Revolucion Penguina

Education has always been an important and controversial subject for Chile. In many respects Chile is viewed as an educational success compared to most other Latin American countries. According to UNESCO, Chile is one of the few countries in Latin America that has high completion rates, high primary and secondary enrollment rates and is the only country in the region that has achieved equity inprimary education completion. This is clear by observing figure 1 and figure 2. Yet in 2006 all Chilean students, either from public or private schools, launched what the Chilean media called: The Penguin Revolution. More than 800,000 people participated in the movement making it the biggest manifestation in Chile in the last three centuries. Students demanded quality and equity in education. Thisdemonstrates that although Chile has high rates of enrollment and completion, the country still lags behind in terms of quality and equity despite considerable increases in educational funding. This paper will explore the failure of the Chilean educational system and in particular the voucher plan that was implemented in 1982 and still used today. That way proving that Chile is not an educationalsuccess. Although there is no “silver bullet” for this problem, this paper will also attempt to find some potential solutions.
A labor force that is not well educated tends to be less productive than a labor force receiving a good education (Backman, 2008). Obviously this can have a negative effect on economic growth and thus it should be a priority for a country to offer good education to allits citizens. According to a study made by the World Bank, it is the quality rather than the quantity of education that has the largest impact on the economy (Hanushek and Wößmann, 2007). Compared to other Latin American countries, Chile is one of the leaders in terms of accessibility, enrollment and completion of schooling. Therefore in quantifiable measurements of education Chile is consideredto be in a good worldwide position. Nevertheless, Chile is only average in Latin America and has one of the lowest results worldwide in terms of quality of education. This is clear by observing figure 4 and figure 5. Figure 4 measures the results of the PISA test, coordinated by the OECD, combined with each country’s literacy rates and separated in quarters of family wealth. Chile performs worsethan most countries in every quarter. In fact the only country that this table measures that seems to be worst than Chile is Peru. In figure 5 one is able to see that Chile performs very poorly, considerably below the world average and most developing countries accounted for in the table, in the TIMSS test for eighth grade math and science. It is important to note that Chile actually performs poorlyin every international educational assessment test (UNESCO/PREAL 2005). The most surprising finding is figure 6. This measures the accumulated per-student spending with the results of the PISA reading comprehension test. The results show that although Chile spends more than other Latin American countries and Eastern European countries on education, Chile still performs worse than them thussuggesting that there might be some built-in inefficiencies with the educational policies implemented in the country.
For the last 20 years improving the quality of education has been a priority for the Chilean government. A voucher system, inspired by the thoughts of Milton Friedman who argued that the use of vouchers would increase the competition among schools and hence they would have to increasetheir productivity, was implemented in 1982 under the authoritarian government of Pinochet in search of an effective way of improving the quality of education. The government also implemented a decentralization policy in which the Ministry of Education transferred the management of all fiscal schools to 300 different municipalities (Backman, 2008). This resulted in the creation of three types...