Americas Quarterly - Summer 2010

job insecurity and lower remuneration. “The price [of the model] included the violation of labor rights,” affirms Nery Barrientos, a leader of CMS teachers who organized ( separately from the teachers’ unions) to gain the same status as traditional schoolteachers. Among the principal complaints: parent power over teacher selection and annual contract renewals undercut job stability and subjected teachers to the whims of fickle parents. Moreover, in Guatemala, reports emerged that many teachers had to pay parent councils to hire them. Even where foul play did not occur, critics questioned whether parents, who usually had little or no formal schooling, should be overseeing teacher performance.

CMS teachers has focused attention on
the shortcomings of the traditional
system, where supervision remains
minimal and teachers rarely receive
sanctions for absences or abuses. The
prospect of lifetime tenure troubles
many parents in rural regions, where
teachers in the traditional system have
a reputation for missing work or arbi-
trarily shortening school days. Fur-
ther raising parents’ ire in recent years,
teachers’ union strikes over back pay
and raises have consistently shut down
schools for weeks or months at a time.

Here, CMS had the advantage. Studies show evidence of higher teacher attendance in these schools. Since teachers did not enjoy union protection and parents monitored them and paid their salaries, teachers showed up more often and worked full school days. In the words of Eduardo, a parent leader: “PRONADE worked every day, Monday to Friday. They complied with the schedule.” Since the phase-out of PRONADE, Eduardo and his neighbors have seen teacher attendance decline. Meanwhile, such problems have apparently not affected Honduras’s PROHECO schools, which have not faced the prospect of conversion.

Patronage politics have captured the
program, with party loyalties—rather
than merit or parent choice—dictating
teacher and field staff selection. This
has continued under President Porfirio
Lobo, whose Partido Nacional has al-
ready begun to systematically replace
PROHECO staff with party loyalists.

CMS has both prompted political backlash—mostly from teachers’ unions—and reflected each country’s broader political legacies (e.g., patronage in Honduras). Its success in expanding education coverage and keeping teachers in the classroom has also brought into sharp relief the continued failure of traditional school systems to serve rural communities.

In Guatemala, the experiment came to an end in early 2010 when President Álvaro Colom’s government finished transferring CMS teachers to the ranks of traditional system teachers. PRONADE’s reversal followed a similar experiment’s end in Nicaragua and preceded El Salvador’s announcement that it is considering overturning its CMS schools (the first in the region) to the traditional system. In Honduras, CMS has survived but in emasculated form.

Job seCurIty vs. aCCountabIlIty while Guatemala’s abandon- ment of CMS marked a victory for teachers worried about labor rights, it also undermined efforts to increase accountability in the education system and civic engagement in remote communities.

The decline of parental participa-
tion has been the other major down-
side of overturning CMS in Guatemala
and weakening CMS through patron-
age in Honduras. CMS proponents in
both countries contend that these
programs would, as a secondary ef-
fect, strengthen rural civil society. Ara-
bella Castro, the minister of education
under former-President Arzú, argued:
Extending lifetime tenure to former
In Honduras, CMS supporters also
claimed that the program would
strengthen civic participation and
social capital. Proponents in both
countries tapped into the discourse
of participatory development, arguing
that citizen participation in meeting
development objectives would also
strengthen democracy.

Of course, many hurdles confront

daniel altschuler

More than a fresh coat of paint: The original school structure, or galera, in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala (left), and a school built years later by the municipality (right).