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Skeptics of school choice are concerned that parents, especially low-income ones, will not choose schools based on sound academic reasoning. Many fear that, given choice, parents will sort themselves into different schools along class lines. How-ever, most surveys find that parents of all socioeconomic groups cite academic aspects as important when choosing a school. Moreover, almost no parents refer to the social composition of the student body. Many advocates of choice hold up these results as proof that choice will produce desirable outcomes. However, these results may not be reliable because they may simply be verbal responses to survey items rather than indicators of actual behavior. In this research, we report on the search behavior of parents in the Metropolitan Region of Santiago, Chile, examining how they construct their school choice sets and comparing this to what they say they are seeking in choosing schools. The data indicate that parental decisions are influenced by demographics. Based on this evidence, we argue that unfettered choice may reduce the pressure on schools to improve their performance and could potentially increase stratification. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management

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RESUMENEn este artículo se examina la hipótesis de que la política de elección escolar ha incrementado la segregación socioeconómica en Chile. Se utiliza una base de datos georreferenciada de estudiantes y escuelas del Gran Santiago, para comparar la segregación real con la que se produciría en un escenario hipotético en que los estudiantes asisten a la escuela más cercana a su lugar de residencia. Los resultados indican que la segregación escolar es mayor en el escenario real que en el contrafactual, lo que sugiere que la interacción entre las preferencias de las familias y las barreras de entrada establecidas por las escuelas (cobros obligatorios y procesos de admisión selectivos) tienden a incrementar la segregación escolar más allá del efecto de la segregación residencial subyacente en la ciudad.

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In this article, we examine the hypothesis that the policy of parental school choice in Chile has increased socioeconomic school segregation. We use a georeferenced database of students and schools in the Greater Metropolitan Area of Santiago to compare actual segregation with the segregation that would occur in the hypothetical case that students attended the school nearest to their place of residence. The results indicate that school segregation is higher in the actual scenario than in the counterfactual scenario, which suggests that the interaction between family preferences and school entry barriers (tuition and selective admission process) tend to increase school segregation beyond the city's underlying residential segregation.

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