Agreements and Tensions around Secondary Education within the Political Left in Uruguay: a Contribution from the Advocacy Coalition Framework

Abstract

This article analyzes the agreements and disagreements within the Frente Amplio and the teachers unions, in order to understand the obstacles to design and implement educational policies that could improve secondary education. To this end, using a qualitative approach, I conducted 23 semi-structured interviews with government authorities, legislators, Frente Amplio’s political activists, experts, and union leaders to understand their points of view about this particular policy issue. The focus is on three dimensions: administration, inclusion, and reform. In this way, I observed significant differences between the interviewees, identifying two advocacy coalitions within the political left, bound by two opposite belief systems about the desirable course of secondary education public policy.