Cuatro décadas de discursos del Gobierno sobre calidad docente: Un análisis desde los Planes Nacionales de Desarrollo (1974-2018)

From a historical perspective, this article studies the evolution of the political discourse on the quality of teaching and the factors that explain this transformation from a critical analysis of Colombia’s national development plans produced in the period between 1974 and 2018. This article shows, first, that the political discourse of the NDP repeatedly uses the notion of teacher quality as an argument to explain the low quality of education in Colombia. To this extent, in the last 44 years the concept of teaching quality has been transformed in such a way that it has been aligned with the ideas of the free market, that is, the poor quality of teachers responds to the lack of incentives that prevent the market from adjusting and attracting the best candidates to the teaching profession. The analysis finds that the concept of the free market, in the labor market, does not solve the problem of quality given the monopoly of the State of this market and the social disrepute of the profession. Furthermore, the monopoly of the teacher labor market is not recognized by the State and is therefore not adequately addressed. As a result, it is concluded that there is a tendency in national development plans to position teachers as responsible for the quality of education in Colombia and to understand the dynamics of the labor market as responsible for the quality of teachers.