From Movements.org:
...students exercised their constitutional right to protest. Chile's Constitution in Article 19, No. 13, guarantees the “right to peaceful assembly without prior permission and without arms.”
A contradictory regulation, issued in 1983 during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, allows the dissolution of demonstrations that do not have the appropriate permission from authorities
When Augusto Pinochet was assisted to dictatorship by the USA in 1973, he took it as his task to undo the changes made my the popularly elected communist Allende. Working with Milton Friedman, Pinochet developed a radical economic plan to reshape the country.
From the Guardian:
The coup was plotted by two factions: the generals and a group of economists trained at the University of Chicago and funded by the CIA. Their ideas had already been comprehensively rejected by the electorate, but now the electorate was irrelevant: Pinochet used the crisis he had created to imprison, torture or kill anyone who dissented. The Chicago School policies – privatisation, deregulation, massive tax and spending cuts – were catastrophic. Inflation rose to 375% in 1974; the highest rate on earth. Even so, Friedman insisted that the programme was not going far or fast enough. On a visit to Chile in 1975 he persuaded Pinochet to hit much harder. The result was a massive increase in unemployment and the near-eradication of the middle class. But the very rich became much richer, and the corporations, scarcely taxed, deregulated and fattened on privatised assets, became much more powerful.If you've had the misfortune of hearing an American politician or pundit any time in the last decade, this should all sound eerily familiar. And so should this: In 1980, a school voucher program was implemented in Chile, public teacher's unions were ended, public and private schools were pitted in market competition against each other.
On paper, of course, even the private schools were banned from being 'for profit' institutions. That would just be wrong and lead to all kinds of horrible consequences.
From The Economist:
What makes this harder to stomach is that many educational establishments are profit-making businesses. That is true of a third of secondary schools and of the technical and vocational colleges attended by two-thirds of students in higher education. Three-quarters of universities are private: in 1981 they were barred from making profits, but many have got around this restriction by setting themselves up as property companies that lease their premises to the universities.The policy was intended to accomplish three things: reduced cost, increased performance, and a shift of students from public to private schooling. Things looked pretty good on the cost front for twenty years or so. After an initial spike in costs to cover breaking so many union contracts, the per pupil costs declined slowly but consistently. Student performance was a different story, dropping quite a bit faster than the costs (but rebounding later). The shift in demographics was utterly predictable, moving wealthier families toward private schools, with a majority of impoverished families remaining in the private schools and a gradient in between.
Over a couple decades, the system mostly stabilized and the inequalities of cost grew. The government shaved a little off the value of the vouchers each year, inching toward a free-market in education. Strangely, the inequalities of outcome did not grow as quickly. From a market perspective, the private schools didn't actually compete, since the wealthy families were already using their services and the poor families could never afford them.
From a Democracy Now interview:
PATRICIO NAVIA: Well, about half of the students in Chile in elementary and secondary education attend voucher schools. These are schools where the government gives a voucher to private operators for every child that goes to those schools. However, there is also a copayment, which means that different parents send kids to different schools according to how much money they make. And that has simply reproduced the very high inequalities that exist in Chile.Things reached a tipping point in the 2000s. Outcome inequalities grew rapidly, costs spiked across the board, and, of course, the global recession that kicked off in 2008 increased the gaps and wiped out the job market. Students of middle school through college, unable afford education, let alone improvements, and with no prospects for work afterword, took to the streets.
From The Real News Network:
The current government has offered concessions, lower interest rates, one time 'stimulus' style budget increases for education, but the protesters have refused. Some have gone as far as to call for a return to fully funded public education for all, similar to what existed under the Allende government, or what currently exists in France.
So, after a thirty year run, can we say that a free market in education worked for Chile? Economists seem to say it's a mixed result. Costs declined slightly and the standardized test scores were mostly flat, but highly variable. Because the schools targeted different economic demographics, there was not enough competition, and thus no real increase in efficiency. From a social science point of view, the whole thing looks bad. The economic stratification will have generational effects. School operators with ties to the government, and sometimes direct connections to the president, were allowed to bypass the law and create for-profit schools. The system itself has contributed to, if not caused, four years of social unrest.
It seems to me is that Chile is a good model of what would happen in the USA if goes much further down the free market road.
Sources:DemocracyNow.org - failed education reform in chile...
The Real News Network - Student Movement Rocks Chile
The Economist - The fraught politics of the classroom
Movements.org - Chile police and students clash...
The Guardian - Conservative financial crisis opportunity
