The opponents of Donald Trump’s pick to be secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, are animated in large part by anger at her support for school voucher programs. And in their efforts to undermine vouchers, they’ve gone far afield—to Chile, to be exact, where an expansive school choice system was begun in 1980. To discredit DeVos, her opponents have set out to discredit Chile’s voucher program, a parent-driven, choice-based, quality-improving education reform that has been a decades-long success.
The week of DeVos’s confirmation hearing, the Washington Post published an article by associate political science professors Jennifer Pribble and Jennifer L. Erkulwater labeling the Chilean voucher system a “cautionary tale.”
How so? Before the voucher system was put in place, Chile tended toward the bottom of educational achievement rankings in Latin America; now it is at the top, as consistently shown by international tests such as the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment). The reason for the change has not been spending: Argentina and Uruguay no longer lead the regional rankings, but still generally outspend Chile on education.
Then there are the criticisms that are in fact endorsements of the system: The Washington Post article presents as problematic the fact that “since vouchers were introduced, public school enrollment has continued to decline.” You bet. Given a choice and a voucher, people left the public system and stayed away.
The article offers a puzzling indictment of school choice in Chile, that “the voucher system has not improved education opportunities for many poor or rural children.” I say “puzzling” because the article itself describes the very poor and rural children as those with no access to private options. If the problem is that the rural poor do not have enough choices, is the solution to do away with choices altogether or to find ways to provide to the poor the full extent of choice enjoyed by other students?
Chile recognized that some kids—primarily the very poor and rural—were being “left behind.” But the way to fix that problem was not to get rid of vouchers, but to expand the system. That expansion, now the better part of a decade old, has had amazing results that Pribble and Erkulwater somehow forgot to mention.
The revision to the voucher system was led by socialist Michelle Bachelet, who, when Chile’s “experiment” with school choice began in 1980, was living in exile in East Germany. To her credit, 30 years later as president, she led the most significant reform towards expanding a system based on parental choice.
With massive bipartisan support, a “preferential” school voucher was created—that is, one worth more, sometimes almost twice the value of regular vouchers—to provide more options for very poor and rural families. The results have been significant.
Economist Christopher Neilson noted in a 2013 working paper that “this reform raised the test scores of poor children significantly and closed the gap between these students and the rest of the population by one third.” Neilson said the “policy changed the nature of competition among schools” and that “the observed policy effect is due mostly to the increase in the quality of schools in poor neighborhoods and not to a resorting of students to better schools or the entry of new higher-quality schools. The introduction of targeted vouchers is shown to have effectively raised competition in poor neighborhoods, pushing schools to improve their academic quality.”
The performance gap between the country as a whole and the poorest 40 percent was cut by one-third in just five years.
Back when the base voucher wasn’t big enough to liberate the rural poor from the monopolistic power of public schools, those schools could still spend their budget on things other than “quality” and the parents were trapped. Once the bigger preferential vouchers were introduced, those parents’s options dramatically expanded and public schools reacted predictably, increasing their quality to keep them from leaving. Two thirds of the improvement in the education of Chile’s poor can be attributed to voucher-encouraged improvements in the quality of public schools in poor neighborhoods. A third of those improved outcomes can be credited to parents sending their kids to private schools.
There are many other lessons to be learned from the Chilean experience. One is that vouchers are not a cure-all. The virtuous effects of vouchers, choice, and competition in Chile have been hampered and limited over the years by increased government control over all aspects of education. With very limited autonomy, with schools singing mostly government-dictated content in government-regulated style, there’s little space for real competition, innovation, and progress. Do not, for a moment, believe that vouchers are enough to rescue education from public strangulation.
Pribble and Erkulwater conclude their article in the Post with the predictable claim that the voucher system “has increased socioeconomic inequalities” in Chile. Wrong again. Using the Gini index of inequality, Claudio Sapelli, professor of economics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, has shown that the level of inequality among older generations of Chileans is comparable to that of Mozambique. But among Chileans born in 1980 (the year the voucher system was introduced), the Gini index is comparable to that of France—and more equal than the United States.
Care to guess what the biggest driver of that change was?
School choice in Chile, far from being a cautionary tale, has been a force for improved educational achievement and greater social equality.
Darío Paya is the former Chilean ambassador to the Organization of American States.
