The quality gap in Chile’s education system

Economía, 2008

Economia, 2008

I n the early 1980s, Chile implemented a nationwide school choice system, under which the government finances education via a flat per-student subsidy (or voucher) to the public or private school chosen by a family. At present, about 94 percent of all schools (public, religious, and secular private) are voucher funded. More than half of urban schools are private, and most of these operate as for-profit institutions. 1 Since the early 1990s, Chile has also publicized information on school performance and increased per pupil expenditure substantially. Despite these and other reforms, Chile has found it challenging to improve students' learning outcomes. 2 Hsieh and Urquiola find that the country's relative performance in international tests did not change much between 1970 and 1999. 3 Its performance on the 2000 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is not only much lower than the OECD average but is similar to that of other Latin American countries and low relative to countries with similar income per capita. 4 Patrick J. McEwan, Miguel Urquiola, and Emiliana Vegas 3 6. Primary public schools cannot charge tuition; as of 1994, secondary schools can, but few actually do.

Journal of Human Resources, 2000

How to achieve quality in education is a topic of increasing concern throughout the world. Many countries have made a wide variety of reforms and spent an increasing amount of resources to improve the quality of education, but often the results have not lived up to expectations. Chile has made innovative reforms to its educational system. One of the most interesting has been the introduction of a voucher-type subsidy system and the entry of private agents in the market to provide free educational services. This paper examines the Chilean experience by analyzing educational performance in different types of school.

Policy Research Working Papers, 1999

Proceedings of the 2019 AERA Annual Meeting

2007

Education plays an important role in the economic and social development of countries. Myriad studies show that education is one of the best ways to offer increased socioeconomic opportunities, social mobility and wages. Not only is universal education important but more significant is the quality of the education. Traditionally, educational policy looks to increase resources, a practice that has not empirically demonstrated satisfactory results. When addressing the problem from an economic standpoint, scholars consider why some schools are "better" than others and examine whether school administration influences results. In 1962, Milton Friedman introduced the voucher system into public education. Vouchers are simply the introduction of incentives as market forces, creating competition to improve educational results. In other words, introducing these incentives creates competition in student recruitment, directly influenced by the academic results of the school-ideally allowing only those institutions with good results to survive "in the market" and closing those schools that cannot "compete" against higher-quality establishments. Unfortunately, sufficient data do not exist to endorse the assertion that vouchers yet impact "the market" in this form. However, I will use the empirical evidence that the Chilean case provides and try to determine if this voucher system works as the theory claims. This study will help to interpret this system, the operation of free choice and how the market forces act to increase the quality of education. Three types of variables exist and are used to explain the educational results of each student; they are the individual and family characteristics as well as the characteristics of the educational establishment. Many variables previously mentioned are endogenous. One of the most important variables for this analysis is the selection of the school, and therefore the traditional mechanism of ordinary least square (OLS) will bias the results. However, by predicting the probabilities of selecting a particular educational establishment, using instrumental variables, and then estimating a two stage least-square model, the bias problem will disappear. The article will be organized in the following way: Section I: Introduction, section II will describe the Chilean education system. Section III describes the dataset and the methodology will be explained. Section IV describes the data and results and later on finally, section V contains the conclusion and recommendations.

Documentos de Trabajo n 263, Serie …, 2009

In this paper we re-analyze the effect of private voucher education on student academic performance in Chile using new data and a novel identification strategy. Most schools in Chile provide either primary or secondary education. We analyze the effect of private voucher education on students that are forced to enroll at a different school to attend secondary education once graduated from primary schooling. Moreover, contrary to the previous literature on Chile's universal voucher system, the data set used in this paper contains information on previous academic achievement and thus allows us to control for it. Using a number of propensity score based econometric techniq ues and changes-in-changes estimation methods we find that private voucher education leads to small, sometimes not statistically significant differences in academic performance. The estimated effect of private voucher education amounts to about 4 to 6 percent of one standard deviation in test scores. The literature on Chile based on cross sectional data had previously found positive effects of about 15 to 20 percent of one standard deviation.

Graduate Theses and Dissertations - Public Policy, 2009

Includes bibliographical references. Improving the quality of education systems is one of the most important challenges faced by Latin American governments. In order to achieve this goal, Chile has introduced several reforms such as the National System for Assessing School Performance (SNED). The System provides monetary incentives to teachers mainly based on students' performance on national standardized tests. This study shows that reading, mathematical and scientific literacy measured by PISA-2006 assessments are positively related with attendance at schools awarded by SNED-2006, after controlling for individual socio-economical factors as well as school quality factors. Schools awarded by SNED-2006 not only offered higher education quality compared to their peers in terms of national curriculum coverage, but they also contributed to develop higher competences relevant to future personal, social and economic well being among their students.

Centro de Economía Aplicada. …, 2005

The aim of this paper is to analyze, using a hierarchical linear model, the degree to which a system of choice, as the one implemented in Chile since the beginning of the 80's, can promote student achievement and equity in the social distribution of achievement. Using data from a standardized achievement test, which includes the entire population of 4 th grade students and schools of the country, we investigate the association between students' socioeconomic status and achievement, within and between schools. We also investigate up to what extent different categories of schools enjoy advantages in educating low-income students. These are important issues because unlike the limited vouchers programs in the US, Chile has had a nationwide school choice program for more than 20 years. Classification JEL: I2