Chile is a narrow South American country on the South Pacific Ocean, stretching from Peru and Bolivia in the north and sharing a border of over 4,000 miles with Argentina, ending at the intersection with the South Atlantic Ocean. Around 90% of its population of 18.7 million is located in the middle third of the country and 88% of the population is urban. 

Chile’s Education System

The education system in Chile comprises four levels, from early childhood/preschool to primary, lower and upper secondary/high school and postsecondary. Kindergarten through 12th grade is compulsory, and there is “almost universal” coverage for grades 1-4. The approximately 12,000 educational institutions are classified as:

• public, funded by state, managed by municipalities (766,000 children)
• private subsidized, funded by state, managed privately (1,071,000)
• private paid, financed by families, managed privately (200,500)

This somewhat lopsided distribution of students (almost two-thirds in privately managed schools) is probably why Chile is considered to have one of the most privatized education systems in the world.   

Equity and Access

The relationship between equity and access in education and public vs. private management and national vs. local governance is complex.

The extent of private education in Chile is seen as one result of the “transformative shift” from federal government control of public schools to local municipalities that took place in the 1980s under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. A voucher system for parents led to private sector growth. Decentralization led to significant differences in educational outcomes, depending on where the student lived. Publicly funded but privately run schools were seen as superior by better-off families, with poorer students self-segregating into public schools, leading to concerns about equity and access. 

In 2006, the Penguin Revolution—street protests of Chilean high school students—highlighted the socioeconomic segregation of Chilean schools. In 2008, the Chilean government passed the Preferential School Subsidy Law (SEP) to “boost student achievement and reduce income-based gaps.” Under SEP, priority students, or students from families in the bottom 40% of the income distribution, which was later increased to the bottom 50%, did not have to pay fees and private schools could not deny them access due to academic grounds. The effect was that poor families had a wider scope of school choices. Moreover, schools received increased funding to participate in SEP.

The imbalance between public and private education, and the disparities that accompanied it, were also addressed by Chile’s Inclusion Law, 2015, which was intended to “significantly increase” government regulation and to provide major redistributive benefits. The Inclusion Law was followed in 2017 by legislation creating a National Public Education System—Servicios Locales de Educación Pública (SLEP)—that would “demunicipalize” education. Thus, 70 Local Public Education Services, or SLEPs, were established in 345 municipalities, which were pooled into regional clusters, with the objective of reducing system fragmentation and enhancing curriculum coherence. Full implementation is expected to be complete by 2027. SLEP is a hybrid model, or “middle ground” in education governance, combining national oversight with local autonomy. It now remains to be seen how effective the SLEPs will have been in rebalancing equity and access.

Assessment and Improvement

One measure of effectiveness is student performance. IEA TIMSS, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement’s Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, conducts assessments of fourth- and eighth-grade students’ math and science achievements every four years. Chile has participated in TIMSS since 1999, with policymakers using results to evaluate Chilean policy and improve the national curriculum. 

Two of several special initiatives in science and math education undertaken by Chile’s Ministry of Education are:

• Schools Up Plan: 400 schools since 2019 that have been designated as “insufficient by Simce (the standardized academic tests) receive support from the Ministry of Education that includes leveling of learning strategies (incorporating provision of language and mathematics educational resources, pedagogical support and demonstration classes), preventing school absenteeism, and improving management.
• Ministry of Education collaborating with several universities to offer special vacancies to encourage women to pursue careers in math, science and technology (STEM careers) that started with the 2024 admission process, enable women to access STEM careers with fewer requirements.

Challenges Remain

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development reported that Chile has inadequate public funding for elementary school, falling 12% from 2015 to 2021, which is the reverse of other OECD countries; its per pupil expenditures, from primary to tertiary levels, are nearly half of those of other OECD countries. They also report excessive workload on teachers because of a higher student-teacher ratio than in other countries. 

The country’s education expenditure is estimated at 5% of GDP and 14.9% of the national budget. This ranks Chile 63:201 globally, the range being from 16.4% of GDP down to 0.3%, although it ranks 4th among the 12 South American countries. As a high-income country, Chile might well be able to address these challenges with additional funding for education.

– Brittany Granquist
Photo: Flickr