Chile's School Voucher System: Enabling Choice or Perpetuating Social Inequality?

On Tuesday, after a contentious process, Betsy DeVos was confirmed as the country’s next Secretary of Education. Ms. DeVos is a billionaire with a history of using her private wealth to advance an education agenda framed around school choice, including school vouchers that use public funds to provide families with a scholarship or stipend to attend the private school of their choice. With her confirmation finally settled, Americans are likely to hear much more about school vouchers. But do they work? While many states in the U.S. have implemented school voucher systems (to mixed results), these programs have also been tested abroad in Sweden, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Colombia. Chile implemented a universal school voucher program 1981, as part of a series of free-market economic reforms ushered in by Dictator Augusto Pinochet, who rose to power in a 1973 coup d'état of the socialist government led by the democratically elected Salvador Allende. As Varun Gauri writes in his 1998

On Tuesday, after a contentious process, Betsy DeVos was confirmed as the country’s next Secretary of Education. Ms. DeVos is a billionaire with a history of using her private wealth to advance an education agenda framed around school choice, including school vouchers that use public funds to provide families with a scholarship or stipend to attend the private school of their choice. With her confirmation finally settled, Americans are likely to hear much more about school vouchers. But do they work? While many states in the U.S. have implemented school voucher systems (to mixed results), thes