Introduction

The Colombian Constitution of 1991 shaped the development of the social sector in Colombia, particularly in the provision of education and health. The new Constitution declared Colombia a “social rights state” and established education as a right and a public service with a social purpose. At the same time, it declared decentralization as a fundamental principle. These two features led to a series of reforms during the 1990s in terms of the institutional and organizational arrangements for the provision of education services. Within this context, a new set of reforms in education took place. One of the most important was the teachers’ reform, an area that continues to have repercussions even 25 years later.

This chapter looks at teacher policy to illustrate the practice of policy analysis in education policy in Colombia at the national level after the 1990s reforms. In particular, we use reform in policies regarding public school teachers as a case to analyse the process of policy formulation and implementation in the education sector in Colombia. We focus on teacher policy for two main reasons. First, it has marked the education sector over the past 20 years, defining several issues that have a direct impact on the quality of primary and secondary education (such as whether or not teachers are required to have professional degree, or whether or not teachers who do not perform well should stay in schools). Second, teacher policy involves several stakeholders and decisions in several domains, allowing illustrating the complexity of policy analysis in the education sector. The chapter has four main objectives: to explain how education policy is constructed; to document the main criteria used in education policy design; to identify the main stakeholders involved; and to assess the extent to which technical and political factors weigh in the policy construction process.

Teacher policy refers to policies governing the hiring, training (pre-service and in-service), compensation and evaluation of teachers in the public sector. Specifically, we focus on six key dimensions: pre-service teacher training; selection and hiring of teachers; retention and promotion; performance evaluation; inservice training; and salaries. These dimensions follow the literature on education policy (García et al, 2014).