From promise to capture: The limits of compensatory education and the territorial politics of equity

This article provides a critical analysis of the historical development and reconfiguration of compensatory education from its origins in the welfare state to its current framing within the neoliberal paradigm. Although conceived as a tool for equity, compensatory education has gradually been influenced by technocratic and performative logics that undermine its transformative purpose. The analysis is based on territorialization as the organizing structure of the compensatory education movement, within a three-part framework of justice – redistributive, recognition, and spatial. Four fundamental fractures are identified: (i) territorialization without spatial justice; (ii) the absence of coordinated redistribution; (iii) the invisibility of recognition and representation; and (iv) performative evaluation as a reproducer of inequality. Drawing on classic and contemporary authors such as Bernstein, Bourdieu, Fraser, Soja, and Biesta, the article argues that educational justice requires intersectoral policies, democratic participation, and adequate evaluation instruments. Despite the constraints imposed by the paradigm of Outcome-Based Education (OBE), it is argued that schools and territories can still serve as strategic sites of resistance and democratic reconstruction, as long as they are anchored in a substantive conception of spatial and social justice.