Presented as Final Paper
Class: Institutional Design for Managing the Environment
Professor: Francis Lethem

In Colombia, there is nowadays a consensus about the need to expand and modernize the education sector in order to sustain the country’s economic growth and development. Surprisingly, however, the education sector reform which was launched in 1991 did not achieve its objectives, even though it had been preceded by the enactment of a new constitution following a highly participatory and democratic process that transformed significantly the institutional arrangements within the country.

To explain what happened, this paper purposes an institutional analysis of the Colombian education reform using the AIC framework. It analyses the shortcomings of the reform process and the factors that contribute to explain why school autonomy and the municipalization of education, its main goals, were not achieved. Along with this, the paper presents some recommendations based on the conclusion that, as part of their institutional strategy, the reformers failed to appreciate the importance of some of the elements in their external institutional environment and to exert influence over others, while neglecting to strengthen those institutional elements over which they should have had greater managerial impact – such as ensuring the Ministry’s staff commitment to the reforms.

The current wave of educational reform in Colombia started in the early nineties, at a time when there was a widely shared concern for the low rate of enrollment and the system’s low quality. The system was complex and operated in a confusing institutional environment due to an incomplete decentralization process initiated by the country in the mid eighties. The dynamic expansion of education services that characterized the period between 1950 and 1980 showed signs of losing momentum. Even in the absence of an evaluation system, there were clear signs of very poor quality. Public expenditure on education (2.5% of GDP) was similar to that of countries with the same income per capita but was lower than in countries with a faster development rate. The financial mechanisms were confused and highly centralized and local contributions were small (Montenegro, 1995).

The question of decentralization had become a major issue within the country. In fact, centralization had been an important trend in the seventies in order to limit the ability of local politicians to become too active in matters of allocation of resources and particularly the hiring of teachers. By the eighties, centralization had reached its political goals of limiting the clientelism in the sector. It had also contributed to the dynamic expansion of the service but had also resulted in high costs: every single payment and decision was now made at the central level by the Ministry of Education (MOE) which resulted in a heavy and inefficient bureaucratic machinery.

By then, however, the political climate went in a different direction. There was an important political movement towards local autonomy. Precisely in this context the Congress approved the popular election of mayors in 1985, introducing a higher level of participation and accountability and, as a side effect, raising expectations in terms of local autonomy regarding the delivery and administration of public services such as education and health. What prevented the government from going further in the decentralization process was in part the lack of legal and financial mechanisms to empower local governments. In fact this very fact made political decentralization "a reform without teeth". Thus the local level did not have the resources to meet the new responsibilities granted by the congressional approval.

Ultimately, the widely perceived need for a major transformation of the country’s political, economical and social environment, led to the election of President Gaviria who took office with a clear agenda for opening the economy and transforming the institutions. A package of economic reforms was enacted along with a program for the modernization of the state and privatization of some services (Fiske, 1996).

In light of the consensus about the need for an extensive reform of the country, the new President called for a referendum in which the citizens voted for a new constitution. The Constitutional Assembly was established at the beginning of 1991 with the task of drafting a new constitution. The main points on the agenda were the expansion of democratic mechanisms and the deepening of decentralization in terms of both responsibilities and fiscal resources. The new Constitution of 1991 was drafted by a group of representatives including indigenous people, leftist groups, former members of guerrilla groups, black communities, religious minorities, and representatives of the traditional political parties. It was widely representative and democratic. For a country that had been ruled by a sort of "agreement" between the two traditional political parties and subjected to political violence for more than forty years, the New Constitution was seen as an opportunity for democratic participation and reconciliation.

And it was in such a context of profound transformation in every aspect of national life that the educational reform was proposed by the government. The reform package had been prepared by a working group from the National Department of Planning, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Education with the following objectives:

To municipalize basic education

To grant autonomy to the schools in order to increase their efficiency and accountability. Autonomy was understood to include control over the decisions regarding personnel selection and management, the active participation of parents, teachers and students in the school government, the management of financial resources, and some areas of the curricula.

To expand enrollment, especially in secondary education.

To improve the quality of education and the accountability of teachers and managers by establishing new teacher evaluation procedures and allowing parents to choose between public and private schools.

To encourage private participation in providing education by, among others, the creation of a voucher program for poor students.

To increase public expenditure in education from 2.5% of GDP in the eighties to 5% at the end of the decade (Montenegro, op. cit).

The above proposals were consistent with the Constitutional Assembly’s two main objectives concerning education: first, that the basic social services would be managed and run by municipalities and departments with the support of a flow of transfers from the central government; and second, that a profound reorganization of the state would take place. Later on, in 1993 the Congress enacted two laws that still regulate the sector today: the Decentralization Law and the General Law of Education (GLE). What these laws achieved was a limited form of school autonomy (it does not empower the principals and community to run the schools independently), the establishment of some instruments to improve educational equality (periodic evaluation of student achievement and of teachers performance), a program of vouchers for poor students (supported by a credit signed with The World Bank right after the design of the GLE was ready to be discussed in Congress), the possibility of contracting out with private education providers, the resolution of issues related with teachers’ wage and pension system, an increase in public spending on education, and the establishment of a zero grade - a preparatory year introducing pre-school education in public schools.

Implementation of above policies and programs, however, was only partial or failed altogether. The burden of decentralization was mainly assumed by the departments, not the municipalities; the price controls on private schools that had been removed were put back in place later on; the vouchers were used by students to attend poor quality private schools; the loans for private providers of secondary education were poorly implemented; the national system of evaluation of education quality made little progress and political resistance blocked implementation of teachers’ evaluation. In short, many of the initial targets of the reform were not achieved. The MOE did not develop enough ownership to defend the reforms and its programs. More importantly, municipalization of basic education and school autonomy were never approved by the Congress.

We will now turn to the AIC framework to understand why the Colombian education reform was not more successful despite such favorable conditions as a trend towards local autonomy, a participatory and wide democratic climate, and what looked like a "political window of opportunity".

The most fundamental issue relates to the commitment of the key stakeholders. Indeed, in spite of a sound constitutional framework - that allowed organization of the education system according to the reform goals and its decentralization - and the awareness of the reform designers of an international trend towards granting autonomy to local administrative levels and the schools themselves, it is now clear that there was no demand for such a reform from their main beneficiaries: students, parents, communities, and the private sector. As Fiske puts it "Those that were in line to benefit directly from the reforms were absent from the debate" (p. 4). The reformers did not even try to build a constituency among these stakeholders, as a result of which when the political debate came to the Congress and the teacher’s union offered a formidable resistance, there was nobody to support the reform, except the technical teams who had designed it.

The above also suggests that the designers failed to carry out even an elementary political risk analysis. If they had done so, they would have quickly realized the political unfeasibility of passing a reform that was in the opposite direction of the interests of a strong actor and main implementer, namely the teachers’ union.

And a third factor that aggravated the lack of active support for the reform had to do with the fact that the MOE has been traditionally weak and adverse to conflicts. So, even though in the first two years of the new administration key positions in the Ministry were filled with high technical level officials supporting the reform, the next Minister changed many of those in key positions. Therefore, the MOE did not develop a strong committed leadership to support the reform beyond its technical design and champion it in the political arena.

The facts pointed out above make apparent that the reformers had neglected to identify the main stakeholders, which should be one of the very first steps of institutional design under the AIC framework. Actors at the regional level (governors) and local government level (mayors), NGOs, universities, the private sector (industrial and financial associations), multilateral institutions and congressional leaders did not become participants in the design process. This was to have an important effect, as I will show in the following section.

Needless to say there was no common vision of the intended reform, except among the central agencies in charge of its design: the Planning Department, Ministry of Finance and MOE. And, as some scholars have pointed out, even within the central government there were different agendas (Montenegro, 1995). For some, their purpose was to regulate the financial flows from the central government to the local levels along with a needed tax reform. For others, what was important was to rationalize the provision of public education and to put it in tune with the requirements for sustained economic growth, the modern theories of human capital, and international trends in education.

Finally, it seems that some of those who might have supported the reformers were not even informed about how they would have benefited from it. This included the private sector, for example, which seemed unaware of the importance of having a good education system for economic growth and social welfare; and the mayors who had recently taken office and did not really know how much they would have become involved in administering the education system. If a consensus had been reached with these two groups they might have compensated for the lack of focus of the central government which was dispersing its efforts by pushing reforms on too many fronts.

After the enactment of GLE, some of the programs started to be implemented. This was the case of the vouchers program for the poor, the national evaluation system, and the loans for secondary education, but ultimately they were largely abandoned at the end of the Gaviria administration. One of the reasons for such failure was that individual agencies began to implement the reforms without linkages with other agencies with complementary responsibilities. As a personal experience as a government officer at the Planning Department, I remember a meeting in which the team in charge of the vouchers program financed by the World Bank had no idea of what was happening with demand subsidies for secondary schools financed by the MOE. There was no coordination mechanisms between these two programs originally oriented toward the same goal of promoting access by the poor to public and private secondary schools. A similar lack of information was affecting the relationships between the Ministry of Finance and the regional agency in charge of transferring public funds to the regional levels (FINDETER). In short, the changes in coordination mechanisms introduced by the reformers were more on paper than leading to actual behavioral changes.

There was also a lack of linkages of the reform programs with agencies outside government that might have contributed to their success. For instance, in the case of the vouchers program, research centers, universities and NGOs were not involved in either its design or its implementation. But even worse was the lack of involvement of the teachers union, which was widely recognized as a political force, very organized and with a large mobilization capacity. As a result, the union saw the vouchers program and the reform in general as a threat to the labor concessions it had won in previous years and as an effort to disband it and "open the door" to privatization of public education. The dialogue with the union was therefore characterized by distrust and secrecy. That is, there was not only absence of a reciprocal relationship but no efforts were even made to establish a dialogue between the parties, and thus "include" the union within the influenceable institutional environment of the reform.

The agency responsible for designing, coordinating and evaluating the reform was the MOE. Its reputation was poor and it ranked low within the cabinet. Historically, the position of Minister of Education had been used by the President to pay political favors to the various political sectors that had supported him in one way or another.

At the time the reform was designed, the Gaviria administration had filled key MOE positions with high profile technical officials. They played an important role in this phase but their technocratic orientation prevented them from having a relevant participation in the congressional debates and the necessary dialogue with the teachers’ union. The next team, which replaced them after two years, assumed a more conciliatory role in the debate but neither had it the capacity to represent the government. In addition, the original reforms were being blocked anyway by former officials who had remained within the Ministry and were opposed to its decentralization and the resulting changes in their functions.

The main reason explaining this reversal is that the new Minister had a more political profile, was technically and politically weak, had no expertise in education, and was adverse to teachers’ strikes (Montenegro, 1995). Thus what should have been the Ministry’s (and the reform’s) "controllable" (or at least strongly influenceable) institutional environment turned out not only to be weak but to have no commitment toward the reforms.

Colombia’s education reform failed from the very beginning because its proponents failed to develop a consensus among those benefiting and those being negatively affected by it. The approach of the Colombian government was mainly technocratic and even within the government itself there were competing agendas. By ignoring the importance of developing a constituency for their purposes and of involving the key stakeholders, the reformers lost the political window of opportunity that was offered by the country’s institutional transformation towards more local autonomy. In other words, the Colombian education reform failed to ensure its legitimacy.

To sum it up in terms of the AIC framework, instead of considering the appreciative and the influenceable institutional environments as inherent components of an institutional design, the reformers concentrated their efforts and actions on the technical design which was under their control, but without making sure that they would also have control over the Ministry of Education which would be primarily responsible for implementation. Under the circumstances, any attempt at reform was doomed to fail.

An education reform and, mutatis mutandis a social reform in general, can benefit from the following recommendations:

· Identification of stakeholders with particular emphasis on the central agencies, regional and local authorities, parents associations, teachers unions and the private sector. Other external organizations such as international organizations also need to be treated as stakeholders;

· Build a common vision and consensus to gain legitimacy (to build a coalition around the reform) and develop broad support among the stakeholders;

· Devise a strategy to forge linkages with those involved or affected;

· Prepare design, implementation and evaluation plans that ensure the participation of the majority of the parties concerned; and in particular

· Build a relationship based on trust with the teachers’ unions through extensive dialogue. While such consultations may take a long time, the cost of delays is likely to be much lower than that of a failed attempt at reform. And in addition, support from the teaching profession, who will be the main implementers, will be an important factor in ensuring the reform’s sustainability.

 

References

 

 

Fiske, Edward (1996). Decentralization in education. Politics and consensus. Washington, D.C: The World Bank.

Montenegro, Armando (1995). An incomplete educational reform: The case of Colombia. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, Human Capital Development and Operations Policy, Working Papers.

Lethem Francis (2001). Seminar in Institutional Design. Course Package. Durham: Duke University, Program in International Development Policy. Fall.

República de Colombia. Constitución Política de Colombia. Pachón, Daniel (com.) (1998). Bogotá: Ediciones Jurídicas Gustavo Ibáñez.

Smith, William et al. The Design of Organizations for Rural Development. World Bank Staff Working Paper No. 375, Washington, D.C, 1980

Wiesner, Eduardo (1997). La efectividad de las políticas públicas en Colombia. Un análisis neoinstitucional. Bogotá: TM Editores, Departamento Nacional de Planeación.