The Bachelet Government: Conflict and Consensus in Post-Pinochet Chile

5. Challenging the Consensus: The Politics of Protest and Policy Reform in Chile’s Education System

5 Challenging the Consensus The Politics of Protest and Policy Reform in Chile’s Education System Mary Rose Kubal [The proposed General Education Law] is not an accord constructed with great deliberation . But there are important steps that will be taken no matter what. One of these, which is not attributable to the government nor to the Right, but rather to society as interpreted by the Penguins, is that there be a revision of the institutional foundation of the Chilean educational system, which has remained unchanged for the past twenty-five years. —Juan Eduardo García Huidobro, former president of the Superior Education Council As observed in the introduction to this volume, since 1990 the ruling Concertaci ón coalition governments have committed themselves to maintaining the Pinochet regime’s neoliberal economic model.1 The Concertación adopted the rhetoric of “growth with equity” and dedicated itself to increasing health, education, and social welfare spending while maintaining a budget surplus. In particular, the Eduardo Frei (1994–99) and Ricardo Lagos (2000–2005) administrations justified increased education spending as an investment in the country’s human capital and future productivity, while maintaining the basic decentralized and market-oriented structure of the system set into place by the dictatorship. The current administration , headed by President Michelle Bachelet (2006–2009), was apparently content to continue the previous governments’ education agenda when it unexpectedly faced massive, student-led demonstrations, just two months into its tenure, in May and June of 2006. At first glance, the so-called “Revolution of the Penguins”—as the series of marches, strikes, and sit-ins was dubbed by the media in reference to the students’ blue-and-white school uniforms—appears to fit into the regional trend of anti-neoliberal social movement activity, from the piqueteros in Argentina to Bolivia’s Water Wars, from the landless movement in Bra- 118 · Mary Rose Kubal zil and elsewhere to the women’s and indigenous movements across Latin America. The student leaders’ focus on broad issues of social inequality related to the market mechanisms that underlie Chile’s education system drew up to a million people to a protest march in Santiago and regional cities in late-May of 2006—a level of protest unprecedented in post-transition Chile. But as Paul Almeida and Hank Johnston observe, although neoliberal policies provide the motivation, and democratization the political opportunity , to understand cross-national and in-country variation in social movement activity in Latin America we must consider “issue specific” opportunities .2 Indeed, it is not entirely clear why, in a country where student protests are an annual occurrence and generally merit only a passing reference in the media, the student demonstrations of 2006 escalated so rapidly, capturing international attention. On the other hand, given the scale of the 2006 protests, one could ask why the General Education Law (Ley General de Educación, or LGE) proposed by the Bachelet administration in response to student demands still has not passed the Congress almost two-and-ahalf years later. These two questions correspond with the distinction David Meyer and Debra Minkoff make between different social movement outcomes: the first relates to levels of protest activity, and the second to policy outcomes.3 Following Meyer and Minkoff, I argue that in order to understand the phenomenon of the Revolution of the Penguins, and the slow and piecemeal policy reforms that have followed, we need to consider both the general political opportunity structure, which helps explain the latter dynamic, as well as issue- and constituency-related dynamics, which account for the outburst of protest activity in 2006. Social movements, such as Chile’s Revolution of the Penguins, “are unlikely to radically transform large structures of domination or dramatically expand elite democracies”; rather, these movements are about “the politics of the possible.”4 The larger political and institutional context in Chile has severely constrained the possibilities for comprehensive education reform—despite the announced intentions of the Bachelet government, which was forced in negotiations with the opposition to modify legislation challenging the for-profit status of government-subsidized private schools, among other measures. While the student demonstrators offered new (and recycled old) models of popular mobilization and articulation, ultimately their impact is likely to be limited to piecemeal, though potentially significant , policy reforms—reforms not necessarily to their liking. Challenging the Consensus · 119 The first section of this chapter describes the general political opportunity structure facing Chile’s...