The Emergence of New School Formats

The concept of being “between promise and precarity,” as outlined by the author, offers an interpretive framework for analyzing the experience of “self-managed schools” (*Escuelas Autogestionadas*) in the province of San Luis, Argentina—also known as “experimental schools” or “2001 schools.” Its analytical power lies in its ability to examine an educational policy that presented itself as an innovative alternative to traditional school organization, while simultaneously raising questions regarding teachers' working conditions, the state's responsibilities, the democratization of education, and the introduction of market-based mechanisms of competition and regulation.

This expression does not necessarily posit an absolute opposition between innovation and precarity, nor does it assume that every institution yielded identical outcomes. Rather, it highlights a constitutive tension: a policy may promise institutional autonomy, organizational flexibility, and improved learning opportunities, while at the same time shifting a significant portion of the risks, responsibilities, and costs of sustaining the educational system onto the schools, their leadership teams, and their teachers.

From this perspective, the study of self-managed schools should not be limited to determining whether the model "succeeds" or "fails." It is necessary to reconstruct the historical conditions of their emergence, the actors involved in their design, the economic and political principles that guided their implementation, the ways in which teaching work is organized, and the concrete experiences of the educational communities themselves. The central question is to understand what kind of public education takes shape when institutional autonomy becomes a primary instrument of educational policy.

The promise of autonomy was rooted in a critical assessment of centralized educational systems. From this viewpoint, bureaucratic regulations, organizational uniformity, and rigid labor standards were seen as potential obstacles to a school's ability to respond to the needs of its community. Decentralization, therefore, appeared as an alternative—a way to foster diverse pedagogical initiatives, expand the decision-making capacity of school leadership teams, and establish a more direct link between institutional outcomes and management decisions. However, autonomy does not in itself constitute a guarantee of democratization. Its meaning depends on how power is distributed, what resources institutions have at their disposal, and the conditions under which they carry out their responsibilities. A school may have greater freedom to define its curricular project while, at the same time, lacking the actual capacity to determine its financial resources, ensure the stability of its staff, or have a say in broader educational policy decisions.