The Consequences of Educational Voucher Reform in Chile

Abstract

work is licensed under a Creative Commons IGO 3.0 AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC-IGO BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo/ legalcode) and may be reproduced with attribution to the IDB and for any non-commercial purpose, as provided below. No derivative work is allowed.Any dispute related to the use of the works of the IDB that cannot be settled amicably shall be submitted to arbitration pursuant to the UNCITRAL rules. The use of the IDB's name for any purpose other than for attribution, and the use of IDB's logo shall be subject to a separate written license agreement between the IDB and the user and is not authorized as part of this CC-IGO license.Following a peer review process, and with previous written consent by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), a revised version of this work may also be reproduced in any academic journal, including those indexed by the American Economic Association's EconLit, provided that the IDB is credited and that the author(s) receive no income from the publication. Therefore, the restriction to receive income from such publication shall only extend to the publication's author(s). With regard to such restriction, in case of any inconsistency between the Creative Commons IGO 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license and these statements, the latter shall prevail.Note that link provided above includes additional terms and conditions of the license. In an effort to boost student achievement and reduce income-based gaps, the Chilean government passed the Preferential School Subsidy Law (SEP) in 2008, which altered the nation's 27-year-old universal school-voucher system dramatically. Implementation of SEP increased the value of the school voucher by 50 percent for "priority students", primarily those whose family incomes fell within the bottom 40 percent of the national distribution. To be eligible to accept the higher-valued vouchers from these students, schools were required to waive fees for Priority students and to participate in an accountability system. We addressed these RQs by fitting a sequence of multi-level interrupted time-series regression models, supplemented by other descriptive analyses. We found that:1. On average, student test scores increased markedly and income-based gaps in those scores declined by one-third in the five years after the passage of SEP.2. The combination of increased support of schools and accountability was the critical mechanism through which the implementation of SEP increased student scores, especially in schools serving high concentrations of low-income students. Migration of lowincome students from public schools to private voucher schools played a small role.We conclude by responding to a recent paper by Feigenberg, Rivkin, and Yan (2017) that argues that the gains from SEP are illusory. *The authors would like to acknowledge the helpful comments on earlier drafts provided

Illusory Gains from Chile's Targeted School Voucher Experiment

“…Navarro-Palau (2015) also finds a significant though more modest effect of SEP on the achievement gap, and concludes based on a regression discontinuity design analysis that the positive program impact was driven by within-public school improvements. The findings in Murnane et al (2016) also point to the combination of increased school funding and greater accountability as the primary mechanism through which SEP raised achievement.…”

Relación inconsistente entre puntajes del Sistema de Medición de Calidad de la Educación y el promedio de notas en estudiantes de octavo básico en Chile

“…A nivel internacional se ha estudiado bastante el fenómeno de la educación chilena y algunas propuestas concretas de mejora van en primer lugar por eliminar el sistema de vouchers, salvo que se mejoren drásticamente los mecanismos de asignación, de manera que realmente apoyen y no cierren a los colegios más necesitados o insuficientes, pues hay evidencia concreta en el propio país, de que con incentivos bien aplicados estos colegios mejoran significativamente sus aprendizajes (Murnane, Waldman, Willett, Bos y Vegas, 2017). Se postula, además, que la retroalimentación desde las instancias administrativas de la prueba debiese centrarse más en temas pedagógicos, que en sugerencias de mercadotecnia y finalmente, que los aprendizajes deben ser recíprocos, pues hasta el momento pareciera que la institucionalidad aprende menos que el estudiantado (Vegas, 2018).…”

“…Parece conveniente entonces, que las instancias institucionales responsables del SIMCE hagan un análisis técnico pedagógico, con prescindencia ideológica como base para la obtención de logros de calidad, de la validez de la prueba y mientras ello no suceda, al menos abstenerse de modificar anualmente la prueba, basándose como hasta ahora, solamente en la variación de los puntajes respecto a la aplicación previa de la prueba. Más importante aún, por las repercusiones sociales de la medida, las autoridades responsables del SIMCE debieran abstenerse de ejercer la potestad de cerrar colegios insuficientes de acuerdo con los puntajes de la prueba, hasta que se demuestre objetivamente, con datos, dicha insuficiencia, que por lo demás está demostrado, con datos, que esta se subsana con apoyo presupuestario y pedagógico (Murnane, et al 2017)…”

The Effects of Accountability on the Allocation of School Resources: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Chile

“…In the case of Chile, specifically, most econometric research on the SEP law has focused on its effects on student outcomes. Some studies show that the SEP subsidy has improved student performance (Nielson, 2013;Navarro-Palau, 2017;Bos et al, 2017), while others find that it did not (Aguirre, 2017;Feigenberg et al, 2017). Most of these studies, however, analyze the SEP law's general effects, regardless of the specific mechanism that may drive them.…”