Secondary school and inequality in Argentina: soft selection without entrance exams

DI PIERO EMILIA

Congreso; Comparative and international education society. Remapping global education; 2018

In this article we analyse the processes of production and legitimation of socio-educational inequalities in a group of university secondary schools in the capital of the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, from the study of the tension between two principles of justice: meritocracy and egalitarianism.It is a group of state institutions that historically served the middle and upper sectors of the population recruited by entrance exams, and which, in the mid-1980s, changed their method of admission to the raffle, to adapt to the configuration of the "democratizing" mandate at that time in the country, that is, direct and unrestricted access.In a country where meritocratic mechanisms for access and egress have not been institutionalized, this study enables the investigation of a national education matrix linked to an egalitarian ideology, against a deregulated selection that operates through implicit mechanisms. In this way, we explore the principles of justice in the educational matrix of our "cultural configuration": admission options underlie different ways of conceiving justice and dissimilar models of social selectivity.In this sense, we approach the way in which educational selection is in the case of these institutions where the entrance exams were abolished, conceptualizing it as a soft selection. We understand that the implementation of the public draw, while representing a progress towards a greater degree of justice in access, is far from finishing all selection, but involves the consolidation of a specific type of selective matrix as legitimate: a soft selection (differently that most countries of the world in which the transition from one level of education to the next involves the adoption of strict entrance exams). In Argentina, on the other hand, inheriting the remnants of a certain egalitarian ethos (Dussel, 2009), with the democratic return -after dictatorial government- intervened in the mechanisms of selection, evaluation and promotion of students as the suppression of the examination and the incorporation of the draw for entry to most national high schools. From that moment, access to secondary and higher education is presented, with exceptions, as open and deregulated, a difference of the characteristic in other educational systems (Tiramonti, 2004: 34). In the case of Germany and France, for example, exams define early the fate of individuals in the vocational or academic circuit (Bourdieu, 1989, Dubet, 2012).In a country in which the expansion of the educational system during the 20th century accompanied a process in which the favorable material conditions enabled social mobility in an upward direction, the claim that education is egalitarian, open to competition and the career of the talents (Hobsbawm, 2003). In this way, the educational model presented as hegemonically more equitable in the Argentine cultural configuration is that of justice given by equal opportunities, and the conception of open and deregulated competition within the institution (Tiramonti and Ziegler, 2008). Any attack on the principle (such as the examination of a stationary type system in which each corresponds to a predetermined circuit) is immediately denounced as unfair.In this article we argue that the hegemonic meanings of justice emerge between teachers interviewed in schools have elective affinity (Weber, 1969) in relation to cultural configuration: the luck appears as the embodiment of equality of opportunity and is considered the most legitimate method to access the vacancies in these schools, since it formally guaranteed the same opportunities to those who demonstrate their abilities once inside the school. It is possible to observe the legitimacy that this paradigm receives in the 60% of answers in favour of the lottery considered as the mechanism of more fair income obtained between the educational establishment of the schools addressed, and in the 62% that it is in favour of the abolition of the admission exams. Thus, justice as equal opportunities is consolidated as the way that the implicit or "argentinean" educational selection acquires, and a certain paradigm of educational selection is established as prevailing, that is to say, a "national matrix of education" (Tiramonti, 2011 : 864).The methodological approach was based on a multiple case study that involved the combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies for data collection. Between the years 2012 and 2016 were made observations, in-depth interviews of thirteen (13) "key" actors for the institutions, sixty-seven (67) questionarys randomly selected teacher surveys and a corpus composed of six institutional documents were included information on the sociodemographic files of the participants.