School admission in Chile, new rules of the game, and the devaluation of Middle-class capitals

Ethics in neoliberalism? Parental responsibility and education policy in Chile and Australia

“…Carrasco, Hernández et al (2021) also show that there is a concern, particularly among middle-class parents, regarding the outcome of the SAS school allocation process. Faced with the eventuality of being assigned a school not of their preference, some families see SAS as a threat to their responsibility for their children’s future educational opportunities; to ensuring a socio-educational environment inappropriate for their culture and abilities.…”

“…This modality expects to formally equalise the access possibilities to the entire school offering, demanding a new ethical standard of parents in their school choice and admission processes, a standard based on educational equality rather than in competitivity or pure individual wellbeing. Carrasco, Hernández et al (2021) also show that there is a concern, particularly among middle-class parents, regarding the outcome of the SAS school allocation process. Faced with the eventuality of being assigned a school not of their preference, some families see SAS as a threat to their responsibility for their children's future educational opportunities; to ensuring a socio-educational environment inappropriate for their culture and abilities.…”

“…In the Chilean case, perhaps more so than the Australian case, the different forms of responsibility are experienced (by some in the middle class) as a profound tension. The demands for an ethical commitment of shared responsibility constitute a drastic change in the ‘rules of the game’ in the schooling field for parents (Carrasco et al, 2021), historically pushed to take care of their individual-familiar wellbeing. SAS adds a crucial element to the school choice and admission policy: as long as it impedes the previous selective practices by schools’ admission processes, the system establishes school allocation on pre-set ‘equity-based’ and impartial formulas rather than individual parent’s cultural, social and economic capitals.…”

Self-segregation strategies through school choice in Chile: A middle-class domain?

“…In other words, a marketized configuration of the educational provision was not crucially transformed by the Inclusion Law. Recent evidence studying family responses to the Inclusion Law, in particular to the new admission system regulating school choice, has counter-intuitively found a mixed picture in terms of support for a law inspired by anti-discrimination and anti-segregation purposes: various fractions of the middle classes and low-middle classes worry that the reforms are making them lose control over their children's educational future and the right to advance their own resources to educate them (Carrasco et al, 2021a(Carrasco et al, , 2021bHernández and Carrasco, 2020). In part, such family responses to the Inclusion Law illustrate the cultural complexity of reforming well-established social practices.…”

Chile’s enduring educational segregation: A trend unchanged by different cycles of reform

“…Not only do institutional features matter for the private provision framework, but also for desegregation policies. Indeed, some of the recent initiatives in this regard have actually failed to reduce segregation when relying on school choice dynamics (Bonal & Bellei, 2020), or have faced strong opposition from middle‐class parents who perceive these changes as a threat to their chances of social mobility (Hernandez & Carrasco, 2020; Carrasco et al ., 2021).…”