Socio-economic Segregation with (without) Competitive Education Policies. A Comparative Analysis of Argentina and Chile

Abstract

Within the differentiated forms of education provision, this paper intends to inquire into the causality governing the relation between the use of vouchers in education and an increased enrolment segmentation or student sorting. It does so through a comparative analysis of the quasi-market reform in Chile and the quasi-monopoly system in place in Argentina. Although from a national perspective these two countries have faced very different decentralisation reforms, they have presently arrived at similar states of their education system in terms of their enrolments' socio-economic segregation. The paper shows that vouchers are not an independent variable but an intervening one within the determinants of socio-economic segmentation. The evidence from Chile and Argentina shows that enrolment segmentation is not a consequence of the introduction of vouchers, and the causal relationship between these two variables is not a clear one. That is, the family school choice decisions brought about by the introduction of systems such as vouchers appear endogenous to a series of factors that determine such choice; factors that that are evidently important in the determination of socio-economic enrolment segmentations in non-voucher systems. This article questions the validity of the highly predominant empirical analyses which take student socio-economic characteristics and school choice decisions as independent determinant variables of student results, and intends initiating further thinking of what really lies behind the inequities in education in developing countries.