A comparative perspective on public policies for education: Studies on Brazil-Spain

Abstract

New directions have been rising in Comparative Education as a result of a steep process of social and epistemological changes that progressively confirm their own value in the face of a greater analytical distance regarding the context, object and issues relating to a particular reality or problem. Aiming at discussing the comparative perspective in Public Policies for Education, this study expands on Brazil-Spain comparisons in this field, with the objective of putting together a descriptive inventory regarding the academic and related scientific output covered by the period 1990-2014, focusing the Public Policies for both Basic and Higher Education. The research showed a shortage of studies with this focus and that authorship in the area is consistently Brazilian. Although relatively diverse when it comes to their objects of analysis, the largest portion of the studies on Basic Education noted, in each of the methodological and interpretative approaches adopted, the prevalence of similarities in the processes of rupture or continuity between the post-redemocratization public actions in Brazil and Spain – it was rare that significant differences were observed between these countries by these studies. The similarities are also present in the studies on Higher Education, which address the phenomena of globalization, their actors, processes and objectives in the construction of public action within the context of national states, showing a certain standardization of cross-border impacts despite the distinctions signaled between the Higher Education systems of these two countries and their respective processes of local resignification of these same influences.