, focusing on the nineteenth century as a founding moment (Paglayan Reference Paglayan2024). However, the book’s bold claims about elite fear as a mechanism of educational expansion is probabilistic, and the book acknowledges a variety of development trajectories across world regions. The idea of elite responses to internal threats may help to explain some countries, such as Argentina and Chile. But given that internal threats can take a variety of different forms and there are restrictive scope conditions that must be in place for these threats to translate into elite support for mass education, it was somewhat less clear to me how this argument could be operationalized in other contexts or what it would take to falsify it.

More work is needed to link Paglayan’s intriguing findings to research on state building in Latin America, which has widely characterized the region as struggling with elite divisions, persistent state weakness, and a lack of control across territory (Centeno Reference Centeno2002; Soifer Reference Soifer2015; Mazzuca Reference Mazzuca2021). Although central authorities often sought to build mass school systems, education bureaucracies were frequently politicized for more immediate political ends alongside broader nation-building efforts. Analysts might fruitfully explore inter-governmental tensions, between national and subnational actors competing for control over authority, which produced territorially uneven expansions (Cabal Reference Cabal2023). As in other regions, these national integration projects gave rise to “patchwork states” characterized by layered governance arrangements (Naseemullah Reference Naseemullah2022). It would be helpful to trace how the control-oriented ideas behind mass schooling, which Paglayan emphasizes, intersected with mass politics and produced patronage ridden bureaucracies.

For instance, in Colombia the state lacked control over the periphery. Duarte (Reference Duarte2003) describes chronic patronage politics in the education bureaucracy in rural departments and a teaching workforce that was regulated by clientelistic exchanges. Colombian primary schools, particularly outside cities, were rudimentary and many involved a quasi-informal teaching labor force before the 1979 Teacher Labor Code (Estatuto Docente). Teachers were described in Colombia (but also throughout the region) as political apostles (apostles politicos) because they were supposed to be devoted to their vocation even when they were not regularly paid, while spreading the gospel of civilization to the countryside. Such practices of quasi-informal labor, patron-client relations, and bureaucratic weakness suggest alternative pathways of state building. Future research should look closely at such cases, where projects of state building ultimately resulted in patronage politics that spilled over into schools.

Territorially uneven state capacity is a central concern for Akshay Mangla in Making Bureaucracy Work. This incisive book considers what legacies of state building tell us about contemporary bureaucratic performance. While it focuses on India, it is relevant for Latin America where there are islands of competence and complex linkages between societal groups and bureaucrats, which sometimes result in coproduction, or state-society collaboration to enhance policy implementation (Rich Reference Rich2019; Coyoli Reference Coyoli2024). Despite similar formal rules, some governments in rural India implement policy effectively, while others do not. The argument is that informal norms guide how bureaucrats behave. There are different types of bureaucracies, some that are more rule abiding and others that are more willing to bend or break the rules to effectively implement policy. Here Mangla invokes the work of Elinor Ostrom (Reference Ostrom2000) who looks at collective action, community norms, and coproduction at the local level and Michael Lipsky (Reference Lipsky1980) who wrote about how policies are actually implemented on the ground.

The innovation, as with Paglayan, is to provide rich data on difficult to study cases to reinvigorate these theories. This book relies on an ethnographic approach including two years of fieldwork in rural Northern India. The book centers on the contrasts between the states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. The former has distinctive deliberative norms, which involve more coproduction with communities, experimentation, and flexibility in the face of local conditions. The latter has legalistic norms that emphasize hierarchy and following the letter of the law (which makes it hard for officials to serve local needs and often leads to disappointing outcomes). Deliberative norms are associated with better outcomes, in terms of school infrastructure, lower teacher absenteeism, and community engagement. These norms are inherited from the colonial period, and they evolved throughout India’s experiment with democracy and mass politics in the twentieth century. This framework is helpful in providing a nuanced and highly contextualized analysis that considers the lived experiences of marginalized women and children in rural communities in India who deliver and receive primary education.

In this analysis, effective implementation can take many forms, depending on the local context. These include women’s associations mobilizing for education for girls, expanding enrollment, building school infrastructure, and providing school meals. In other words, there are many ways that bureaucrats can work with communities to help schools to achieve better outcomes, which are primarily related to the goals of expanding access to primary school and reducing illiteracy. While the book purports to study monitoring teacher absenteeism and teaching practice, I was less convinced that either bureaucrats or illiterate parents could do much to raise the quality of education—other than ensuring that teachers fulfill their basic duties. Since 2020, India has implemented national reforms to improve the quality of education—especially new assessments and teacher standards—which took place after the period covered in Mangla’s study.

The book’s central question is on how Indian officials implement policies. The analysis suggests that bureaucrats have developmental goals (related to education for all) or seek to prevent political interference, but it was less clear to me why bureaucrats (who have a reputation for inertia) were motivated to achieve these goals in the first place. It would be interesting to further probe the broader political projects behind mass education, following Paglayan, and how those projects inform the work of bureaucrats and instill a sense of a broader mission. It is also worth considering the career trajectories of bureaucrats, in terms of promotions to higher ranking positions and how their performance was evaluated. While the argument emphasizes culture and norms, material and professional incentives surely interacted with decisions to bend rules, collaborate with communities, and act in more deliberative ways.

Policy Reform and Implementation

Another perspective considers the politics of education in the contemporary period, with the state and bureaucratic capacity as historical legacies that frame these reform efforts. This literature focuses on the politics of adopting and implementing reforms, such as decentralization, teacher evaluation, and streamlining bureaucracies. Ben Ross Schneider in Routes to Reform explores the politics of policy reform, specifically upgrading the quality of education. This is a groundbreaking book in that it engages with the politics of policy more broadly. Establishing merit-based evaluations that impose selective criteria when hiring new teachers, rather than letting politicians select teachers at their discretion, hold promise to improve the quality of education. Such policies challenge entrenched legacies of patronage politics in many countries. Students from low-income backgrounds who are attending public school may be especially likely to benefit, when ineffective teachers in the classroom are replaced with more effective ones. Reforming teacher careers is not easy. In many developing democracies, teacher hiring and promotion remains mired in patronage politics, and promising reforms are difficult to implement. The book puts it quite simply, “democracy boosts quantity but not quality,” meaning that democracies expand access to schooling, but students who attend these schools learn little (Schneider Reference Schneider2024, 23).

The main argument is that teacher career reforms are unlikely to advance where there is clientelism and/or machine unions. It is in the absence of machine politics in public schools that such reforms move forward. This point echoes issues of state formation and bureaucratic politics (i.e., patronage) highlighted by Mangla. The book also identifies the electoral salience of education as another key factor, suggesting that a more bottom-up process of reform driven by voters will help sustain reform implementation. Technocracy is also a driver of education reform in many countries, while civil society organizations are usually less important in reform processes. It is the narrow interests of teachers’ unions, especially those that are political machines, that threaten to sabotage reform.

Routes to Reform is the culmination of more than a decade of diligent labor, that included collaborations with policy insiders along with interviews with high-ranking policymakers. The book has many strengths. It is laudable for advancing a more policy focused political science, and one that engages with questions that are of central import to leaders in Latin America especially. The empirical chapters provide a sweeping but also in-depth analysis of reform implementation. This is an ambitious, medium-N analysis focused primarily on Latin America (i.e., Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, and Brazil) but also looking outside of the region (i.e., South Africa and Turkey). Each case study systematically evaluates how each of the causal factors shape the policy process.

This book embraces merit-based evaluations as a step forward in improving the quality of education. The idea is that education reform amounts to expanding access to better quality public schools to lower income students and is mostly aligned with democratic goals of effectively providing services. This perspective is aligned with the mainstream view of international organizations, namely that teacher evaluations promote better quality education by enhancing the professional credentials of teachers. However, there is room for more debate about both the advantages but also the limitations of teacher evaluations and career reforms—in terms of whether good schools set higher academic standards and offer more rigorous instruction for high-achieving students or provide more support and resources for disadvantaged ones.

The focus is on obstacles to reform implementation (i.e., patronage politics) and drivers of education reform (i.e., electoral salience), and there is less attention to how the education policy agenda was set. While the book acknowledges the role foundations and billionaires played in lobbying and launching media campaigns in some countries, notably the United States and Brazil, it emphasizes that the wealthy generally have little interest in public education because they send their own children to elite private schools. However, more work could be done to examine agenda setting, which is a central theme in political economy. Even if wealthy business leaders were not involved in implementation, they did help to raise the salience of educational quality issues through purportedly philanthropic initiatives—in ways that are sometimes less politically visible but quite salient, in line with what Reckhow (Reference Reckhow2012) has described in major US cities. A closer look at how the agenda was set could demonstrate the dramatic influence foundations and business leaders have gained over the past thirty years in elevating the issue of teacher quality and other technocratic reforms.

Claudia Díaz-Ríos’s Translating Global Ideas explores whether Latin American countries adopt, reject, or adapt global policy models for education governance. Some countries have adopted policies in line with global models, while others have adopted some but not all these policies, while others still have resisted them. These models tend to involve some kind of market mechanism, whether that be privatization and school choice or greater decentralization. This process of diffusion of global ideas is contested and dynamic, rather than a mere top-down implementation of international “best practices.” The aim is to examine why policy decisions conformed or diverged from global ideas about test-based accountability. The outcome to be explained is different patterns of secondary education governance, and whether they conform to global ideas. There are four potential outcomes, in terms of alignment between secondary education policies and international ideals: conformity, compromise, avoidance, and defiance.

The argument is that these ideas are adapted based on policy legacies (that limit change) and domestic coalitions (that support and oppose reform). In line with Paglayan, Díaz-Ríos highlights the ongoing salience of authoritarian legacies and the central role of elites (and their beliefs) in advancing reforms. As a comparative international education scholar, she highlights the importance of international organizations in reform projects but notes the interplay between policy legacies of the 1960s and 1970s and the domestic politics (negotiations between interest groups and policy experts) that hammer out the terms on which new models are adopted.

Díaz-Ríos presents a comparative analysis of three countries—Argentina, Chile, and Colombia—while examining distinctive policy areas within each country. This book covers about seventy years of historical change, using data from document analysis, congressional archives, and elite interviews. Within these countries, it examines three historical epochs, Manpower Educational Planning, State Retrenchment, and Education for All + Accountability, and three dimensions of educational governance (provision, curriculum, and evaluation). Summarizing these cases is difficult, but Chile seems to be a case of (mostly) conformity, Argentina compromise, and Colombia defiance or hybrid translation, albeit with quite a bit of variation over time in each country.

The argument is multi-layered and complex. The first step is policy legacies, or the policies that are already on the books at the time when global ideas are being considered. Policy legacies foreclose certain possibilities and make others more likely, but they are not themselves definitive. The argument highlights path dependence and the ways that earlier reforms set the stage for new ideas, what coalitions are possible, and whether resistance is entrenched. The second step, and the one where the most action is, involves the idea of “domestic coalitions” (Díaz-Ríos Reference Díaz-Ríos2024, 34–38). These are the political groupings that support and oppose global ideas, and the balance of power between the supporters and opponents of these ideas. She also examines how education policy debates have evolved over time, but how while coalitions shift, there are certain actors that have persistently been central to the policy process.

The argument against policy convergence is clear and compelling. What is somewhat less clear, however, is the relative importance of legacies on the one hand and coalitions on the other, in terms of why in some cases resistance is insurmountable and in other cases it is not. The real action seems to be in the relative power of the supporters and opponents of global ideas. However, more work could be done to unpack these coalitions and explain the glue that holds the disparate groups in them together. While the book considers the actors (i.e., teachers’ unions, the church, political parties, subnational politicians, experts in the ministry of education, and international organizations) and the political activities they organized, it could dig deeper into how these activities shaped the policy process, and how they changed over time. The influence of organized interests over education policy, especially when they are rivals and pushing in opposite directions, is something of a black box. More work could be done to understand how and why different groups mobilize with varying levels of intensity, and how their influence on policy can ebb and flow over time.

Resistance, Liberation, and Identity

Not all scholars see the reforms proposed by technocrats and welcomed by international organizations as a positive development. Some are more critical of the mainstream reform agenda, seeing it as an encroachment of marketization and standardization in education, and seeing these policies largely being driven from the top-down, without much democratic debate. Moreover, many groups may not benefit from these policies, and social movements have developed their own innovative, alternative models for education. These include Afro-descendant and indigenous communities. Rebecca Tarlau in Occupying Schools, Occupying Land provides a perspective on education centered on rural people who have historically been excluded from public education. This book is aligned with the work of Bracho (Reference Bracho2019) who looks at backlash against neoliberal education reforms in the Mexican state of Oaxaca and Gellman (Reference Gellman2022) who looks at alternative models of education, namely the instruction of indigenous languages. It also speaks to the literature on protest against the neoliberal economic model and the Chilean student movement, which was aligned with democracy and political inclusion (Somma and Donoso Reference Somma and Donoso2021).

This book considers alternative pedagogical practices that imagine schooling and education in a more emancipatory way. Motivated by the Landless Workers Movement (MST), one of the largest and most successful social movements in the region, some activists have sought to provide education outside of the state. This book takes the most societally oriented perspective of the five considered here. Tarlau notes that some of the models developed by the MST have been adopted by the state and used for rural education more broadly. The MST has transformed public education in rural areas and has sought to link its political project of land reform and social justice with a pedagogical project rooted in critical, emancipatory education. Landless people who live outside of cities—and have often not gone to school—have had different experiences and need different types of pedagogical models.

The book shows that social movements can transform state institutions, even without capturing state power, by embedding activists and movement ideals inside bureaucratic and educational structures. It advances the concept of “contentious co-governance”—a process in which activists strategically collaborate with state actors to institutionalize alternative educational models while maintaining pressure as outsiders. In some ways, this echoes Mangla’s idea of deliberative bureaucracy, but the emphasis is on a more conflictive relationship between state and society, where movements (rather than bureaucrats) are the central protagonist.

Empirically, the book is based on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival research—the author describes having taken 1,200 pages of field notes. The book engages in a subnational comparison of education in three Brazilian states: Rio Grande do Sul, Pernambuco, and Ceará. Like in Mangla, there are different types of relations between rural communities and government, including coproduction and patronage politics. It considers how the MST established rural schools and teacher-training programs, negotiated with municipal and state governments, and developed partnerships with public universities to create curricula aligned with the movement’s ideology of social justice. The MST’s Education of the Countryside (Educação do Campo) initiative shaped national education policy and has influenced debates about rural education across Latin America.

This book provides an alternative account to technocratic reforms, emphasizing bottom-up experimentation, the potential of movements to spur education policy, and the push to include students who historically lacked access to school. Tarlau suggests that social movements do not face a simple choice between resistance and incorporation, rather they can oppose and participate in the state at the same time—without demobilizing—which is captured in the concept of “contentious co-governance” (Tarlau Reference Tarlau, Cini, Porta and Guzmán-Concha2019, 284). While she suggests that the MST democratized education through its activism, one might wonder how the critical approach of Marxist pedagogues like Paulo Freire and Soviet theorists like Anton Makarenko translate into the debate about students learning math, reading, and science concepts. While social movements like the MST are well positioned to provide students with a critical perspective on history and social structure, I was curious about how teachers taught students to solve problems, how they navigated the less democratic elements of the movement, and how they assessed whether students were gaining skills through classroom learning. Some social movements (such as the Pedagogical Movement in Colombia in the 1980s) embraced emancipatory language and proposed new pedagogical models but have been less successful in changing teaching practice and improving classroom learning (Chambers-Ju and Sullivan Reference Chambers-Ju, Sullivan, Juan and Madariaga2025). Healthy skepticism is in order, as movements may critique global education reforms but articulate an alternative vision that involves a different set of trade-offs.

An Agenda for Research

The field of education politics has advanced considerably over the past thirty years, and these books illustrate some of the directions it has gone. Education reform is characterized by a dialectical process, involving reforms that are often advanced by elites and resistance to these reforms from societal groups. Looking ahead, more work can be done to build more dialogue among scholars. There remain sharp divisions between US-based vs. Latin American-based scholars, supporters vs. opponents of the mainstream education reforms, qualitative vs. quantitative scholars, political scientists vs. education scholars, and so on. While these researchers are all ostensibly working in the same areas and can benefit from cross-fertilization, often there are incentives to speak to the same group of people. Research on teachers’ unions demonstrates this, with some scholars vehement that teachers’ unions are vested interests (Moe Reference Moe2015), while others consider them resurgent social movement unions (Bracho Reference Bracho2019). Comparative scholars can identify these contrasting perspectives and then navigate and maneuver within them to deepen our understanding and build theory.

There are abundant opportunities to link education to other policy areas and other parts of the field. Future research, for instance, can explore how projects of expanding mass public education were linked to both state building and also patronage politics. There are opportunities to consider the politics of raising the quality of education—as an instance of policy reform—in dialogue with more recent health care reforms and poverty alleviation initiatives. There is also more to be done on universities and higher education in Latin America in terms of how reforms to these institutions reflect changes to K-12 education. Studying these topics should involve fieldwork and building ties to policymakers, pedagogues, and academics in the region who are working on related research. In sum, even as the education politics field matures, there is more work to be done to integrate this policy area into the literature, and to bring new perspectives (especially from junior scholars) into the debate.