The struggle for privatisation: Arguments for, and Orders of worth of, the Debate over the Re- Regulation of Private Education in Peru

Privatisation in education is a controversial topic in academic and policy-making debates. However, there is a failure to recognise the ideational and structural basis that informs such polarised positions. Through a sociological understanding of disputes and following authors such as Scott (1998), Fourcade and Healy (2016), and Robertson (2022), I propose an approach that seeks to see through the lenses of both the state and the market in order to understand the claims behind the contested visions at play in the regulation of private education in a specific case: a debate in 2018 in Peru between private providers and the Ministry of Education that would inform the latest national regulation on private education. Following Diehl (2021), I combine these frameworks with Boltanski and Thevenot’s (2016) pragmatic sociology to grasp the different ‘orders of worth’ behind such gazes. The paper draws on tools from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) - in particular, Fairclough and Fairclough’s (2010) practical argumentation and Laclau and Mouffe’s (2001) logics of equivalence and difference - to examine the contradictory ways in which private providers and representatives of the State in Peru argue for or against what the new regulation proposes regarding two controversial topics. First, the scope of parents’ and students’ involvement and participation in schools, and second, the evaluation and selection of students in private schools. Following this methodology, I analyse how these arguments are raised, justified and positioned by these actors and what are the underlying ‘orders of worth’ and ‘ways of seeing’ underpinning such discourses. The analysis provides evidence of contradictory ways of seeing education that are located in market and industrial orders of worth. Specifically, the study reveals the ‘limits’ of school choice from the private providers’ perspective, how education is equated to a service to be sold, students and parents are equated to consumers and private schools to companies. However, these arguments are positioned so that they do not contradict civic order of worth values or as a means that would lead to them. The paper aims to advance theoretical and methodological avenues to analyse what lies behind the polarised positions in the privatisation in education debate. Moreover, it applies a CDA methodology to critically analyse the narratives and disputes behind the making of an educational policy at a national level. As it proves for the case of study, the analysis of the debate suggests an initial reconstruction of a hegemonic project in the making for private education in Peru that also holds open the possibility of challenging it by unpacking the arguments used to support it.