Maestría en Educación

Analisis Politico Socioeconomico

Actividad #5
Universidad Interamericana para el Desarrollo
PRESENTACIÓN: Yvonnie Aime Moh Tzul
Maestro: Angel Ezequiel Rivero*Palomo
FECHA: Chetumal, Quintana Roo
3 de julio del 2021
 Reflexiones sobre políticas educativas

The reading was very extensive. It started from the beginning where it was explained
how policies came to be. From the early century education was not institutionalized.
Children learned from their parents what they had to learn. Boys learned the typical men
work and girls learned the women chores. However, as modernization occurred
education went about changing. It became complex and then there were policies and
institutional levels introduced for the differentiation of learning. These institutions
prepared children and young people for adult life. The first level of education was the
university level

The levels of education came to be known as primary, secondary, middle higher and
then university level.

As societies became complex, specialized institutions emerged for preparing

children and young people for adult life. These institutions developed throughout the
eleventh to nineteenth centuries, that is, from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth
century, but not from the bottom up, as is often thought: first primary, then secondary,
middle higher and then the university. In reality, it was exactly the other way around
( Collins, 2000 ).

The oldest formal educational institutions were the universities, from the 11th and
12th centuries. The institutions that we would now call secondary education, the
lyceums, appeared later, in the 15th and 16th centuries, in Protestant Europe, and then
in the countries of the Counter-Reformation, with the Jesuits. Public elementary
education appears until the 19th century, or from the late 18th century in the places
where it occurred earlier, such as Prussia.

Obviously, there was education before, but not institutionalized. People of

possibility had an instructor at home who taught the boy the first letters, but he did not
go to school. The educational establishments arose over the centuries, then, in that
peculiar way, according to a student of these questions: “until the seventeenth century
there was no teaching in the vulgar language that corresponded to the current primary
level… In the Middle Ages, at the less until the 16th century, there was only a Latin
school, the grammar school ” (Aries, 1973, p. 318) .

The structure of an educational system

Now education systems integrate many elements: students, teachers and

managers; ways of organizing these, their physical plant and times, etc. Today we
tend to think that there were always degrees, but this is not the case. In Mexico they
are established until the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. In the
United States, degrees are established until 1843, following the pioneering example of
Prussia.

What was a school like before? How long did a child have to be in it? Well, until he
learned what he had to learn. And how much was that? It depends: some learned early
and others never succeeded. At what age did a child have to start school? When your
parents send it. How long did he have to stay? Until I learned. And how did he go
from one grade to another? That did not happen; there were no degrees. All the
children studied together in a kind of multigrade. What is now a minor form of
education, when there is no other choice, was normal. The ways of organizing
students, of grouping them, configure the institutions. The same occurs with the
contents and forms of teaching: study plans and programs, that is, the curriculum, in a
restricted sense; ways of controlling students and teachers; discipline rules; rules for
the management of teachers; forms of financing; care for equity; ways of distributing
functions between territorial units, centralized, partially decentralized, highly
decentralized, etc .; forms of government and distribution of decision-making: who is
in charge? Is there a council of state, a minister? Do parents have a voice and vote or
not? What makes up an educational system is the way in which all these things are
organized. a minister? Do parents have a voice and vote or not? What makes up an
educational system is the way in which all these things are organized. a minister? Do
parents have a voice and vote or not? What makes up an educational system is the
way in which all these things are organized.

Actors and stakeholders

What actors and parties intervene in one way or another in an educational

system? The Figure 1 summarizes the response. In the central block are the school
communities, public and private, with directors, teachers and students. That is the core
of the education system. Around the center there are four different blocks of actors
that intervene. At the top is the public sector, which is not only the Ministry of Public
Education (SEP), but a set of actors defined according to two axes: in the lines of
powers, the executive, the legislative and the judicial, and now , in addition, the
autonomous organisms; all powers have to do with education, to a greater or lesser
degree. And in the columns of the government, federal, state and municipal orders.
 FIGURE 1.
Actors and interested parties in the Educational System
own elaboration.

At the federal level of the executive branch, obviously, we have the SEP, and at the
state level, we have the state secretariats of education and their equivalents. In Mexico
there is nothing similar at the municipal level, which in other systems is the most
important. In our country, education was an attribution of the federal states in the 19th
century, and Carranza wanted to municipalize it in order to remove power from the
governors. But, constitutionally, the municipality does not now have a relevant role in
this regard. As regards autonomous bodies, a novelty in Mexico, we only have at the
federal level the National Institute for the Evaluation of Education (INEE). In the
legislative power, the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies; at the federal level, to
state congresses and municipal councils. In the judiciary,

All these actors have to do with education. Traditionally, only SEP was thought of,
but in reality the matter is more complex. The legislature makes laws. The changes
made in 2013 to the constitutional articles and the different secondary laws that have
to do with education leave no doubt about the importance of this actor. The judiciary
is increasingly relevant in educational matters, because there are lawsuits and appeals
in this area that can be very important. Let us remember that the racial disaggregation
of the United States educational system began in 1954, when the Supreme Court of
that country reversed another decision of the same, taken around 1896, which had
declared that having schools only for blacks and only for whites did not it was
unconstitutional,separate but equal ). In 1954 the Supreme Court reversed the
decision, declaring it unconstitutional for a school to prohibit a racial group from
entering its classrooms. The judiciary changed the American educational system in a
profound and momentous way. In Mexico it is also having an increasing specific
weight.

Another block of the figure refers to the social and academic sector, with unions,
training institutions such as normal schools, the National Pedagogical University
(UPN) and other higher-level institutions, as well as researchers. Another block
corresponds to the private sector, where we have, of course, the parents, but also non-
governmental organizations, the media and businessmen. And in one more block, the
international sector, with organizations such as the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD), etc. The figure thus highlights the large
number of actors who have to do, to a greater or lesser degree, with the educational
system.

Educational reforms

From the above we can define an educational reform as a change in one or more of
the elements mentioned, for example:

· Change the age at which it is compulsory for students to go to school, making it

compulsory or not a certain level.

· Change student assessment systems or forms of grouping, for example, by

introducing or removing multigrade.

· Modify the times, such as extending or reducing the calendar or the school day.

· Modify the contents (the curriculum) or the teaching methods, recommending or

demanding a certain didactic approach.

· Introduce changes in the discipline and control of students, prohibiting, for

example, the use of corporal punishment.

· Modify requirements to be a teacher or the corresponding evaluation criteria,

which have existed for a long time, with the ladder systems that, adequate or not, were
evaluation systems.
 · Transform the organization of the system, such as centralizing or decentralizing
the power to make certain decisions.

· Change the form of government, expanding or reducing participation.

These subsections are examples of possible reforms, which may affect only one
aspect or another, or several at the same time. They can be considered large or small
reforms, structural or not, or whatever you want to call them, but in all cases they are
types of reform, and this allows us to see that educational policies are related, in
general, to some reform.

In the seminar that preceded this conference, four policies were worked on, which
refer to decentralization, study plans and programs, teachers, and social
participation. In Mexico there have been others, on textbooks (which have to do with
the curriculum); those relating to the introduction of computers, Enciclomedia, Digital
Skills for All; compulsory secondary school, preschool and upper secondary
education); equity, such as the creation of the National Council for Educational
Development (Conafe), the compensatory programs that began in 1991, with former
president Carlos Salinas de Gortari; the reform of the Normal School, and so on. This
is the context of the central theme of the conference.

In the following points I will try to contribute elements for the analysis of
educational policies and their relationship with research.

Policies, reforms, government

First, I take elements from a recent OECD document that, citing Espinoza (2009 ),
collects in a very broad way how the term educational policies is usually understood
today, although, as we will see shortly, it is not exactly the meaning given to the term
by some policy scholars:

Education policy can be formally understood as the actions undertaken by a

government in relation to educational practices and the way in which the
government attends to the production and supply of education. We admit that
some propose a broader way of understanding education policy, recognizing
the fact that private actors or other institutions, international organizations
and NGOs can organize educational policies ( Viennet and Pont, 2017, p.
19 ).

The initial definition identifies policies with actions undertaken by a government,

but it is immediately recognized that there may be other actors that generate
policies. The difference would seem subtle, but it is relevant. The authors expressly
add that in their text "the terms policies and reforms will be used interchangeably." In
addition, the OECD document focuses on educational policies generated by public
authorities (central, regional or local) for the provision of public education, and takes
up another definition from Rayou and Van Zanten (2015) : “Educational policies are
programs developed by public authorities, informed by values and ideas, aimed at
educational actors, and implemented by administrators and education professionals
”(Viennet and Pont, 2017, p. 19 ).

Public policies are programs. The introduction of this new term leads to the
consideration of the other perspective for the definition of public policies. In order to
review the approach of the educational policy theorists, ideas of Luis Aguilar are
taken up, who from the 1980s introduced policy studies in Mexico, which had begun
to emerge in the 1950s, after World War II. According to this author, five features
define what is understood by the notion that interests us. A public policy is:

· A set of intentional and causal actions, aimed at achieving an objective of public

interest or benefit.

· Defined by the type of dialogue that takes place between the government and
sectors of the citizenry.

· Decided by legitimate public authorities, a decision that makes them public and
legitimate.

· Carried out by government actors, or by them in association with social actors; Y

· That configure a pattern of behavior of the government and society (Aguilar, 2010,

p. 29 ).

Each element contributes something special to the notion: that a policy is “a set of
intentional actions…”, therefore, not isolated or casual actions; that they are actions
“aimed at achieving an objective of public interest”, and “that configure a pattern of
behavior”; that they are actions “defined by the type of dialogue that takes place
between the government and sectors of the citizenry and decided by legitimate public
authorities”, which is what makes the actions also public and legitimate. These two
points are fundamental. If they are not established by the decision of a legitimate
public authority, the actions are not legitimate public policies. And even more
relevant: if there is no dialogue between the government and sectors of the citizenry,
the actions in question are not public policies either,

This is what the OECD document that we have just seen refers to when it
recognizes that there are other ways of understanding policies. If the logic of Luis
Aguilar's definition is followed, if there is a set of intentional actions that try to
confront a public problem, and that were decided by the public authority, but did not
arise from an interlocution with the sectors of society, no it would be about public
policies. This goes against the usual meaning of the expression, which incorporates
the notion proposed in the OECD document. In that case, it could be said that it is
about public policies that are not consulted, some authoritarian, vertical or non-
participatory policies, but, in the end, public policies. However, in the orthodox
definition of policy theorists, they would not be public policy.

Relationship between policies and programs

In the sense in which it is used here, the term program was also invented in the
1960s, when Robert McNamara and collaborators proposed the system of budgeting
per program (Planning, Programing, Budgeting System, PPBS), which to date
continues being the way to manage budgets in the public sector. If an official requests
certain resources, he must justify what will be done with them, what the results will
be; the request is justified based on the actions that constitute a program. This logic of
the budget allows the actions with which a government meets social needs to be
defined as programs. Public policies can also be defined as a program, or as a
structured set of programs, a plan, which recalls the OECD definition: policies are
programs.

Luis Aguilar adds that the term program comes from the grammar of finance, not
from politics; from finance vocabulary, not policy vocabulary, and adds:

... what we call security, health, educational, environmental or transportation

policy (should be) a structured and coherent set of specific or particular
programs that address particular dimensions or components of the greater
problem that we call public insecurity ... ( Aguilar, 2010, p. 30, n. 8 ).

This leads to exploring how this current of policy study began, why in the fifties of
the last century? What happened then? Where did we come from?

Governing by policies is opposed to two positions: on the one hand, to liberal

policies, according to which the government should only be in charge of security
(police state), since the market will take care of other needs; on the other hand,
authoritarian positions (of central planning), according to which the government must
take care of all the needs, with measures decided by its officials, without citizen
participation.

When we talk about neoliberalism today, we refer to a previous era with the original
liberalism, the Manchesterian, since the industrial revolution and the 19th century,
when the State should not intervene in the economy, but only prevent someone from
stealing the property of another ( police), and the market would take care of all the
needs. Only in the case of war economies were exceptions made, when the State
intervened in the economy by, for example, turning the steel industry into arms
production.

With the October revolution, Lenin seized power in the empire of the tsars, which
left the place to the Soviet Union. After Lenin's premature death, Stalin defeats
Trotsky in the power dispute, and the five-year plans begin. The Soviet economy,
without private ownership of producer goods, is planned. The amount of goods
required to meet the needs of the population in all aspects (housing, food, clothing,
footwear, etc.) was calculated and production was organized accordingly. The same
was done in education: you need to produce a certain amount of such a good, so you
need a number of specialized engineers or technicians.

The beginning of the Soviet five-year plans coincided with the Great Recession of
1929, to emerge from which the ideas of Keynes prevailed, and the State intervened in
the economy, as in the case of the great public works of the Tennessee Valley, in the
United States. Even after World War II, at the beginning of the Cold War, planning
seemed to be working very well. Some economics texts of the time predicted that the
GDP of the Soviet Union (USSR) would exceed that of the United States in a short
time, because the USSR was growing very rapidly. It seemed, then, better, that the
state controlled the economy.

European reconstruction after World War II involved the enormous public effort of
the Marshall Plan. France established five-year plans, whose difference with the
Soviets was that, since it was not a socialist country, there was private property and
public companies, so that the plans were imperative for the public sector and
indicative for the private sector.

But as early as the 1950s it was noted that neither approach was optimal. That the
State does not intervene never has problems, which manifest themselves in recurring
crises; In addition, there are needs that the market does not serve well, including
educational ones. On the other hand, the imperative Soviet planning also had serious
problems, although its near collapse was not yet evident, but it was perceived that it
was not adequate in a democratic country.

These questions were posed: How to make decisions that affect all citizens? How
should public action programs be defined? How should public policies be defined in a
democratic country?
 The answer that was imposed is that they have to be defined in an interaction of all
the interested actors, whose interests do not coincide; Each actor has particular
preferences, with their reasons, but in a democratic country it is necessary to take
everyone into account, negotiate and come up with something that satisfies each actor
enough. That is government by policy.

Governing by policies implies that the needs of society that the market cannot meet
are faced with actions that use public resources, without ruling out that there are also
private resources, but that they are undertaken based on decisions made with the
participation of all parties with legitimate interest, by consensus or through
democratic decision-making mechanisms. That is the bottom line.

Government by policies is seen as that of a plural and democratic society. In the

most usual way of understanding the term policies, these subtleties are not entered,
and it is simply considered that all public action is a policy, whether it has been
consensual or not, even if it has been imposed vertically; either way it is considered to
be a policy. It is important to specify that the difference depends on the definition of
the policy; being clear about this would avoid controversies that are reduced to the
semantic.

The Planning Law in force in our country since 1983 established that each federal
administration must make a National Development Plan (PND), which must be
approved by Congress. The PND is made up of sectoral programs (education, health,
etc.), supposedly based on a consultation, although we know that these consultations
were only simulations.

This Planning Law predates the introduction of policy studies in Mexico, and also
the opening of the political system. With everything and his mock consultations, this
was functional in an authoritarian regime. The democratization of the country now
makes a lot of sense in the discussion about what is the appropriate way to make
decisions in the public interest, and here the claim about the government by policies,
in the sense indicated, is very relevant.

A particular aspect of the question is that which has to do with the role of specialists
and technicians in decision-making on matters of general interest; the role of research
and researchers in public policy decisions, which is what the next section deals with.

Research and policies

In principle, there are three positions in this regard, two extreme and one
intermediate, which, by posing it as intermediate, is anticipated, since it is proposed as
the appropriate one.
 An extreme position can be called positivist, in the original sense that August
Comte gave to the term around 1835, which coincides only in part with the
neopositivism of the late nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth,
with the Vienna Circle. Both have been neglected since at least the 1950s in the
philosophical media, although many continue to call anyone doing quantitative
research a positivist. There are those who consider Karl Popper as an outstanding
positivist, without knowing that, as early as 1934, he wrote the work that is considered
the tip of neopositivism. In his autobiography, Popper (1976, p. 88) says: "Today
everyone considers that logical positivism is dead, but no one seems to suspect that
the question should be asked of who is responsible or, rather, who killed him ... I think
I should assume such responsibility."

What did Comte's positivism say in the sense that interests us? Something similar to
Plato, when he proposed that the rulers should be the philosophers, since they are the
ones who know the most, the philosopher king. Also in Comte science would take the
place of theology and myth. And scientists should rule, again, because they know a
lot. We would think these ideas are long dead, but it seems somehow they still survive
today.

The other extreme position is the one that coincides with the idea of dialectics, in
the sense of the most radical Marxism of the 1940s and 1950s, which is also dead in
the specialized media, but seems to survive in what is now related rather with
populism.

In its radical Latin American version, action research posited that those who know
the most about social problems are not the researchers who study them, but the people
who suffer them; populism speaks of the wise people.

Between those two extremes about who knows more, the scientist or the people,
there are intermediate possibilities. I will refer to four currents of thought, to four
important authors, who coincide with different ways of posing an intermediate
position: Gadamer, based on the Aristotelian notion of phronesis; Popper, with his
fragmentary social engineering; Majone, and his approach to the artisan analyst in the
study of politics; and Lee Cronbach (the great statistician who proposed the Alpha
coefficient), with his ideas on the role of the evaluator in decision-making.

Hans Georg Gadamer and the notion of phronesis

The Greeks had special terms to denote different types of knowledge. The closest to
what we call science would be episteme; Sophia was wisdom; gnosis,
illumination; doxa , tekne , etc., but none of those words designated the type of
knowledge necessary for praxis, the knowledge necessary to make decisions; that
was phronesis .

Gadamer distinguishes the field of convincing arguments from the field of logically
conclusive arguments. An argument can be logically perfect, but not convince
anyone; on the other hand, certain easily evident sophisms are accepted by many
people because they reach the guts. A convincing argument, which many times
appeals to sentiment, is different from a logically convincing argument, which many
times does not convince.

Gadamer (1977, p. 647) argues that self-knowledge for decision-making is not

science:

One of the most important teachings that the history of philosophy offers for
this problem is the role played in Aristotelian ethics and politics by praxis and
its illuminating and guiding knowledge, astuteness or practical wisdom that
Aristotle called phronesis .

The translation into Latin (transparent, in Spanish) of the Greek term that Gadamer
refers to helps to understand the meaning of the approach: prudentia. Knowledge for
action is prudence, not science. What you have to master when making decisions is to
be prudent. In our time, if a decision maker is prudent, he will take into account what
science says about the question in question, especially if it is complex; not taking
science into account would be unwise, but the decision should not be limited to
that. By its nature, science limits its object of study and dispenses with the rest. To
make decisions you do not have to limit; We must consider all the aspects that we can,
with the greatest breadth, what science cannot do. Therefore, it is necessary to take
into account the opinion of other people familiar with the matter,

Karl Popper is known for his falsificationism: there is a logical asymmetry between
proving that something is true and that it is false. It is impossible to show that
something is true, but it can be shown to be false. The classic example is: the truth of
the statement all swans are white is not proven by finding thousands of white
swans; however many I find, I cannot be sure that they all are. But with a black swan
that I find, I show that it is false that all swans are white. According to Popper, you
should not be overwhelmed by reaching the truth fully, because you cannot. What we
can do is detect errors, and to the extent that we do, we will get closer to the truth,
even if we never fully arrive at it.

Popper's social philosophy is similar. Criticizing Plato and Marx, Popper says that
you cannot arrive at the good or the perfect society. If a ruler wants to arrive
authoritatively at the perfect society, he will impose hell, as happened with the Soviet
paradise. It is not necessary to try to reach the ideal society, but concrete evils can be
avoided, to improve the real society, even if the perfect one is not reached. This is
Popper's fragmentary social engineering, which has to do with the economic ideas of
optimal and suboptimal.

In reality, you can never really have an optimal situation, there are only suboptimal
ones. In this sense, in a less solemn key, I have proposed introducing the term
minuspeyorización. From the Latin minus (less) and peior (worse), the term proposes
exactly the same as the notion of suboptimal. Policies cannot pretend to reach the
ideal, but they can seek to correct things that are not right in our society (make it less
worse), which could be a really valuable contribution.

Giandomenico Majone, in the field of politics, talks about the role of the policy
analyst as a craftsman. In his opinion, simple approaches to the relationship between
policy makers and clients are insufficient, as if such decisions were merely technical,
and did not involve ideological, political and ethical considerations; as if the
technicians only had to analyze the efficiency of some means in comparison with
others, without discussing the aims pursued and the values involved: “The role of a
policy analyst, similar to that of a craftsman. Attention must be paid to the role of
argumentation and persuasion in public deliberation processes that policy definition
should entail ”( Majone, 1997 ).

The definition of policies implies deliberation processes between the legitimately

interested actors, and this implies the capacity for argumentation, to convince, and
since a convincing argument is not the same as a logically convincing one, the policy
analyst needs that capacity for argumentation.

Lee Cronbach, for his part, led a group that published a work that advocates a
profound reform of program evaluation, from which many elements are taken that I
believe are generally applicable to the relationship of any researcher with decision
makers. In 95 theses (in memory of those of Luther) evaluations (and, in general,
research) that they believe can replace the decision maker are criticized.

According to Cronbach et al, infatuated with the idea that correct decisions can
substitute for political agreements, some decision makers make unrealistic demands
on evaluators. In simpler words: some politicians say: I do not want to be confused
with these complicated questions; you, expert, tell me what to do. On the other hand,
always according to Cronbach and his collaborators (1980, p. 1), evaluators and
researchers, eager to serve and look good with those who pay, and even to manipulate
those who hold power, lose sight of what they should do, worse still, they let
themselves be fascinated by the techniques.
Easy and difficult reforms

According to Marileen Green, who studied numerous educational reforms in Latin

America from the 1970s to the beginning of this century, reforms that she labels as
easy predominated in the 1970s and 1980s, with which all actors agreed. : building
schools, creating teaching positions ... But in the 1990s, concerns about quality arose,
and other reforms emerged: for there to be quality, children must be evaluated,
teachers evaluated, demand accountability, etc. . The interests of the different actors
no longer coincided: parents are often not interested; it doesn't suit the unions; for
politicians the results are not quick and visible.

The first reforms, the easy ones, obviously required resources, which can be
obtained from somewhere, but they did not imply that the actors changed their
practices. The second, difficult reforms, involving long chains of decisions and
actions, must be adopted in the classroom with many levels of implementers; at any
point they can experience laziness, wrong judgments, organizational jealousy and
logistical tangles, all of which make it much more difficult to achieve their goals.

Another important scholar of educational reforms, Larry Cuban (2013) ,

distinguishes four levels of the curriculum: the official, or prescribed, the taught
curriculum, the learned curriculum, and the assessed curriculum. And these four levels
do not match:

· What a teacher teaches does not coincide with the prescribed curriculum:
sometimes because he does not master a subject and prefers to omit it; others, because
the curriculum is overloaded and cannot be covered. For these or other reasons, what
the teacher teaches does not coincide with the official curriculum, plus he can teach
things that are not in it.

Children do not learn everything the teacher teaches, they learn some things and
others not, and they learn things that the teacher does not teach, or that he does not try
to teach, but does, so that the learned curriculum does not coincide with the one
taught, nor with the officer.

· And the tests that the evaluated curriculum consists of do not coincide with the
prescribed, nor with the evaluated or the learned, because what they include is what
can be asked with the type of instruments that are handled. For example, many times
you have to ask multiple-choice questions, and with them you can only evaluate a few
things.

The difficulty of policies reaching the classroom

 Specialists from different eras coincide in underlining how difficult it is to bring to
each classroom what is established by the policies designed at the top of the system,
or to imitate those that have been successful elsewhere. The following brief quotes are
some examples:

The question of whether educational policies have the strong influence on

education that the authorities expect remains unanswered. In addition, they
face a peculiar problem: those who must put them into practice (teachers) are
usually seen as part of the problem to overcome ( Sykes and Wilson, 2016) .

Many policies seem to work like a broken telephone in that they are distorted,
from their formulation until they reach the classroom, passing through various
intermediaries (Spillane, 2004 ).

Politics is a punch press, teaching is like a scalpel ( Green, 1983 ).

Education is an expression of the life and character of a country; if you want

to import the educational policies of another nation, you would have to import
its culture ( Sadler, 1900 ).

There are several ways to take into account policies of other systems to take
advantage of them in your own: replication, adaptation, grafting and
redesign; only redesign can work, but it is the most difficult ( Alexander,
2012 ).

Role of the researcher

At this point, we return to the issue of the role of the researcher in decision-making,
for which several of the 95 theses proposed by Cronbach and collaborators are used ,
reiterating that what they say about the evaluators is valid in general for educational
researchers, since evaluation is applied research. See the following theses together:

Thesis 12: The hope that an evaluation will give unequivocal answers,
convincing enough to end controversies about the merits of a program, will
certainly be disappointed.

Thesis 13: The conclusions of professional evaluators cannot substitute for the
political process.

Thesis 21: The idea of the superman evaluator who will make every social
option simple, every program efficient, and public management a technique, is
an opium dream.
 Thesis 23: An image of plural arrangements more accurately represents how
policies and programs take shape than the Platonic image of concentrated
power and responsibility.

Thesis 29: The community that shapes the policies does not wait for a clear
winner; it has to act in the face of uncertainty, defining plausible, politically
acceptable actions.

Thesis 21: When programs have multiple, possibly different results, comparing
them is necessarily a matter of judgment. No technique for comparing benefits
will silence partisan disagreements.

Thesis 87: There is a need for more energetic exchanges than the typical
academic discussion, and more responsible than the debates between the
followers of the different party currents ( Cronbach  et al  ., 1980, pp. 2-11 ).

Role of technical elements in supporting rational decisions

To clarify the idea that prudence currently includes taking into account what science
says, it must be considered that, without ignoring the weight of ideological
differences, the definition of policies will benefit if it takes into account the results of
good research. quality. Non-rational factors influence any topic so much more than
rational factors, and for this reason defining public policies supposes persuasive
arguments from artisan analysts, but it will not hurt them to have elements based on
good research.

For them to have credibility, it is important that specialized organizations such as

INEGI or INEE are autonomous. We need to know, in the most reliable way possible,
what the reality is like in the matter of a decision, because if we do not have the same
numbers, it will be more difficult to agree. Technical aspects are important.

It is convenient to insist on the previous point, with the support of the ideas of
Cronbach and collaborators who, in different ways, underline that the role of the
evaluator (and the researcher in general) is not to make value judgments, nor to make
decisions in place of officials responsible, but to offer relevant information to the
parties involved in a policy, which allows them to participate in the political decision-
making process in a more enlightened way and with stronger foundations. Let's see in
this sense other of the 95 theses:

Thesis 94: Policy makers have to make decisions with open eyes; the
evaluator's task is to shed light on the decision, not dictate it.
 Thesis 7: In debates on controversial topics, liars stand out and numbers often
lie (liars figure and figures often lie); the evaluator is responsible for
protecting the client from both deceptions.

Thesis 95: The main standard is not scientific quality; an evaluation must be
understandable, correct, complete, and credible to supporters on either side
( Cronbach  et al  ., 1980, pp. 2-11 ).

And the most general and important lesson for evaluators and decision makers:

Thesis 93: The evaluator is an educator; their success must be judged by what

others learn ( Cronbach  et al.  , 1980, p. 11 ).

Pablo Latapí's ideas on educational policies

Pablo Latapí was not a theorist of public policies, but his work includes reflections
on them, and on educational research and their relationship.

Latapí's role as a researcher with an applied approach, as a consultant for

institutions that sought to influence educational policies in Mexico, and as an advisor
to heads of the SEP and other officials, give special weight to his opinions.

Pablo expressly said: “The main purpose of my professional life has been to
contribute to improving educational policy; from the earliest years I conceived
educational research as the means to achieve this. " And he specifies that, when he
went to do doctorate studies: “What interested me was to prepare myself to contribute
to making decisions about educational systems based” ( Latapí and Quintanilla, 2009,
pp. 66, 56 ).

The institutions he founded confirm that his interest in research did not end in this
activity by itself, but that he was especially concerned that the results would be used
to influence decision-making and policies.

Those institutions included the Center for Educational Studies and its Journal,
which later became the Latin American Journal of Educational Studies; the
Educational Research Meetings; the National Indicative Program for Educational
Research of Conacyt; the first National Congress of Educational Research, from
which the Mexican Council for Educational Research later emerged; the Citizen
Observatory of Education.

In the same sense, he points out the importance that he gave to the work of
columnist and columnist on educational issues in such important media as Excelsior
before 1976, or the Proceso magazine, through which he directly influenced public
opinion, with the obvious assumption that social participation in decision-making is
essential in a society that claims to be democratic.

Without being a political theorist, the way in which Latapí defined education is
congruent with the vision of Luis Aguilar that was presented earlier: the action of the
State on the education of society; the set of decisions that the government makes
regarding the development of the educational system; the essential negotiation process
to reach the decisions and analysis of its actors; party programs for the educational
branch.

Latapí also considered that education is not one more, among other State policies,
but that it should have a special rank and pre-eminence, since it corresponds to her to
articulate the other policies, defining the nation project that is desired and giving it a
human meaning. Related to this idea is the one that proposes that the SEP should be a
ministry of thought.

On the researcher's relationship with politicians

Regarding his relationship with Fernando Solana, of whom he was an advisor when
he was head of the SEP for the first time, between 1977 and 1982, Latapí says:

The external critic establishes as criteria of judgment, in general, abstract

norms or ideal values and… does not sufficiently weigh the obstacles that
hinder the application of those norms or values. The investigator's judgment is
lacking… but it is incomplete and often unfair. What I learned as an advisor to
Fernando Solana was to better understand the limits of what is achievable,
without renouncing the theoretical visions of the researcher… (Latapí, 2008,
p. 118) .

In the opposite perspective, another head of the SEP to whom Latapí was an
advisor, Miguel Limón, points out:

... in the researcher's findings the restrictions of reality do not necessarily

appear, while the work to improve reality requires imagination and study, and
this leads to the consultation that allows knowing what the researchers
contribute ... and decision-making is produced by that link that is usually tense
... there is a need that allows one and the other to nurture each other; In other
words, it is also useful for the researcher to know the way of reasoning of the
decision-maker, to have a useful reference for their work that allows them to
maintain their inspiration to flow in reality ( Latapí and Quintanilla, 2009, pp.
254-255 ) .
Conclution

Popper criticizes the utopian thought of Plato and Marx, warning that, in this vision,
by wanting to impose the ideal society, one reaches hell. But there is another way of
understanding utopia, not as something that wants to be imposed in the short term,
because it is not possible and it is inhuman, but as an unattainable ideal referent.

In this perspective we are aware that we will never reach utopia; not only will we
not reach it in a six-year term, but never. It is an ideal, but one that guides us, sets us a
goal towards which we must go, knowing that we will never fully achieve it.

And I think that, in addition to his other virtues as a researcher, as a policy advisor,
or as an advisor of public opinion, Pablo Latapí played a very important role for those
of us who knew him and for those of us who are educational researchers. We all
remember him for his speech at the COMIE Congress in Mérida, in which he invited
us not to lose hope seeing the problems that plague Mexico; to believe that it is
possible to have something better and encourage ourselves not to stop dreaming about
it.

In that sense, I define Pablo Latapí as the man who cared for utopia.
Las promesas de una nueva reforma educativa y sus contradicciones presupuestales en 2020.