The Particularistic Shift and the Impeachment of Equality: The Policies for Regulating Teaching Work in the 1990s in Argentina

Abstract

This article discusses a set of effects of neoliberal teaching work regulation policies implemented in the 1990s in Argentina. Based on the review of contributions from reference research in the field of educational policies, the text presents a reconstruction of the sense articulations around the task of teaching and the ways in which they involved the configuration of a series of particularistic logics that shifted the idea of equality - especially important in the history of school systems in the region - and promoted a technocratic and privatizing discourse that hegemonized ways of understanding and interpreting educational topics. The article explores three movements in this particularistic turn: reducing state responsibility for market logic, reformulating the notion of the public in education, and the dismissal of the idea of equality in the deployment of so-called targeted policies.