The following post was written by Mario Waissbluth, President of Educación 2020 Foundation, a Chilean citizen’s movement founded in 2008. Its latest reform proposals (in Spanish) are called “La Reforma Educativa que Chile Necesita”, and were published in April 2013. A book on this subject (in Spanish) is also available. These proposals were mostly adopted by and included in the educational program of the recently elected government of Michelle Bachelet, and are starting to be implemented now.
Valentina Quiroga (32) was one of the student founders of this organization and is now Undersecretary of Education.
Although Educación 2020 remains as a fully independent movement, the positions stated thereon are in many ways similar to those of the current government.
Chile: Dismantling the most pro-market education system in the world
Mario Waissbluth
In August 2013 I wrote in this blog a three piece series, called “Chile: The most pro-market system in the world.” The first described the origins and structure of the system. The second explained its educational and social results, good and bad. The third pointed the way Chile should choose to get out of this mess. If the reader wants to fully understand this situation (the most “Milton Friedmanish” in the world), incomparable with any other country, it is advisable to read those beforehand.
Although some might disagree, from both extremes of the political spectrum, we are happy to inform that the proposals we made are very similar to those being implemented now. However, the political, financial and cultural obstacles will be formidable.
Bachelet was elected by a large margin of voters and has a majority in both the House and the Senate. Nonetheless, positions within the government’s coalition are not fully homogeneous. In addition, there is an impending tax reform that is vital for funding these reforms, costing no less than 2% of gross national product in gradual increments.
Of course, many powerful companies, with strong lobbying capability, are not happy about that. The educational reforms will include dozens of new laws and budgets, covering from preschool to tertiary education.
A warning for American readers. I am fully aware that many of you are criticizing charter schools, profit, teaching to the test, skimming, and the destruction of the teaching profession. I myself have cited Diane Ravitch’s books many times. But you have to be aware that, after 30 years of neoliberal schemes in Chile, charter schools subsidized by government are a majority (55%). One third of them are religious. Two thirds of them are for-profit, and one half of them charge anywhere from US$ 10 to US$ 180 a month on top of the subsidy, therefore skimming quite efficiently.
Teaching to the test, with consequences, has been taken to the greatest extreme imaginable. Policies to destruct public education are too numerous to mention here, and the result is that this system is in acute crisis financially, managerially and emotionally. The teaching profession is in far worse condition than in the US, by any statistical criteria.
In this situation, it is simply not possible to pretend now that charter schools could vanish. Less so if millions of parents have chosen to send their children to highly segregated charters, in a country whose social inequalities are far worse than those in the US, which I know are ugly by themselves.
In short, if the US is navigating towards hell, we are already there and are trying to get out without sinking the ship. It is a very different situation.
The most difficult hurdle in front of us is not legal, political or financial, but cultural. Parents have been led to believe, for decades, that the “best” school is that which is segregated, both academically and socioeconomically. We have a true cultural and educational apartheid. Therefore, the changes will have to be gradual and careful. At the same time, the government is sending strong signals: this is not going to be a minor adjustment but a major change in the overall orientation of the school system; not to make it fully state owned, but simply to resemble the vast majority of OECD countries, probably in a way similar to that of Belgium or The Netherlands. The whole strategy is described in more detail in the above mentioned entries of this blog,
Recently, the Education Minister, Mr. Nicolás Eyzaguirre (with a powerful political and financial experience and profile) has announced the first wave of legislation, to be sent to Congress in May, whose details are now being drafted. They include, amongst other things, the radical ending of academic selection and skimming, the gradual elimination of cost-sharing (to reduce social skimming), the phasing out of 3,500 for-profit schools (to be converted into non-profits), the radical pruning of the standardized testing system, the strengthening and expansion of the public network of schools (so that they can compete in a better way with the charters) and a major reform to the teaching profession, from its training (completely unregulated so far), to improving salaries and working conditions.
This is an evolving situation. I will be most happy (if I can) to answer questions through this blog, and also to inform you about new developments in the future.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thanks for keeping us posted on this development. It would be ironic if the lessons our legislators had to learn came from an international community, especially when you consider the considerable influence of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in pushing for education that drives the economy. and the determination of this nation”s elected leaders to privatize public education.
Sadly, I doubt the leaders here will look at the situations in Chile or Sweden at all. It’s “full steam ahead” here for privatization.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Chili went over the public education cliff the United States is headed for and now, decades later, is climbing the cliff with goals to reverse the damage.
Chile, not Chili
Most pro-market in the world? Someone has never heard of Belgium or the Netherlands or Sweden.
Dear WT. Sweden has at the most 25% of charter schools, half of them for profit. We have more than double that figure. Netheralnds has similar proportions of charters, but none of them are for profit, and non of them charge a co-payment from parents.
In those nations, the government pays for all schooling, including at private schools. Can’t be more “pro-market” than that.
In The Netherlands, the situation has changed in the past 15 years. It used to be the case that about 60% of all schools were privately owned. The umbrella term for these schools was, and is, ‘Bijzonder Onderwijs” and this includes all schools on a religious basis (either Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim or any other denomination) as well as schools with a special educational denomination (such as Montessori, Jenaplan, Dalton, Democratic etc.). The remaining 40% of schools used to be governmental, i.e. really ‘public’.
All of these schools were (and still are) paid for by public money. Parents are asked a small yearly fee (about 25 to 100 dollars) in order for a number of extracurricular activities.
Then came the neolib overhaul. All school boards were privatized, which is merely a legal construction by which private non-profit foundations took over the former public schools. Now all Dutch primary, secondary or tertiary schools are part of some private Foundation of Union. They are not marketed, and don’t have shareholders. They receive about 8000 dollar of public money for each subscribed student. School boards can do with that money what they like, within very, very wide limitations. The ‘freedom of education’ has turned into an increased freedom for school boards, and a decreased freedom for teachers (who have to obey the boards’ working orders) and limited freedom for parents (who can send their children to a limited number of schools).
The neolib privatization overhaul was sold to the Dutch public by the usual pretexts: ‘more quality for a lower price’. As the sceptics expected, the result turned out exactly the other way. The public expenses have more than doubled in 13 years time (the cumulative inflation being less than 30%), salaries for non-teaching staff have increased hugely, as have their number. Teaching staff, however, receive lower pay, and both teaching hours and class size have increased. PISA comparisons show that results have steadily decreased, compared to similar countries, as have the qualifications of newly arrived teachers.
I find it a bit ironic that Chile would consider The Netherlands an example in order to fight segregation. The neolib overhaul and the government-forced ‘concurrency’ between schools has resulted in dramatic segregation in urban areas. The percentage of either ‘black schools’ and ‘white schools’ has increased from 25% to 75% in only two decades, and is still growing.
I used to be proud of Dutch education. That was when I started my career as a teacher, and researcher. At present, I see very little in my country’s education system or policy that can make me proud. And I certainly would not recommend it as an example to other nations.
Thank you for your clarification. I probably should have said “the old Netherlands model”. Our main point now is that we have 55% of charter schools, most of them for profit, and most of them charging a hefty co-payment, which varies from school to school, thus effectively segregating the students by socioeconomic levels. In addition, there are frequent practices of academic skimming in the admission, and skimming through early expulsion, so that the school “looks better” in standardized tests. Our main priority for now is to dismantle all those practices, being today almost impossible to offer to parents a different alternative in public education, which has been reduced to the barest minimum. It will take many many years to recover public education.
Thanks so much for this. I’m curious about this:
“the gradual elimination of cost-sharing (to reduce social skimming), ”
How did that work out, as a practical matter? Higher income parents received a voucher for a private school and then supplemented the voucher with family income? So they were essentially creating schools with a high-income student population, where lower income ended up excluded?
Was there any effect on state funding as a result of that? For example, did state per pupil funding go down because higher-income parents had created a higher-income parallel system therefore leaving lower-income parents with less political clout, due to fragmentation of any “public school funding political coalition”?
Do people feel that the voucher system was a way to cost-shift, to take the burden of funding education off the state and shift it to to family budgets? I think the Ohio voucher system does just that, or will, now that it’s been vastly expanded. I actually think cost-shifting from the state to lower and middle class people is the real long-term threat with voucher systems, perhaps by design but maybe inevitably (not planned).
Chiara. Cost-sharing started in full in 1992, and paradoxically, it was approved by the same center-left coalition now in power (but now they all regret it, or so they say). The idea was to increase education funding from the wealthier parent pockets. The result: the most socially segregated system in the world, according to PISA statistics.
Thank you. I think the cost-shifting is a huge issue, and one people should be very wary of. Obviously all states and nations would rather not fund public education, so they’ll try to weasel out of it any way they can.
They advertise the vouchers as “scholarships” in Ohio (banners on the private schools) which I think is deceptive because a lot of people probably assume the school is offering the “scholarship” but really it’s a state-funded voucher.
I’ve read that the word “voucher” polls poorly in the US for public ed, so they simply re-branded vouchers as “scholarships”.
The “Chicago Boys” wrecked Chile’s educational system. At the University of Chicago, Friedman preached privatization. Right before he died he said hurricane Katrina did for us in one day what we have been unable to do in fifty years. His policies are devastating Louisiana right now. And they have been devastating Chile for 40 years.
Our CIA under Nixon overthrew the democratically elected President Allende in Chile in order to install the brutal head of the military, Pinochet. He murdered thousands. He instituted austerity. He privatized the economic system and the educational system. It has been a 40 year old Milton Freidman experiment. This post details the failure.
Obama was also a professor at the University of Chicago. He speaks out of both sides of his mouth. On the one hand, he says government should take care of everything. and he is very busy signing into law government mandates about health insurance and educational standards. On the other hand, he actually is a puppet for the big private bankers and he refuses to regulate them with a sensible law like the Glass Steagall Act that was in place for 66 years, that would end this derivatives bubble they are creating which will eventually implode and destroy our economy. His health care bill was not just to cover some poor people that had no insurance. It is a huge giveaway to the insurance companies by a government mandated policy. And the education mandates are a huge giveaway to charter school investors (like Michael Milken and Robert Rubin…….wasn’t he the guy that was the Treasury Secretary under Clinton when Glass Steagall was repealed so Rubin could go be the head of Citigroup merged with Travelers Insurance?….bad pennies have a way of turning up over and over)
A lot of bad ideas and shady characters come out of Chicago. Too bad for Chile. Too bad for us.
This (unfortunately) is right on the money— pun intended. A good summary of the incestuous relationship between business and politics, and the revolving door in DC.
Michael Milken was sentenced to 10 years in prison, and served 2, at club fed. His lack of ethics and illegality resulted in him being barred from the securities industry, for forever.
So therefore he is allowed to go into public school systems perpetuating his fraud whereas any teacher with a felony conviction is permanently barred from EVER teaching in any public school anywhere in the United States.
He is also barred from federal subsidies but that isn’t stopping him from putting things in other people’s names. He’s living high on the hog at taxpayer expense again.
Moral of the story is this: Anybody who has the University of Chicago anywhere on his or her resume should be automatically disqualified from running for public office.
The Chicago School is simply crackpot economics, and tragically lives have been ruined and countries damaged or destroyed by a nutball theory.
Amen.
“Worth up to $4,250 for grades K-8.”
So the concern with cost-shifting would go like this. When Ohio creates a 4,250 per pupil funding number with vouchers, is that now the race-to-the-bottom per pupil funding number?
So lower-income people would have $4250 total (they can’t contribute additional on 40k a year for a family of 4) and higher-income people would have a BASE of 4250 and supplement that?
Here’s another example. Michigan ed reformer’s “skunk works”, which was a voucher plan that would allocate 5k per pupil. It didn’t happen because they got caught, but it was the plan:
“The Detroit News, which first highlighted the “secret” meetings last week, reported the group was developing a low-cost, technology-centric charter school with a voucher-like funding mechanism. The governor said he was not aware of those private meetings but wants the discussion over expanded classroom technology to continue in public channels.”
LOW COST. That should be in bold print.
Okay, so people know if they’re selling you a voucher plan for 5k in Michigan what that is a VAST reduction in public education funding, right? We’re not going to fall for that, are we? 🙂
All they’re doing is shifting the cost of public ed from the state to the family, because obviously 5k is less than 7k or 9k, and if they hadn’t have been caught with “skunk works” 5k would be the new race to the bottom per pupil finding number for Michigan.
http://www.mlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/04/michigan_gov_rick_snyder_on_sk.html
It wasn’t just a failure. It was an epic failure.
http://www.presstv.ir/…/03/28/295588/riot-police-students-clash-in-chile
From March 2013:
On Thursday, some 25,000 Chilean students took to the streets of the capital where they called for high-quality and free education.
“We are going to continue marching for free and high quality education,” said a high school student during the protest rally.
Reports say that police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse the crowd, who responded by throwing rocks and other projectiles.
According to a statement released by a high school student spokesperson Elosia Gonzalez “Today we are marching because we believe that there is a root to the problem here, it’s a structural problem in the system.”
“We will continue to see the closure of universities and schools,” Gonzalez added.
What’s great about it is, the IDEA survived, even after 30 years. My big fear is once it’s gone we never get it back, because there will be too many interested parties, lobbyists, etc.
I have this horrible image of my daughter begging the US Senate for a “private option” in public ed, and failing, like it failed in health insurance reform. Once a public system is gone, it must be tough to get it back.
That’s why we end the Bill Gates experiment now!
Thank you for sharing with us. Rough times!
This is the Center for Education Reform declaring victory for privatized voucher systems, and citing Chile.
In 2007!
Maybe a tad premature, given that there were massive protests in 2008 🙂
http://www.edreform.com/edspresso-shots/a-voucher-victory-andrew-coulson/
Totally agree in that the biggest problem is a cultural one, not only because the well off kids are sent to nicer schools thinking that they will get better education, I believe that the teachers themselves are not ready for a big change nor want one, most of them just want to retire as soon as they can. Most of them are not prepared to the challenges that awaits chilean education, most of them became teacher because that was the only thing they could study, because in Chile you can only study whatever grade you get on your PSU (national standard test to get into a university (most private universities is not a requirement, at least not the grade)) so high grades gets you into architecure, medicine, and engineering, the lowest ones…. yes you guessed it, teaching (there are exceptions of course)
Sadly I´ve seen more vocational teachers quit than those who are just in to earn a living. Why? pay is low, hours in the school are classroom hours, sometimes you get a couple of hours for planning (that is if you are not called to sub for a teacher who didnt show up) so you have to grade and plan your classes at home nights and weekends, so no social or family life, and on top of that you have to follow a horrendous curriculum on top of preparing the kids for the standarized testing.
I feel the first step is get a new generation of teachers, improve their pay and a more sensible curriculum, made by teachers and not experts who never been in a classroom.
Good article- effects of privatizing public education
There are those who embrace privatization because they have skin in the game–they expect to make money by that means. And then there are those who do so because they have a theory.
The theory is really quite simple, and it takes the form of a story: Our schools are failing. However, if you allow private alternatives to flourish, then those alternative schools will have to compete with one another for students and dollars, which will spur competition and innovation, which will result will be better schools, and our schools won’t be failing anymore.
David Coleman famously called upon us to deemphasize instruction in narrative in favor of instruction on informative texts. But here is a news flash for Lord Coleman: Narrative is a primary mode by which our species, Homo ignorans, makes sense of the world. And so it is very, very important that
a. we recognize when a narrative is being promulgated,
b. we know what that narrative is, and
c. we have the tools to subject it to critique
The narrative that is driving privatization sounds sensible on the face of it. Well, plenty, and we have a number of existence proofs, Chile being one of them, to show us the ways in which the simple narrative (one might even say simple-minded) being promulgated to support privatization of our schools can be wrong.
Let’s start with the “Our schools are failing part.” This is Ed Deform Falsehood Numero Uno. The falsehood is repeated in every major Ed Deform address–by our Secretary of the Department of Privatization of Education (formerly, the USDE) Arne “Dunkin” Duncan; by Michelle Rhee; by just about every white paper from the Thomas B. Fordham doublethink thank, by Bill Gates and by his foundation, and by many others of the Rheeformish bent.
But our schools are not failing. By the deformers’ own preferred measure–scores on international comparative tests–our schools and kids are resounding successes, if you correct the weighting of the scores to take into account the socioeconomic level of the kids taking the tests. Our schools are among the finest in the world.
But we have a problem with performance by kids who live in extreme poverty.
And the way to improve that is not to hit those kids with the stick of more testing, and it’s certainly not to turn their schooling over to privateers.
What Chile shows is that the privatizers’ model leads to MORE SOCIAL INEQUITY, which is THE ACTUAL PROBLEM (not underperformance of our teachers and schools) THAT WE FACE.
I shall let others fill in the other problems, but that seems to me to be the BIG ONE with the deformers’ story. It has a false premise, and it recommends a solution that will make the real problem worse.
Until recent years, the United States public school system has been, arguably, the greatest force for social and economic mobility that the world has ever seen.
But the leader of that system has spent his entire tenure in office trying to dismantle it.
I think that that is criminal.
Seriously. I think that it is a criminal breach of the public trust placed upon him–to be the steward of a public education system.
And note, as well, that his job description did not include blackmailing states to adopt a curriculum outline.
That’s illegal, too.
Robert:
Well said. The wrong subtext has been spun and accepted and is leading to the wrong confusions and actions, for sure. It’s like listening to “O Mio Babino” and thinking she’s begging her father to get her out if a marriage, rather than her begging him to let her love as she chooses. Imagine how a story can change when a major aria is misinterpreted.
Poverty is what our aria is about. I saw 60 Minutes last night with the Robin Hood guy and he is one who believes poverty results from the schools. That’s the problem. Just like Kopp, it’s a which came first question.
Your “Lord” Coleman title cracks me up.
Who will begin to let folks know that Obama allowed the DOE to try things that are of questionable legality? Where is the organized effort to hold a President accountable that was common when Clinton was pres? Why did he disgust the right, but Race to the Top does not? Is it masked by health care reform? Are folks not paying attention?
“Confusions” meant to read “conclusions;” albeit confusion is some of what we have for sure
Your musical references crack ME up! What a delight!
In a better world, there would be checks and balances provided by other powerful institutions–the organizations representing parents (PTOs and PTAs) and the organizations representing teachers (the unions). Unfortunately, these important checks have themselves RECEIVED A LOT OF CHECKS from the Ed Deform folks, and so we have this imbalance, this one-sided, heedless, mad rush. I keep thinking that in a better world, the unions would be a very, very strong voice against a) the centralization of standards and the stealing of teacher curricular and pedagogical authority that that entails; b) the abusive and invalid tests; c) the VAM sham; d) the plan, in the background of much of this, to replace teachers with software; and e) privatization in all its forms.
ALAS, where are they? Well, they are supping with the plutocrats. And that’s really, really bad for kids and parents and teachers and, in the not-too-long run, a disaster for democracy and for the American dream.
And I feel a lot of grief about that, Joanna. When I think of all that has been lost, is being lost, will be lost. . . for want of strong representation and resistance.
What a lucid and compelling response you have written, Bob Shephard! May I have your permission to print and share your analysis, above?
Reblogged this on Scarlet Rialto.
Thank you to Mario for giving us information and helping us to understand the situation in Chile! I hope each day builds the courage, strength, learning, and clarity to unite more and more people to reach the goals of change.
Well explains why privatization scheme, over-deregulation, corporatization of schools erodes the ethics and integrity of national education system, especially when it is spearheaded by a corrupted, autocratic government regime.
Well we want to be competitive with other countries. And this is education in some of them.
How like the US – to covet the worse components of other countries, adapt them, and make them fit the capitalist model without regard to how these new policies effect their citizens (only focusing on the profit margin).
I had no idea that the G.E.R.M. had infected Chile’s educational system to this degree. I am grateful to Mario for telling the story of Chile’s neoliberal education reforms, a cautionary tale for all of us. I wish him strength as he works to restore a more democratic and equitable system for all of Chile’s children, families, and communities.
P.S. G.E.R.M. stands for the Global Education Reform Movement. I am “officially” a member of SFPADS (Society for the Prevention of Acronyms in Daily Speech.)