ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the educational policy agenda in Argentina during 2000–2020. Education policy during this period can be divided into two stages. In the early years, Minister Daniel Filmus led a strategy to recover public education and leave the 1990s’ education reform behind. New laws that offered a comprehensive education framework were passed, and Argentina’s education budget increased from 4.2% to 6% of its GDP between 2004 and 2013. However, there were no significant reforms; there was no explicit change theory to explain how education would improve. Instead, education policy became more ideologized, and party politics became strained, with a growing gap between the government and the opposition. At the end of 2015, the elections marked a profound change in the political course when Mauricio Macri took office. The Ministry of Education did not have the resources, political wealth or knowledge of the previous education system. Macri’s government’s ambitious vision of the educational revolution rapidly shipwrecked in a “reform without water”: ambitious discourses for change were not backed by sufficient investment and political capital.
