Social-educational programs and the regulation of teachers’ work in secondary education

Abstract

Over the last three decades, the national and provincial governments have implemented different types of policies aiming to transform key aspects of state secondary schooling in Argentina. In this paper, based on an ethnographic study on a social-educational program, we examine how educational policies deployed in the 1990s have continued to expand in the 2000s – and how they are redefining significant features of teachers’ work. We analyze the Programa de Fortalecimiento Institucional de la Escuela Media in the city of Buenos Aires and its practical effects in terms of school government, power relations in schools, and teachers’ working conditions in a secondary school, whose students are young people from vulnerable families, in the south of the city. Firstly, we characterize the local field of knowledge production and locate our research within it. Secondly, we present the history of Escuelas Municipales de Educación Media and argue that their creation in 1990 represented a transformation in the school government of secondary education. Thirdly, we unpack how Fortalecimiento operates. To do so, we scrutinize its key features and then we closely examine a proyecto escolar [school project] called El Puente. This examination allows us to identify key changes in the school government, in the relationships between the head teacher and teachers, as well as the intensification and worsening of teachers’ working conditions. Fieldwork was carried out between November 2012 and December 2014.