Transforming Neoliberal Education: Can Chile Reverse Market-Oriented Strategies That Drive the System?

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: The Politics of Neoliberal Educational Policies: Conceptual and Empirical Examinations of Alternative Educational Visions

Abstract

For 40 years, Chile has created an education system directly shaped by neoliberal ideology. The design of the system was influenced by Milton Friedman theories (Madero, 2018), and the implementation took place during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The pillars of the system are the introduction of voucher schools on a nationwide scale. These schools had limited regulation and therefore compete unevenly with public schools. Voucher schools had the ability to be for profit organizations; charge copayment to families; use arbitrary selection methods such as families’ interview. The business of schooling became an attractive opportunity, and the market of voucher schools increased, reaching more than 50% of the total enrollment. Additionally, during the 1980s, the administration of public schools was transferred from the Ministry of education to local municipalities. The goal was to decentralize the system and decrease its bureaucracy. The result was a socioeconomically segregated education system where the capacity to pay determined the quality of education students receive (Mizala & Torche, 2012). Up until the beginning of this decade, the segregation was mostly socioeconomic. However, a wave of immigration from Latin American countries has changed the dynamics of school exclusion. Even though only immigrant students represent only 3.5% of the enrollment of public schools, 57% of all immigrants are enrolled in public schools. This percentage is significant, considering that less than 40% of all students are enrolled in a traditional public school (Fernandez, 2018). Thus, in the last years, Chilean schools have begun to face multidimensional segregation in terms of family income, ethnicity, race, and nationality.

Currently, the country is trying to reverse the impact of the market-oriented strategies to implement a more democratic public education system to desegregate the schools. For this purpose, there are three ongoing policy reforms in place. The first limits the attributions of voucher school operators. The second professionalized the teaching profession by increasing the entry requirements for traditional teaching education programs at universities, improving the working conditions of teaching and increasing the salaries of teachers. The third transfers the administration of traditional public schools from municipalities to a new institution. This paper reviews the first and third policies to examine if reforms have been able to modify some consequences of having a market-oriented system during the first two years of implementation. The review explores a critical question: What are the steps taken to ensure that the changes are modifying the structure of the education system, as well as the values and beliefs of its actors? In the same way Chile was a pioneer nation in introducing market-oriented strategies, we are currently witnessing if this country will have the same success in removing such mechanisms from the education system.

Author

• Maria Eugenia Rojas Concha, University of California - Berkeley