Chang-Tai Hsieh and Miguel Urquiola, National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
January 2002
Here is another (#43) in the growing series of "occasional papers" from the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Written by Chang-Tai Hsieh of Princeton and Miguel Urquiola of Cornell, this one analyzes what the authors call Chile's "school voucher program" dating back to 1981. They contend that Chile's experience lends itself to the analysis of the effects of vouchers because the country's policy has remained fairly stable, the number of children who shifted from public to private schools (at least in urban areas) was sizable, and there are good data regarding student achievement. The authors conclude that vouchers in Chile produced no overall improvement in that country's overall educational achievement due to what they call "sorting": the reallocation of stronger and relatively wealthier students from public to private schools. The technical analysis in this paper is intricate and worthy of close inspection by more sophisticated methodologists than I. It would also be valuable to obtain some Chilean perspectives on what happened there and how best to analyze it. It seems fairly clear, though, that the data from Chile warrant attention by school choice researchers, even as one wonders how much the cultural, sociological and political singularities of a country shape its individual and institutional behaviors in ways that would not translate to another country even under seemingly similar policy circumstances. To view the paper, surf to http://www.ncspe.org or order a hard copy at (212) 678-3259 or [email protected].
