This article offers new empirical evidence regarding the limits of the premises of educational privatisation policies. Educational markets rely on the assumption that private participation has the potential to boost school diversification and open new educational opportunities for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Using a fresh empirical…

School choice is a controversial issue in the public discussion of education. In Chile, the new School Admission System (SAE) was recently implemented to gradually reverse the country's high educational segregation. However, this system is facing strong opposition. Voucher and free choice promoters have opposed SAE because they claim it violates…

Given the lack of studies regarding migrant parents' views towards the education system of their host countries in an era of global movement, this article focuses on the strategies deployed by Latin American migrant parents towards their children's schooling in the Chilean educational field. To understand these strategies in the context of…

This study offers a comparative examination of desegregation policy reforms in Belgium, Chile, and the Netherlands, addressing equity reforms to universal school choice systems. Through an analysis of the reform trajectories, we explore the evolution of policies, the causal mechanisms of change, efforts to institutionalize policies, and the…

In the context of the increased interest in social justice within education policy debates, this article addresses the new justice-oriented school admission system implemented in Chile. Considering the critical role of parents in education policy, we explore families' negotiations about the new school admission system, focusing on the moral…

In highly marketised higher education systems, massification has afforded greater access, particularly for first-in-generation students. Generally, this expansion has been fuelled by neoliberal ideologies that valorise the notion of choice and promise of social mobility. In this study, using interviews with 25 first-generation students, the issue…

In 2019, the right-wing Government of Chile was expected to implement a substantial reform regarding student assignment to schools that had been passed by the previous administration (the School Inclusion Law). While implementing this policy, in 2019, the former minister of education directed a populist campaign aiming to change policy directions…

In 2016, the Chilean Ministry of Education implemented the new School Admission System (SAS) designed with the goal of equalizing access to schools for the most disadvantaged families and reduce educational segregation. Yet it is not clear if the SAS is sensitive to socio-cultural minorities and their particular conditions. Hence, in this article…

This article presents the findings of research focused on schools' responses to competitive environments. Using the Chilean education market as a case study, the article analyzes not only the responses developed by schools in different domains in the face of competitive incentives but also their diversity, as well as motivations, rationalities,…

A common criticisms of school choice programs is that, instead of improving student achievement, they would increase school segregation. Parents may use different criteria to choose a school, such as proximity, school quality, or the school's ethnic/racial composition. As a result, the system would be segregated based on the parent's preferences.…

This paper illustrates the influence of a new national assignment system (NSAS) on Chilean middle-class advantage. This system was designed to increase educational equity by changing the previous school admission "rules" that were prejudicial against low-income students. We use Bourdieu's conceptual tools, drawing on concepts of capitals…

Chile is known for universal school choice policies and a high level of economic segregation. In part, segregation has been linked to selective school admission policies. Chile implemented a centralized school admission system (New School Admission System), where PK-12 schools must accept any applicant, and lottery assignment is used for…

This study analyzes the effect of spatial competition on public schools' efficiency in Chile, an extreme case of market-oriented reforms in the educational sector. To address this issue, we use a measure of competition that captures three major characteristics of market competition in a spatial context: the number of competitors, based on distance…

Latin families moving to a different Latin American country are placed in a dominated position by what is called 'coloniality'. In this sense, we argue that the processes of classification (in terms of social class), racialisation and genderisation that migrant Latin families experience when choosing schools for their children in the Chilean…

The quantitative literature on parental reasons of school choice for their elementary school children was systematically reviewed using all major databases. The quality of the studies was assessed through a modified version of the Newcastle-Ottawa scale. Among 3982 references reviewed, 26 studies were included from 14 countries. Although large…