Counter-reforming through reactionary populism: a failing attempt to restrain a major school admission reform in Chile

ABSTRACT

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 coined the Just Admission Project (JAP). Such policy debates have critical implications regarding the functioning of school choice in Chile. This paper analyzes the JAP as a case study of reactionary neoliberal populism. Framed by such conceptualization of populism, this paper develops a statistical analysis to model the potential influence of the JAP bill on school choice opportunities while comparing with the recently implemented new assignment system from the Inclusion Law (NSAS). We show the results of simulations representing how students would have been assigned to schools for the 2019 school year had the admission procedure been the JAP instead of the NSAS.

KEYWORDS:

• School choice
• school admission in Chile
• populism in education
• counter-reforming

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Against busing, a plan in the US for promoting school desegregation, by which ethnic minority students are transported to largely White schools and White students are brought to largely minority schools.

2. Marcha CONFEPA, 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hnRXiyh1Fw https://www.emol.com/noticias/Nacional/2016/03/02/791004/Sostenedores-y-apoderados-lanzan-campana-contra-Ley-de-Inclusion-a-dias-de-su-inicio.html.

3. Carrasco and Gunter (2019) reported empirically the magnitude of subsidized private schools against Inclusion Law.

4. See in Apendix 1 an illustration of the evolution of legislation about admission processes in Chile.

5. The Appendix B shows the authors’ analysis regarding the institutional actors involved during the debate of the Inclusion Law project (end of 2014), and Just Admission project (2019). For this account, we studied all the sessions of the Education and Culture commission of the Chilean Senate in the Parliament that discussed these Law projects, which invited external institutions interested on the matter, to expose their perspectives and evidence regarding selecting students in the schools’ admission processes. This list of institutions serves as a representative set of actors actively involved in this discussion.

6. As it is stated in its Website, the survey was applied to a nationally representative sample of 4,291 adults (age 18 an older). See: https://www.educationnext.org/amid-pandemic-support-soars-online-learning-parent-poll-shows-2020-education-next-survey-public-opinion/.

7. In fact, as we will see, the Former Minister invoked the fuzzy notion of “middle-classes” as a homogenous group of families.

8. The Former Minister organized during 2018–2019 a tour through Chile to hear families who lost their right to choose (see section 4).

9. Indeed, the Former Minister accused experts and technocrats to keep their school choice privileges while taking away from middle-class families.

10. As put by Fraser (2017a), progressive neoliberalism mixes together “truncated ideals of emancipation and lethal forms of financialization”, identifying “‘progress’ with meritocracy instead of equality” and equating “’emancipation’ with the rise of a small elite of ‘talented’ women, minorities, and gays in the winner-takes-all corporate hierarchy instead of with the latter’s abolition” (p. 2). Thus, progressive neoliberalism is based on liberal-individualist understandings of “progress”, instead of on the “more expansive, anti-hierarchical, egalitarian, class-sensitive, anti-capitalist understandings of emancipation that had flourished in the 1960s and 1970s” (p. 2).

11. Principals or schools might also be the recipient of populist’s messages as part of “the people” and not only the families. This might be the case since the first author elsewhere published survey evidence about the negative assessment of principals from most fairly prestigious subsidized private schools about the elimination of selectivity previously allowed to schools included in the inclusion law (Carrasco & Gunter, 2019). But it is a mixed picture, in similar work, it is shown that principals from low-prestige schools are in general in support of the inclusion law, in particular the elimination of selection. However, this paper is focused exclusively on “families” since they are the key actors of populism (elite/people) when a policy of school choice is being analyzed. School choice as a policy strategy is about the role of families in decision-making when choosing schools. It is about the “demand side” of school markets, not about the “supply side”. Further research is needed regarding the role of principals/schools as recipient of populist’s messages.

12. Interestingly, the new admission system (NSAS) produced some families’ resistance to the NSAS in particular some middle-class fractions as recent evidence has shown (see Carrasco & Honey, 2019). Such recent empirical work on the NSAS is illustrating that not “families” as a whole, only some fractions of middle classes are in favor of the previous system. Our research shows that low-social class and some fractions of middle-classes express a strong support of the NSAS. Indeed, they see that the NSAS a gave power of choice, eliminated discriminatory practices of selection, and reinforced a sense of justice in Chilean education.

13. Accordingly, the Inclusion Law was rise discoursebly by the Former Minister as a threat to families not only to their freedom to choose schools, but also to the social mobility opportunities of their sons.

14. https://www.fjguzman.cl/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/IP_N235.pdf.

15. Quote from Marcela the Former Minister, Radio U. de Chile. In: https://radio.uchile.cl/2019/04/28/ministra-cubillos-asegura-que-si-la-camara-rechaza-admision-justa-lo-repondran-el-proximo-ano/.

16. Quote from Marcela the Former Minister, Radio Duna. In: https://www.duna.cl/programa/terapia-chilensis/2019/03/25/marcela-cubillos-por-admision-justa-si-no-se-habla-de-merito-le-hacemos-dano-al-sistema-educacional/.

17. In: https://www.cnnchile.com/pais/ministra-cubillos-inicio-encuentros-con-apoderados-para-discutir-desde-desercion-escolar-hasta-el-sistema-de-admision_20190727/.

18. In: https://www.cooperativa.cl/noticias/pais/educacion/proyectos/admision-justa-oposicion-llevara-gira-de-cubillos-a-la-contraloria/2019-03-10/111521.html.

19. In: October 18th, of 2019, and during the following weeks, Chile lived a strong social revolt against social injustices.

20. https://www.elmostrador.cl/noticias/pais/2019/04/15/el-estilo-alarmista-de-marcela-cubillos-sigue-causando-polemica-mineduc-lanza-folleto-que-promociona-admision-justa-y-critica-el-sae-de-bachelet/.

21. In http://www.diarioeldia.cl/pais/gobierno-firma-proyecto-que-perfecciona-sistema-admision-escolar.

22. In https://www.cooperativa.cl/noticias/pais/educacion/admision-escolar-cubillos-apunta-a-problema-de-diseno-que-no-se/2019-07-20/230657.html.

23. In https://www.senado.cl/tras-11-sesiones-de-analisis-comision-de-educacion-aprueba-en-general/senado/2019-08-26/122429.html.

24. Database available in: http://datos.mineduc.cl/dashboards/20514/descarga-bases-de-datos-de-los-proceso-de-admision-escolar-anos-2016-y-2017/.

25. Database available in: http://informacionestadistica.agenciaeducacion.cl/#/bases.

26. Database available in: http://datos.mineduc.cl/dashboards/20015/descarga-bases-de-datos-directorio-de-establecimientos-educacionales/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Associative Research Programme - ANID PIA CIE160007; Agencia nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID) [ANID PIA CIE160007].