Incentivos a la demanda y racionalidades de elección escolar: reflexiones en entornos de pobreza

During the last decades, we have witnessed a recent centrality of demandside
education policies aimed to improve access and conditions of schooling for the
poor. Among them, voucher systems have played a prominent role as a mechanism to enhance choice and competition. Actors advocating for and boosting these policies, such as the World Bank, national governments or private corporations, share a common understanding of the ways in which poor people respond to policies based on market incentives. This paper develops a critique of the assumed instrumental rationality of policies and programs that focus on market incentives to influence the educational demand of the poor. In the first part, the paper describes the main characteristics of demand-side financing of education policies and provides an interpretation of the instrumental rationality embedded in the theory of change of these policies. In the second part, alternative frameworks to interpret poor’s responses to market and policy incentives are presented and discussed. The final section reflects on the significant political implications of this discussion for global education reforms.