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This article explores the representations and meanings regarding social inequality socially constructed in schools since the implementation of the Federal Law of Education in the 90's. This work analyses the implementation of institutional articulation policy in one school in the suburbs of Buenos Aires with the intention of describing how decentralization and autonomy policies contribute to reinforcing social inequalities in schools' everyday life. By reference to concrete ethnographic situations, we describe the process by which schools implemented the institutional articulation between former primary and secondary schools in order to understand not only what people say about social inequality in a particular moment in history, but also what people "do". As a result, this paper intends to describe the differentiation process among and within schools that the implementation of neoliberal policies leds to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to show the political ideological conceptions held by the public education policies in the province of La Pampa between 1984-1996. This period of time is the one beginning with the restoration of democracy and ending with the sanction of the Provincial Law of Education. The eighties were characterized by the reestablishment of institutional order and the attempt to design and establish policies based on the State of Welfare conception. During this period, the search for agreement with the provincial government and the teachers was mediated by the teacher's trade union which obtained historically claimed rights and labour achievements. In the nineties, neoliberal policies and the demands from international organizations give origin to deep changes in the educational system of La Pampa. The trend towards decentralization and the State reform policy account for the structural change implied by a new relationship between State and society. New strategies in the search for support appear; trade unions are no longer the privileged speakers; they have been shifted by the euphemism of «community participation» This analysis tries to trace in the official political discourse evidence of the above mentioned change in the idea of the role of the State in educational matters on the one hand, an on the other, the change in the strategies searching for support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]