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Decoupling and the Politics of Legitimacy in Buenos Aires’ Bachilleratos Populares
This article examines the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA) adult education policy environment as it is experienced by two autonomous, community-organized high schools in the city. Drawing on over a year of ethnographic research in Buenos Aires, Lucas Bricca explores how Buenos Aires’ bachilleratos populares navigate the tension between enacting emancipatory, grassroots educational models and conforming to the formal policies required for accreditation. Bricca investigates the practices through which BPs maintain a deliberate gap between formal policy and their day-to-day activities (decoupling), and the importance of this organizational resistance for the schools’ survival. Bricca then explores why the state tolerates this noncompliance, arguing that a decoupled policy environment allowed policymakers to disavow the contradictions of a recent technological literacy program.
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