Mechanisms Behind Public School Enrollment Trends in School Choice Systems: The Case of Chile

Market-based reforms in education have expanded worldwide, often raising questions about their impact on the strength and sustainability of the public education sector. In this paper, we explore how such “school choice” policies affected public school enrollment in Chile, a country where a nationwide school choice reform coincided with a decline in public enrollment. To better understand the factors driving the public enrollment decline, we develop an agent-based model representing the education system in Chile between 2004 and 2016. We calibrate our model to data from four cities and conduct simulation experiments that disentangle the impacts of the hypothesized explanations for the decline. Our analysis reveals the importance of an institutional factor largely outside the core of the school choice policy – the grade-span configuration of schools in each sector. It also suggests that creating a formal coordination mechanism among primary and secondary public schools, to ensure students graduating from a primary public school a seat at a secondary public school, may be a promising policy for strengthening public enrollment. Other implications for understanding the decline in Chilean public enrollment are also discussed.