With Malta’s expenditure on education at six per cent of the country’s GDP, many are questioning the return on current investment in education.
Debates on the high rates of early school-leavers and academic underachievement have, at times, yielded proposals for alternative education policy scenarios that can deliver better results. One of the scenarios proposed by business-friendly discussants and commentators is the further privatisation of education provision through a voucher system which allows for ‘free choice’ in a marketised sector.
Such a policy scenario is not alien to the educational world. Chile offers us the most spectacular example of such a policy scenario, an education system which I experienced first-hand when, in January, I was invited to deliver a keynote speech on poverty and education at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile.
Inspired by the ideas of such liberal economists as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and imposed by then dictator General Augusto Pinochet, the ‘Chilean experiment’ was meant to prove that education can deliver the best results when the State acts as a regulator and financier and when the private sector is actively encouraged to handle its administration. Since the school voucher system was introduced in 1980 – parents receive a voucher to use in either private or public schools – the for-profit sector has expanded to a third of the national compulsory education provision.
Results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) indicate that, in 2012, Chile featured among a small group of countries that had registered an increase in maths, reading and science scores since 2000. The academic gains have also been confirmed by Simce, Chile’s own national testing system.
While the general educational and economic gains ought to be acknowledged, the narrative that emerges from the national and international testing regimes provides a stark contrast to the stories of thousands of Chilean students who have been protesting for free, quality education since 2011.
Evidence provided by students, parents, academics and social activists I met in Villarrica and Santiago, indicates clearly that within a market-oriented education system equity is a major casualty.
One of the controversial aspects of the privatisation process in Chile is a family fee-charging system called “shared funding”. Technically illegal, this scheme allows private voucher schools, all recipients of subsidies from the State, to charge a tuition fee over and above the State subsidy.
Many question the return on current investment in education
Eighty per cent of private voucher schools have adopted this approach, creating a discriminatory regime based on fees. This regime is directly linked to one of the highest levels of socio-economic segregation in schools among OECD countries. This practice has also been associated with the fact that students’ academic achievement in Chile is strongly correlated to their socio-economic status.
Profit-making educational institutions in Chile have also been linked to overt discrimination against underachieving students and those from low-income families.
Chilean schools are allowed to apply arbitrary selection procedures, selecting students on the basis of cognitive capital and the family’s socio-economic and cultural capital.
In a piece written for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Alfredo Gaeta, co-organiser of the January conference, and Stephanie Jones, a keynote speaker, argued that, in Chile, schools serving the more underprivileged students have greater difficulties, not only for responding competitively but also for improving school attractiveness. Schools are currently investing more in marketing strategies than in actually improving their services.
The image culture imposed by the for-profit market has yielded a teach-to-the-test approach to the detriment of untestable and enriching experiences. Teaching to the test has also negatively affected teachers’ professional autonomy and morale.
In the final analysis, controlling for discrimination on the basis of socio-economic status, private schools did not perform better than public schools.
Student protests, culminating in the ‘Penguins Revolution’ (secondary students’ struggle for quality and equity of Chilean education), have recently led to radical reforms in the educational system of Chile.
In January, the President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, announced radical educational reforms.
Fuelled by an overhaul of the tax system supported by PISA-based data, OECD policy documents that confirm repeatedly that “school choice poses risks to equity and requires careful management, in particular to ensure that it does not result in increased differences in the social composition of different schools” (OECD, No More Failures, 2010) and informed by the basic principle that there is no democracy without social justice and that democracy is not limited to single-issue politics, Chile will end public funding to private, for-profit schools, make all primary and secondary education free of charge and will prohibit controversial selective practices used in school admission processes.
For Bachelet, the reforms that were passed by the Lower House of Parliament on January 26, after eight months of intense debate, constitute the first step in the redemocratisation of Chile’s edu-cation system.
The next step in the democratisation process will address the issue of equitable access to higher education, incidentally the title of my forthcoming keynote speech in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Carmel Borg is associate professor at the Faculty of Education’s Department of Education Studies.