The crisis and the market: Regulating Peru's ungoverned private education market

Balarin M.; María Fernanda Rodríguez G. · Research Handbook on Education Privatization and Marketization (2025) · DOI: 10.4337/9781035311385.00039

Resumen

Since the mid-1990s, Peru has undergone a process of default educational privatization, with the private education market now accounting for more than a quarter of the country's enrolments. Such growth has taken place in the context of highly loose and disorganised regulation, resulting in an extremely heterogeneous private education market, in terms of both supply and results. Since 2011, the Ministry of Education has led at least five attempts at improving the regulation of private education, bringing it closer to state oversight. These attempts have faced staunch resistance from some sectors of the market, showing the problems that a completely 'free' market for private education may lead to. In this chapter, we revisit the strategies deployed by both the state and private actors to advance or hinder these reform attempts, and we discuss how contextual factors have influenced them. We base our discussion on investigations we conducted as both researchers and participant-observers of the reform attempts. Our analysis shows the challenges faced by private education regulatory reforms in contexts with weak states and institutions, where largely unregulated social sectors, political instability, and the permeability of the state to private interests pose considerable challenges to the consolidation of reform agendas. © Adrián Zancajo, Clara Fontdevila, Huriya Jabbar and Antoni Verger 2025. All rights reserved.