Student screening practices in the Chilean school system: exclusion legitimacy and accountability pressure.

• In Event: Standardization, accountability and incentives across schools in Latin America

Abstract

Student screening based on their socioeconomic status, home environment or their past and potential academic achievement, it’s a practice that generates segregation within the school system (Carrasco et al., 2014). Student segregation between schools has a negative impact over their educational experiences, the quality of their citizenship (García Huidobro, 2007) and, later, over social tolerance and cohesion (Villalobos & Valenzuela, 2012). Social integration is an educational value by itself, which should be reflected over educational quality and opportunities, giving to children the opportunities to experiment the social and cultural heterogeneity within the school environment (García Huidobro & Corvalán, 2009).
For this reason, the Chilean system presents an interesting study case of the impact that student screening has on schools’ socioeconomic segregation. Since 1981, Chile has a universal voucher system that allows the existence of three type of schools according to their financing sources: private owned schools funded exclusively by families, private-voucher schools which are private owned but receive public funding and are also allowed to charge a monthly fee to the attending families, and public schools managed by local governments (municipios) publicly funded, and allowed to ask for a voluntary monetary contribution from the students’ families. Public funding for public and private-voucher schools is based on student attendance. Owners of private schools, either they receive public funding or not, are allowed to operate their schools as for-profit enterprises or non-profit institutions. However, public funded schools (private or public owned) are forbidden by law to select students based on their academic merit or socioeconomic status, at least not before the sixth grade. Despite this, admission processes intended to cream skim students can still be found in private owned schools. This asymmetrical set of rules has produced a profoundly segregated school system, based on social class differentiation as an indirect measure of academic quality (Contreras, 2010), turning the Chilean school system into one of the most segregated school systems in the world (Mizala y Torche, 2012; Valenzuela, Bellei y De los Ríos, 2010;Hernando y Niklitschek, 2013).
This presentation describes the students’ screening process in the Chilean school system, analyzing the admission requirements reported by school administrators and comparing them to what the law actually permits and its impact over the general socioeconomic segregation between and within schools. Admission requirements data is publicly available at Chilean Ministry of Education webpage “More information, better education”, and is self-reported by the school owner (for private schools) or by the school’s principal (for public schools).
Our initial findings show that recollection of admission requirements that allow schools to thoroughly describe the students’ academic past and future performance and their socioeconomic environment, is a widely used practice among all kinds of schools, either they are publicly or privately funded, and –most of the cases- circumventing the limits established by law. Despite this, there are differences between school types. Private voucher schools are more likely to apply student screening than public schools. For-profit private voucher schools are less likely to demand background information than their non-profit counterparts.
Students’ screening is a widely used practice and has become socially accepted. The law that regulates screening has several void areas, becoming a regulatory framework for student selection rather than effectively forbidding it. Also, the punishment that establishes for student screening is pretty mild, making it cheaper to “pay the price” than to obey the law (Carrasco et al., 2014). A good example of this social tolerance is how easily school owners or administrators explicitly detail their admission requirements to the regulatory body (Ministry of Education) in a public access website. It isn’t only cheaper to screen students, it also isn’t necessary to hide these forbidden practices from the public eye.
Across the world there have been experiences of educational reforms that introduce market-based logic in the school systems. The result is usually the transformation of schools into firms that operate under the pressure of competition. The ability to discriminate students through their selection processes is an advantage that schools can’t ignore in a competitive market. The results from the Chilean case present a cautionary tale on the impact of this type of polices, especially about the potential damage in the edification of a cohesive and integrated society.

Authors

• Felipe Salazar, Universidad Diego Portales

• Felipe Godoy, Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación

• Ernesto Trevino, Center for Comparative Education Policies, Universidad Diego Portales