Lessons from Chile: School Choice Gets Results

Lindsey Burke / July 01, 2011

Forty-five kindergarten children sit attentively in a cold classroom in a poor school on the outskirts of Santiago, Chile. Bundled in blue and white uniforms, they patiently wait on their teacher’s next instruction, a child occasionally moving across the small room to access materials in his personal cubby-hole.

In a neighborhood plagued with drugs and violence, the private voucher school is a sanctuary for the low-income children who reside there. For many, their home life is one full of neglect: out-of-work parents (if any), unsanitary living conditions, and a familiarity with the sounds of local drug dealers that should be reserved for the music of an ice cream delivery truck. (more…)