Self-segregation strategies through school choice in Chile: A middle-class domain?

Abstract

Sociological research has shown that marketized educational systems favour middle-class families’ self-segregation strategies through school choice and, consequently, the reproduction of their social advantage over poorer families. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of capitals, habitus and strategy, we analyse quantitative and ethnographic data on parents’ school choice from Chile to introduce nuances to this argument, evincing more extended and complex mechanisms of self-segregation in the Chilean marketized educational system. We found that not only middle-class parents but also parents from different socioeconomic groups displayed self-segregating school choice strategies. We also found that these strategies were performed both vertically (in relation to other social classes) and horizontally (in relation to other groups within the same social class). These findings unwrap a possible stronger effect of the Chilean school choice system over segregation.

Keywords

Bourdieu Chile school choice segregation social class

Sociological research on school choice has shown how, in marketized educational systems, parental choice mechanisms play in favour of middle-class families, contributing to the reproduction of the social structure and privileging those already privileged. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, these studies have empirically illustrated how the middle classes’ school decision-making is displayed using a range of resources which offer advantages over the working classes to configure a certain school social environment that allows parents to transmit their advantage to their children (Ball, 2003; Lareau et al. 2016; Power et al., 2003; Reay, 1998).

This article intends to add to this well-established knowledge, offering evidence from Chile, whose educational system is one of the most privatized and marketized in the globe (Sepännen et al., 2015). We argue that Chile is a paradigmatic case of an unrestricted choice mechanism (Orfield and Frankenberg, 2013), since its school system is highly unregulated and fragmented, offering a wide range of school choice possibilities to families. As a consequence, school choice has a pivotal role in organizing school provision in Chile.

In this context, we attempt to clarify to what extent choices oriented to create advantageous social environments in school are specific to the middle classes. In other words, we explore whether Chilean parents from different social classes strategically choose schools with particular student populations. For this, we analysed the data produced by the survey from a study conducted between 2011 and 2013, in order to explore Chilean parents’ dispositions towards choosing socially mixed schools, across different social classes. This quantitative information is complemented and interpreted using insights from the ethnographic findings produced by the same study to better understand the rationale of the trends showed by the quantitative analysis. We found that both middle-class parents and parents from different socioeconomic groups show strategic self-segregating behaviour in their school choices. We also found that these strategies were performed both vertically (in relation to other social classes) and horizontally (in relation to other groups within the same social class). These findings unwrap a possible stronger effect of the Chilean school choice system over segregation.

Next, we present the theoretical concepts discussed in this article, followed by the methods, results and conclusions.

Distinction strategies and school choice: a middle-class domain?

Sociological research on school choice has tended to focus on the middle classes, identifying strategic action almost exclusively within this group, which is argued to exercise intensive parenting and to stress a more exhausting path to find the school they want and orient their educational decisions to class reproduction (e.g. Power et al., 2003; Reay et al., 2011). These studies have also found that professional middle-class families tend to elaborate strategies of ‘concerted cultivation’ (Lareau et al., 2016), that is, to spend large amounts of time, money and energy in the children’s upbringing – for example, through extra-curricular activities – and make school decisions using their resources to guarantee certain learning and social environments for their children, which offer advantages over the working classes. As argued by Ball, they often do this by excluding disadvantaged students ‘and insulating their child from untoward influences – other students who are disruptive or work-shy, [or] simply less able [because] they do not want their child be dragged down or distracted’ (Ball, 2003: 68).

In this scenario, school choice has been argued to be a key contemporary practice and educational strategy that allows families to enhance the future social positions of their children (Crozier et al., 2008; Raveaud and van Zanten, 2007; Reay and Ball, 1997). In this article, we focus on the importance that parents attribute to the schools’ student population in their choice, which is usually argued to constitute a key area of self-segregation and social reproduction for middle-class families (e.g. Boterman, 2013; Gewirtz et al., 1995; McEwan and Carnoy, 2000; Vowden, 2012).

In general, the literature offers evidence of homophily choices, that is, families prefer schools with students with similar socioeconomic or ethnic backgrounds to theirs (Papapolydorou, 2014; van Zanten, 2003). Saporito argues that ‘individual preferences can be described by patterns of out-group avoidance’ (2003: 184), by which advantaged parents tend to assimilate evasive practices in order to avoid schools with high concentrations of ‘unwanted’ minorities. In Chile, research reveals the preference of socioeconomically homogeneous schools, particularly among high-income families, who use school choice as a distinction strategy to maintain their status by self-segregating and avoiding contact with perceived undesirable groups (e.g. Bellei et al., 2020; Carrasco et al., 2016; Chumacero et al., 2011; Elacqua et al., 2006; Flores and Carrasco, 2016; Gallego and Hernando, 2010; Kosunen and Carrasco, 2016; Madrid, 2016; Méndez and Gayo, 2018; Moya and Hernández, 2014). Most of this work emphasizes the existence of inner differences within middle and high social classes by evincing the existence of social class fractions: for example, the traditional, neoconservative and modern middle classes (Bellei et al., 2020); and the inheritors, achievers and incomers within the upper middle class (Méndez and Gayo, 2018).

The demarcation between middle and working classes is usually conceptualized using the Kantian aesthetic of virtue of necessity used by Bourdieu, according to which higher amounts of institutionalized cultural capital – understood as ‘high culture’ tastes, knowledge, skills and credentials – contribute to the definition of future social advantages in a certain field. In this framework, the middle classes will always be benefited when using their cultural capital in the educational field. Working-class families, in turn, are seen as immersed in material and mundane dynamics of precariousness and pragmatism, constraining their decision-making to present needs and transforming it into a non-strategic practical order. For example, Ball interprets that his working-class respondents’ secondary school choice was a contingent decision rather than a future-minded one in that they had:

ideas about school [that] were often subordinated to consideration of the constraints of family and locality. [. . .] Thus, ‘choice’ of school fits into the practicalities of ‘getting by’ rather than into some grander social agenda of new, rarer and more distinct goods (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 247). [. . .] The schooling of children of these working-class families is not normally related to long range planning. [. . .] It must be interpreted as working-class short-termism, as against the deferred gratification of the middle-classes. (Ball, 2003: 162–4)

In a further publication, Ball adds: ‘The working-class families are also engaged in a process of social reproduction [. . .] Their utilisation of the specific powers of the education system is accommodative rather than strategic’ (2006: 174). As a result, school choice in a marketized educational system has been seen in these studies as a mechanism to privilege the middle classes’ social distinction and closure to the detriment of the working classes.

We argue that, by bringing together the socioeconomic and cultural dimensions of social differences, this literature has prioritized a hierarchical approach to social classes in society and, in particular, in the educational field. This has led to an understanding of parental decisions as rooted in social classes, that is, decisions which are more homogeneous when they are performed by individuals of the same class. As a corollary, research has tended to disregard possible differences within a certain social class and possible similarities between different social classes, as well as the meaning of choice as a cultural practice in non-middle-class people. In this framework, we explore how a range of socioeconomic groups use complex choice to advance educational and social differentiations, and how these differentiations may take place in more complex ways than those assumed by a vertical and hierarchical conception of class divisions (Savage, 2015). In other words, we wonder to what extent different social classes are using resources to offer advantages to their offspring, attempting to identify more subtle class strategies through school choice that transcend the hierarchical understanding of social class divisions. We illustrate this point by analysing school choice preferences of a sample of Chilean families from different social classes to understand to what extent the strategies to create advantageous school social environments are only specific to middle classes.

We lean on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and its strategic component (Bourdieu, 1984, 1990) to shed light on parental school choice as a social practice that is tied to social position but also endowed with creative possibilities of agency. Therefore, despite not necessarily being rationally calculated in their consequences, practices may be oriented to future gains. The particularity of Bourdieu’s concept of strategy is that, unlike more individualistic definitions (e.g. Rational Action Theory), it is understood in relation to the subjects’ social contexts. As a socialized subjectivity, habitus can produce a range of different practices in different circumstances but always within certain limits, which are the limits of its historicity (i.e. previous experiences and available resources or capitals).

We argue that the Chilean context is key to study these issues. While most international research has explored the connection between social class advantages and education on roughly restricted (regulated) school choice and public educational systems, Chile is a paradigmatic case of an extremely market-driven educational system including an unrestricted (unregulated) choice mechanism (Orfield and Frankenberg, 2013). Using a theory of pure market instead of a theory of integrated choice, Chile has an extremely privatized mixed provision and universal school choice since the military dictatorship (1973–90). Until 2016, the Chilean education system included policies that allow for-profit schools, co-payment from families (in partial operation until 2025 approximately) and selection in school admission (replaced by a new admission system universally in operation from 2020), which promoted strong differentiation among schools. The entry of private providers was stimulated, leading to the division of the school system into state, private subsidized (partly funded by the state, currently attracting more than half of school enrolments), and private non-subsidized schools; additionally, for-profit private schools (with or without public funding) were allowed. Schools are highly differentiated in terms of their fees as well: the add-on fees policy (‘Financiamiento Compartido’, since 1993) allows private schools (even those receiving state funding) to charge parents a monthly fee of up to around US$100, which is being gradually eliminated by the Inclusion Law. Finally, as a component of the Inclusion Law, the new school admission system (whose implementation in the whole country was completed in 2020) while it is eliminating selective practices used by schools to ‘choose’ students (Carrasco et al., 2017; Contreras et al., 2010), is at the same time reinforcing, celebrating, and confirming the pivotal role of school choice in organizing school provision in Chile.

Despite strong criticism of the policy from right-wing political sectors (Carrasco et al., 2021b), the implementation of the Inclusion Law (which abolished school selection and family co-payment, including the implementation of a new admission system), while it is eliminating unfair educational access barriers which explained in a relevant portion the level of educational segregation in Chile, by design, it is also maintaining two critical components of the Chilean educational market: privatization in provision and universal school choice. Such institutional features are fertile ground for ‘parentocracy’ – a system in which ‘a child’s education is increasingly dependent upon the wealth and wishes of parents’ (Brown, 1990: 66) and the enduring role of families’ practices in shaping school segregation patterns. Indeed, novel research capturing the sociological effects of the Inclusion Law has recently shown that middle-class families still display strategic behaviour attempting to distinguish themselves from other social groups, while some fractions are resisting these new regulations (Hernández and Carrasco, 2020).

This complex combination of policies, along with the construction of a choice system based on a universal school voucher – according to which public and private education have been largely funded by a state subsidy that enables all parents to choose schools – has articulated a scenario in which families have many possibilities to consider regarding the distinctive features of the schools available (unrestricted choice system). At the same time, the families’ capacity to choose depends on an extremely unequal distribution of capitals, due to Chile’s huge socioeconomic segregation,¹ which renders the country’s school choice system particularly complex in terms of the options that families have to deal with.

Methods

The quantitative analysis is based on a representative sample² of 750 parents³ from the Metropolitan Region of Chile (where the capital, Santiago, is), who were choosing school. All parents in the sample had children below 5 years of age who were not enrolled in school, which means that parents were more or less actively participating in the process of choosing schools. Two elements of this sampling strategy generated a rather unique dataset: (a) parents are choosing schools for the very first time (parents are not ‘captured’ by a previous decision), and (b) the strategy allows studying pre-choice rather than post-choice (which is the case in all other studies about school choice in Chile). The latter allowed us to avoid assuming that the features of the already chosen school are the truly preferred features since some parents end up in a school that they did not prefer to begin with, given barriers such as selective admission policies and prohibitive transport costs. We expected to analyse pre-choice dynamics such as the desires, dilemmas and negotiations involved, as well as the acknowledgement of and ways of coping with school barriers, which are at the basis of actual preferences. The survey asked for the names and locations of all the schools that parents had more or less actively considered for their elder child. The group of all named schools was defined as the particular choice set for each parent.

The sample was stratified in five socioeconomic groups according to the parents’ educational level. The first and second columns in Table 1 provide the number and percentage of parents in each educational group, most of them (30.1%) having completed their secondary education. The third column shows the average number of schools mentioned by each parent in each educational group as their preferred schools, showing choice sets of similar average size that oscillate between 1.65 and 1.90. On average, parents mention 1.79 schools. Finally, the last column identifies the number of schools that are mentioned at least once in each educational group. Altogether, parents mention a total of 507 schools.⁴

Table 1.

Parents and choice sets.

	Parents		Choice set
	Parents	%	Size	Schools
Educational group (years of education)
Group 1: Primary or less	95	15.4%	1.88	131
Group 2: Less than completed secondary	93	15.0%	1.90	128
Group 3: Completed secondary	186	30.1%	1.81	221
Group 4: Vocational or less than completed college	158	25.6%	1.65	170
Group 5: Completed university or more	86	13.9%	1.80	99
Total	618	100%	1.79	507

Source: Authors’ survey.

Parental preferences described above provide an indicator of the level of popularity of schools. We assume that mentioned schools are more popular than schools not mentioned, and that the higher the number of mentions the higher the popularity of the school. Table 2 shows the number of mentions for each of the 2,060 schools within the Metropolitan Region among parents in each educational group. For instance, 93.6% of schools within the Metropolitan Region are mentioned zero times by parents in Group 1 (with primary education or less), whereas the rest (6.4%) are mentioned between 1 and 6 times each.

Table 2.

Schools in the Metropolitan Region: number of mentions among parents in each educational group.

Mentions	Group 1		Group 2		Group 3		Group 4		Group 5
Mentions	N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%
0	1929	93.6%	1932	93.8%	1839	89.3%	1890	91.7%	1961	95.2%
1	104	5.0%	100	4.9%	157	7.6%	118	5.7%	70	3.4%
2	18	0.9%	14	0.7%	37	1.8%	29	1.4%	13	0.6%
3	2	0.1%	10	0.5%	11	0.5%	14	0.7%	12	0.6%
4	4	0.2%	2	0.1%	10	0.5%	4	0.2%	2	0.1%
5	1	0.0%	1	0.0%	4	0.2%	3	0.1%	0
6	2	0.1%	1	0.0%	1	0.0%	2	0.1%	0
7	0		0		1	0.0%	0		1	0.0%
8	0		0		0		0		1	0.0%
Total	2060	100%	2060	100%	2060	100%	2060	100%	2060	100%

Source: Authors’ survey.

Using the number of mentions in the parents’ choice sets described in Table 2 as a dependent variable, and given the large number of schools not mentioned among parents of all educational groups, we estimated a number of zero inflated models (ZIPs). These models seek to estimate the school’s level of popularity among parents with different levels of education, and, simultaneously, the chances of not being mentioned in the choice set, assuming that a separate process from the families’ school preferences generates these chances. In doing so, we assume that there are two kinds of unmentioned schools in the observed data: those that were not likely to be mentioned even though they may be considered desirable by parents in the sample, and those that were actually not desired (and thus never mentioned as part of the choice set). Whenever needed, we used the negative binomial form (ZINB), to allow for over-dispersion of the data.

In this study, the key independent variable explaining the schools’ popularity is the social composition of the school relative to the social status of the parents establishing their preferences (for whom the model is estimated). Relative social composition of the school is measured as the ratio between: (a) the number of parents in an educational group that is above or below the educational group of the parents whose choice set is being studied, and (b) the number of parents in the same educational group of the parents in the sample. We used the standard deviations of these ratios as independent variables.⁵ Whenever possible, the models also control for the relative representation of educational groups further below or further above. Additionally, they control for other schools’ attributes such as the average number of years of education among all mothers in the school, average achievement in math,⁶ level of co-payment,⁷ and administrative structure (whether it is public or private). In addition, we control for the poverty rate in the municipality where the school is located.⁸

The chances of having zero mentions (estimated in the inflation model) depends on the average distance between the schools and the residences of all parents in the sample, and on the school’s eligibility (number of parents for whom the school falls within their ‘tolerable’ distance within which a school can be preferred).⁹

These quantitative analyses were complemented with data from an ethnographic exploration, which took place between 2011 and 2013 in various districts of Santiago, where we shadowed nine families. In this phase, our definition of social class is more complex than in the quantitative phase since it combines multiple dimensions, such as the parents’ educational level (i.e. degree holding or not), their occupation and the locality where they were living. The latter was a particularly powerful socioeconomic indicator given Santiago’s residential segregation (Méndez and Gayo, 2019). Our aim was to study school choice on the basis of the broader circumstances that surrounded and formed it, to shed light on the subtler mechanisms through which families produce and reproduce a certain social and symbolical position. The first stage of the ethnographic inquiry involved contacting the families randomly via a wide network. We conducted interviews with all household members, as well as agents who emerged and were in some way linked to the choice (e.g. deputy principal in charge of a school’s admission process). It also involved accompanying the families to the schools they visited and, sometimes, taking part of their admission interviews. The exploration was carried out by a group of ethnographers, guided and led by the authors,¹⁰ who held weekly workshops with them. The workshop activities included deciding on the interviews, conversations and observations to be conducted, reflecting on field decisions, conceptual discussions, and parallel analyses of the themes that emerged. The result was nine reports as well as cross-case analyses. In this article, we focus on the case of one working-class family to illustrate a key finding of the quantitative analysis: strategic school choice is not only a middle-class domain (see Carrasco et al., 2015 for a qualitative analysis of the school choice strategies of families from different socioeconomic groups in our study).

Next, we present our findings.

Ubiquitous distinction strategies through school choice

Self-segregation school choice strategies across social classes

Table 3¹¹ shows descriptive figures for the independent variables included in the models for each educational group. Figures are presented separately for schools with no mentions and for schools with one or more mentions. These figures show that, among parents with middle, mid-high and high level of education, school popularity decreases when the representation of educational groups below theirs increases. Among parents of these educational groups, the average relative representation of educational groups from the next group further below is smaller for schools that are mentioned at least once as compared to those that are never mentioned. The data also show that, among parents of the bottom two educational groups, the popularity of schools decreases with the representation of groups from the next educational group above theirs and further above the chooser’s educational level. In contrast, parents from the middle and mid-high educational groups tend to prefer schools where upper classes are over-represented. Thus, these descriptive figures suggest a below-group avoidance pattern in school preferences, at least among the middle and upper educational groups (who also reveal an above-group inclination pattern), and an above-group avoidance pattern among parents with low levels of education.

Table 3.

Descriptive figures.

	Number of mentions by parents from educational group. . .
	Lowest		Mid-low		Middle		Mid-high		Highest
	0	1+	0	1+	0	1+	0	1+	0	1+
Ratio of educational group versus own (Z)
Down (non-adjacent)	. . .	. . .	. . .	. . .	0.04	−0.33	0.03	−0.58	0.03	−0.61
Down (adjacent)	. . .	. . .	0.00	0.02	0.04	−0.28	0.03	−0.52	0.05	−0.98
Up (adjacent)	0.04	−0.08	0.01	−0.11	−0.01	0.08	−0.03	0.55	. . .	. . .
Up (non-adjacent)	0.01	−0.09	0.01	−0.14	0.02	−0.16	. . .	. . .	. . .	. . .
School average mother’s education (in years)
	11.7	11.8	11.7	11.8	11.7	12.1	11.6	13.9	11.6	15.2
Achievement (Z)
	−0.01	0.26	−0.02	0.31	−0.04	0.35	−0.06	1.01	−0.08	1.53
Administration
Public (%)	32%	25%	32%	24%	33%	17%	32%	14%	32%	10%
Private (%)	69%	75%	68%	76%	67%	83%	68%	86%	68%	90%
Co-payment
None	37%	36%	37%	36%	37%	30%	38%	16%	38%	7%
Low	24%	24%	24%	30%	24%	28%	25%	11%	25%	5%
High	39%	40%	39%	34%	39%	42%	37%	73%	37%	88%
Local poverty (Z)
	−2.21	−3.57	−2.38	−1.00	−2.32	−1.99	−2.07	−6.13	−1.99	−8.11
Average distance to residences (Z)
	0.02	−0.29	0.02	−0.32	0.04	−0.32	0.02	−0.39	0.01	−0.27
Eligibility	5.48	8.21	5.52	6.97	5.45	6.99	5.58	6.35	5.64	5.24

Source: Authors’ survey, official data from MINEDUC and CASEN (2011).

Table 4¹² shows the results of the zero inflated models estimating school popularity among parents with low, mid-low, middle, mid-high and high levels of education separately. As shown at the bottom of Table 4, the LR (likelihood ratio) tests (that compare the zero inflated negative binomial with the zero inflated Poisson) and the Vuong tests (that compare the zero inflated negative binomial with the regular negative binomial) are statistically significant for models estimating school popularity among parents in all but the mid-high educational groups. Thus, all models correspond to the zero inflated negative binomial forms, except for models that correspond to the fourth educational group (columns 7 and 8), that correspond to a zero inflated Poisson (note that the Vuong test that compares the zero inflated Poisson with the regular Poisson is statistically significant in these models, which favour the zero inflated over the regular version of the Poisson model).

Table 4.

Zero inflated models.

	Lowest^a		Mid-low^a		Middle^a		Mid-high^b		Highest^a
	Model 1 ZINB	Model 2 ZINB	Model 1 ZINB	Model 2 ZINB	Model 1 ZINB	Model 2 ZINB	Model 1 ZIP	Model 2 ZIP	Model 1 ZINB	Model 2 ZINB
School average mother’s education (years)
	1.107ns	0.828*	0.762**	0.565***	0.625***	0.598***	0.793ns	0.590**	1.887***	1.603***
	(0.066)	(0.110)	(0.137)	(0.197)	(0.168)	(0.177)	(0.208)	(0.236)	(0.140)	(0.147)
Representation of other education groups
Down (non-adjacent)					0.807ns	0.881ns	0.030*	0.026**	0.727ns	0.717ns
					(0.349)	(0.344)	(1.935)	(1.858)	(1.559)	(1.758)
Down (adjacent)			0.387***	0.413**	0.254***	0.280***	0.363***	0.353***	0.411*	0.552*
			(0.306)	(0.346)	(0.379)	(0.359)	(0.259)	(0.301)	(0.480)	(0.340)
Up (adjacent)	0.638**	0.747ns	6.185**	8.631**	3.368***	1.949***	1.213**	1.202*
	(0.198)	(0.193)	(0.785)	(0.893)	(0.223)	(0.214)	(0.084)	(0.110)
Up (non-adjacent)	0.584ns	0.651ns	0.011**	0.005**	0.144*	0.149*
	(0.399)	(0.395)	(2.181)	(2.567)	(1.035)	(1.150)
Achievement (Z)		1.631***		2.741***		1.953***		1.598***		2.192***
		(0.173)		(0.149)		(0.112)		(0.113)		(0.167)
Public ^c		0.619*		0.552**		0.588**		0.993ns		2.855**
		(0.296)		(0.280)		(0.227)		(0.396)		(0.479)
Co-payment ^d
Low		0.649ns		0.765ns		0.576***		0.345**		1.640ns
		(0.317)		(0.280)		(0.199)		(0.438)		(0.525)
High		0.587ns		0.569ns		0.790ns		0.849ns		1.677ns
		(0.343)		(0.311)		(0.223)		(0.390)		(0.506)
Local poverty (Z)		0.903***		1.071***		1.049***		0.947*		1.007ns
		(0.028)		(0.025)		(0.018)		(0.028)		(0.037)

– zero inflated negative binomial; ^b – zero inflated Poisson. Robust standard errors in parentheses.

– reference category is private school; ^d – reference category is no co-payment. *** p-val<0.01; ** p-val<0.05; * p-val<0.1; ns p-val>0.1.

The models estimating school popularity among parents of different educational groups have two versions. Model 1 includes all variables regarding the social composition of the school, whereas Model 2 includes the rest of the covariates. Models show that the relative representation of educational groups that are just below the level of education of the chooser significantly decreases the number of mentions among all kinds of parents, even after controlling for other school attributes such as average achievement. Thus, among parents with a mid-low level of education, each standard deviation in the level of representation of parents from the lowest educational group, decreases the number of mentions by 61.3% and by 58.7% after controlling for the rest of the school’s attributes. Similarly, the number of mentions among parents with middle educational level decreases by 72% with each standard deviation in the representation of parents from the mid-low educational group. This percentage is rather similar to that for parents in the upper educational groups. Models show that only parents from the fourth educational group (mid-high level of education) tend to avoid parents from lower groups, other than the adjacent educational group. Among these parents, school popularity decreases by almost 100% for each standard deviation in the representation of parents from the lowest educational groups (first and second). It is worth noting that these results hold after controlling for the absolute social composition of the school.

The results described above provide evidence for a below-group avoidance pattern in the school choice process, which is robust and consistent for parents of every educational level. That is, all parents in the sample tend to avoid parents below their level of education, even after controlling for other school attributes. The models also provide evidence for an above-group inclination pattern that appears more clearly in the models than in the descriptive figures shown in Table 3. Thus, school popularity increases with the level of representation of parents from educational groups above the one of the chooser. This is true for parents in all educational groups except for parents from the lowest educational group, among whom the number of mentions actually decreases by around 25% with each standard deviation in the representation of parents from the second educational group. Nonetheless, the level of representation of parents from educational groups further above (beyond the adjacent group) actually decreases the level of popularity of schools among parents from the second and third educational group. In other words, the above-group inclination pattern only holds for adjacent educational groups, and not for the representation of groups that are further above.

Putting these findings together suggests that parents from the bottom and highest educational groups tend to form school isolating preferences. However, the fact that parents tend to avoid parents with less education and to seek parents with higher education, means that the bottom group has considerably less chances to integrate as compared to parents from the higher groups. Parents from educational groups in the middle form preferences that isolate them from the lowest classes and integrate them with the upper classes (as long as these groups are not too far ahead). In other words, we found a strong self-segregation of the elites, and an ‘obligated’ self-segregation of the poor, that is totally explained by restrictions of choice. Likewise, this evidence calls attention to the idea that school segregation and the possibility to choose schools implies the creation of systematically unwanted schools, even after controlling for other features of these schools, such as achievement. This, potentially, has profound concrete and symbolic consequences for children and families in these schools that policies need to take into account. These findings are consistent with research highlighting the high levels of socioeconomic segregation across schools in Chile: among OECD countries, Chile occupies the third place in the No Social Diversity Index, which means that it has one of the lowest levels of social diversity within schools among OECD countries (OECD, 2019).

Overall, while previous research has consolidated a corpus of evidence regarding the distinctive school choice strategies displayed by different social classes according to their own resources, our findings illustrate what is common across social classes when choosing schools: a self-closure strategy to favour schools composed of families with a socioeconomic background similar to or slightly higher than theirs, as a way to gain social and educational advantages which are considered to be worthwhile within each social group. Therefore, given the unregulated school choice scheme in Chile, the use of school choice practices has been widely incorporated by all social groups, and is not solely a middle-class domain, which we argue may contribute to strengthening the relationship between school choice and school segregation in the Chilean educational system.

These findings are aligned with recent evidence from the US and England, which suggests that intensive and strategic parenting is increasingly being normalized across different social classes (e.g., Bennett et al., 2012; Vincent, 2017), given the institutionalization of a neoliberal discourse defining the ideal subject as entrepreneurial. Thus, parents are insistently called on by educational policies to take responsibility of their child’s educational, emotional, physical and social development as a powerful tool to tackle disadvantage. These studies, however, also show that despite their strategic attitude, working-class parents’ strategic behaviour tends to be constrained by their disadvantaged socioeconomic living conditions and possession of capitals (which translate, for example, into the upper groups’ below-group avoidance in our study). The next section provides insights on the working classes’ strategic school choice by complementing the statistical analyses with ethnographic data from our research.

Understanding horizontal distinction strategies: the case of a working-class family

The ethnographic data of the study provides evidence for understanding the strategic school choice carried out by working-class parents. We illustrate this claim with the Gonzalez family, which is composed of both parents and their 6-year-old child, Juan. At the time of the study, the family was living in precarious conditions within a shanty town located in a socially mixed area of Santiago. The house was small and made from light materials, and, during the ethnography a nephew was also living with the family so Juan was sleeping in his parents’ bed. Their incomes came from a small shop that they accommodated within their home and were considered to be insufficient to cover their expenditures. Since living in the shanty town was seen by both parents as transitional until they could improve their economic situation, they avoided feeling too settled in that space, for example, by evading social interactions and friendship with their neighbours. They were also concerned about controlling Juan’s free time and usually forbade him to play in the streets or in other children’s houses, which they considered to be dangerous because ‘we do not know how the adults really are and who are in the house’ (Mother). The risks, they explained, came from physical abuse to ‘bad habits’ (e.g., swearing, drugs, intra-family violence, etc.) they did not want their child to be exposed to.

In this scenario, the Gonzalez’s school choice was shaped by their willingness to distinguish themselves from their neighbours, ‘these flaites¹³ without any eagerness to better themselves’ (Father). The school was imagined in opposition to their neighbourhood, as a potential space to strengthen what their immediate social context could not: a morality based on the values of meritocracy, discipline and hard work, which were considered to be at the base of a future advantageous social position. Due to their low economic capital, their choice was restricted to free schools, which they considered to be less likely to satisfy their needs; they could not spend money in transport either. Given these restrictions, the parents fiercely believed that only very specific schoolmates would be able to promote the morality they were looking to instil in Juan: children whose families, despite living in their locality or nearby localities, have a slightly better socioeconomic condition and, particularly, a better housing situation. These characteristics were associated with being ‘decent’ poor people, in contrast to the ‘indecent’ ones living in shanty towns. The Gonzalez’s informal conversations with relatives and friends (about their experiences and appreciations of different schools), and direct observation of the schools, were key strategies for defining ‘decency’. They visited several schools, either to be interviewed or to just evaluate what they looked like, and in every of these situations they carefully examined the appearance of the students. If they were tidily dressed and had a short haircut, they interpreted this as a good sign of the way their parents take care of them. In the end, they identified a few schools with the ‘right’ social composition, as well as satisfying the proximity and free-of-charge criteria, but the application processes were not exempt from obstacles. Juan was rejected from the two preferred schools, which the parents attributed to being discriminated against because of living in a shanty town. For this reason, they decided to hide this information in the next applications and Juan was finally accepted in a school of their choice.

This case illustrates three key points. First, it confirms the presence of strategic behaviour in working-class parents’ school choice. A rough analysis of the case would support the hypothesis of the ‘trapped’ working classes, without any alternative for deploying strategic action. Nevertheless, although their disadvantageous social position, defined by their low institutionalized cultural capital (i.e. professional certifications, as neither of the parents finished school) and insufficient economic capital, the Gonzalez’s habitus and, specifically, their school choice dispositions, were clearly shaped by their dissatisfaction with their current housing conditions, as well as with the non-aspirational habitus of their neighbours. In this scenario, school choice appears to be a strategic decisional space to distinguish the family from the people living right beside them, which was finally possible due to the parents’ activation of certain capitals (Bourdieu, 1986). Their social capital, based on their close and informal relationships with families and friends, provided them with first-hand information about nearby schools, particularly about the families and students attending them. The parents’ embodied cultural capital was also crucial in this aim – for example, the key place that cleanliness and tidiness had in the care of their home and of their own bodies, connected with their high estimation of these elements when observing the schools (i.e. they rejected schools because of the messy hair and unbuttoned aprons of the children).

A second key point is the importance of paying attention to the nuances present in the construction of social divisions within each social class; that is, demystifying social classes as a collective membership and considering class fractions (Savage, 2015) when analysing school choice strategies. In fact, the Gonzalez’s case illustrates how the family distinguished their habitus from their neighbours’, suggesting that habitus is a less unified category than Bourdieu contended. This does not point to abandoning the aim of conducting class analysis, but to ‘the need to consider the nature of contemporary identities in ways which are not premised on simplistic contrasts between either class collectivism on the one hand, or individualised identities on the other, but which are attentive to their intermeshing’ (Savage, 2000: 108).

Finally, our findings emphasize the importance of analysing school choice not only in relation to vertical class distinction strategies but also horizontal ones. In fact, the Gonzalez’s strategic school choice could have remained hidden if we had not considered their self-segregation attempts within their own social group: the search of a school with a particular student composition serves the goal of generating distance from people like those who live in their shanty town. Research has shown that other social markers, besides social class divisions, have a key role in organizing patterns of sociocultural division. While Bennett, Savage and colleagues (2009) found, in the British case, that age, gender and ethnicity play a substantive role along with class, the Chilean case presented here shows that sociocultural and moral boundaries also play an important role in building social distinctions and divisions. As Bennett, Savage and colleagues claim, ‘approaching the relational organisation of the social solely in class terms proves singularly unable to accommodate the more multi-dimensional logics connecting cultural practices and social positions’ (2009: 35).

Conclusions: Self-segregating strategies in an unrestricted school choice system

While sociological research has shown that marketized educational systems favour middle-class families’ self-segregation strategies through school choice and, consequently, the reproduction of their social advantage over poorer families, this article emphasizes the existence of more extended and complex mechanisms of self-segregation. Quantitative analyses demonstrate that different socioeconomic groups are using school choice to reinforce their social closure and therefore apply vertical distinction strategies, as they prefer schools with a socioeconomic status similar or slightly higher than theirs. This finding contributes to enriching our understanding of strategic school choice among non-middle-class families and challenges the assumption that working-class families are characterized by ‘getting by’ choices, as if they did not have any strategic orientation regarding the social composition of the schools’ populations (although their actual choices are more constrained by their disadvantaged living conditions). The analysis of the ethnographic case study complements this argument by revealing the articulation between vertical distinction strategies and horizontal distinction strategies in a working-class family’s school choice. Therefore, we argue that parental choice in Chile is characterized not only by hierarchical positional social class disputes but also by horizontal sociocultural differentiation – within similar social class groups – which allows us to understand the enactment of distinction strategies through school choice across different social classes, not solely as a middle-class domain. We interpret these results by exploring developments of Bourdieu’s concepts of capitals and habitus that expand the axis of sociocultural divisions to understand contemporary social conformations, so that they are not explained only by social class boundaries.

Altogether, these results unwrap a possible stronger effect of the Chilean school choice system over segregation via self-segregation strategies from parents, compared to other countries in which this topic has been studied. In fact, ‘While [. . .] there is a recognizable global orthodoxy to education policy in the twenty-first century, policies also have a national specificity’ (Ball, 2003: 27). In this regard, the families’ school choice strategies not only depend on their capitals but also on the state of instruments of social (re)production which allow social agents to control their social trajectory (Bourdieu, 1984). We argue that these findings may be the result of a particular modality of marketization in education: while most educational research in developed countries has been conducted on restricted (or regulated) choice and mostly public provision of education, we contend that the configuration of an unrestricted (or unregulated) choice and mostly private provision of education in Chile expands the possibilities of mobilizing resources to different social groups, not being exclusive only to the middle or upper classes. In other words, Chile is a unique case at a global scale in terms of the scope of the set of market-driven mechanisms implemented to organize the school system – vast privatization of public supply, unregulated school choice for families, co-payment allowed to families, a voucher funding system to fund schools, and selective admission practices – and those mechanisms have turned out to be critical drivers of school choice practices. As a consequence, school choice in Chile can be exercised employing a range of family resources (e.g. the Gonzalez’s non-qualified cultural capital) and channel multiple class disputes (i.e. vertical and horizontal distinction strategies).

In this scenario, school choice in Chile can be interpreted as a strong segregation mechanism, promoting both vertical and horizontal social divisions, based not only on socioeconomic differences but also on sociocultural ones. Echoing Vincent (2017), we argue that the expansion of self-segregation is directly linked to the powerful introduction of neoliberal discourses in the Chilean educational system and the successful installation of the ideal neoliberal parent, that is, strategic parenting as a way to tackle disadvantage. Therefore, our evidence suggests that the ‘parentocracy’, along with an unrestricted school market where social integration and access to opportunities are highly individualized, is contributing to broaden social divisions, producing even greater educational segregation, as it is both socioeconomic and sociocultural.

These findings have remarkable policy implications given the fact that Chile has recently introduced major reforms (the Inclusion Law) in the name of school inclusion, aiming to regulate the market mechanisms in education. Yet, paradoxically, this has been done through reinforcing and consolidating a universal school choice system, which is politically and socially supported by Chilean society. In other words, a marketized configuration of the educational provision was not crucially transformed by the Inclusion Law. Recent evidence studying family responses to the Inclusion Law, in particular to the new admission system regulating school choice, has counter-intuitively found a mixed picture in terms of support for a law inspired by anti-discrimination and anti-segregation purposes: various fractions of the middle classes and low-middle classes worry that the reforms are making them lose control over their children’s educational future and the right to advance their own resources to educate them (Carrasco et al., 2021a, 2021b; Hernández and Carrasco, 2020). In part, such family responses to the Inclusion Law illustrate the cultural complexity of reforming well-established social practices.

It can be hypothesized, then, that the long-established social dimension of school choice in Chile makes it difficult to drastically transform the relationship between schools and families, and to reduce school segregation without further policies, such as de-privatization, including the regulation of school choice itself. This implies that the findings reported here will possibly prevail in configuring the relationship between social differentiation and education until these policies are enacted.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Associative Research Programme – ANID PIA CIE160007.

ORCID iD

Manuela Mendoza

Notes

Author biographies

Alejandro Carrasco is an associate professor in Education at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and main researcher at the Centre of Educational Justice, Chile. His work focuses on school choice and admission systems, and the impact of reforms based on accountability and market-driven regimes.

Manuela Mendoza is a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Educational Policies and Practices - CEPPE (Chile) and at the UCL Institute of Education (England). Her research focuses on the relationship between market-based educational policies and families. Specific areas of interest include school choice, school mix, and social class identity.

Carolina Flores is an associate professor in education at Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile. Her research focuses on school and residential segregation and market-based policies, as well as advanced research on initial teacher training, teacher turnover and enrolment, and its effects on educational inequality.

References

Ball

(2003) Class Strategies and the Education Market. London: Routledge Falmer.

Ball

(2006) ‘Educational Reform, Market Concepts and Ethical Re-tooling’, pp. 115–29 in Ball

S.J.

(ed.) Education Policy and Social Class: The Selected Works of Stephen J. Ball. Abingdon: Routledge.

Bellei

Orellana

Canales

(2020) ‘Elección de escuela en la clase alta chilena: Comunidad, identidad y cierre social’, Archivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas 28(5), https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.28.3884

Bennett

Lutz

Jayaram

(2012) ‘Beyond the Schoolyard: The Role of Parenting Logics, Financial Resources, and Social Institutions in the Social Class Gap in Structured Activity Participation’, Sociology of Education 85: 131–57.

Bennett

Savage

Silva

E.B.

Warde

Gayo-Cal

Wright

(2009) Culture, Class, Distinction. Abingdon: Routledge.

Boterman

W.R.

(2013) ‘Dealing with Diversity: Middle-class Family Households and the Issue of “Black” and “White” Schools in Amsterdam’, Urban Studies 50(6): 1130–47.

Bourdieu

(1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Bourdieu

(1986) ‘Forms of Capital’, pp. 241–58 in Richardson

(ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood.

Bourdieu

(1990) The Logic of Practice. Cambridge MA: Polity Press.

10.

Brown

(1990) ‘The “Third Wave”: Education and the Ideology of Parentocracy’, British Journal of Sociology of Education 11(1): 65–85.

11.

Carrasco

Donoso

Mendoza

(2016) ‘La dimensión ético-política de la elección de escuela: dilemas en familias chilenas de elite’, in Corvalan

Carrasco

Garcia-Huidobro

J.E.

(eds) Mercado escolar y oportunidad educacional en Chile: Libertad, diversidad y desigualdad. Santiago: Ediciones UC.

12.

Carrasco

Falabella

Mendoza

(2015) ‘School Choice in Chile as a Sociocultural Practice: An Ethnographic Inquiry’, pp. 245–66 in Seppänen

, et al. (eds) (2015) Contrasting Dynamics in Education Politics of Extremes: School Choice in Finland and Chile. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

13.

Carrasco

Gutiérrez

Flores

(2017) ‘Failed Regulations and School Composition: Selective Admission Practices in Chilean Primary Schools’, Journal of Education Policy 32(5): 642–72, doi:10.1080/02680939.2017.1312549.

14.

Carrasco

Hernández

Honey

Oyarzún

J.D.D.

(2021a) ‘School Admission in Chile, New Rules of the Game, and the Devaluation of Middle-class Capitals’, British Journal of Sociology of Education 42(2): 179–95.

15.

Carrasco

Honey

Oyarzún

J.D.D.

Mendoza

(2021b) ‘Counter-reforming through Reactionary Populism: A Failing Attempt to Restrain a Major School Admission Reform in Chile’, Journal of School Choice 15(1): 59–87.

16.

CASEN (2011) Ministerio de Desarrollo Social (Ministry of Social Development), Gobierno de Chile.

17.

Chumacero

Gómez

Paredes

. (2011) ‘I Would Walk 500 Miles (If It Paid): Vouchers and School Choice in Chile’, Economics of Education Review 30(5): 1103–14, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2011.05.015

18.

Contreras

Sepúlveda

Bustos

(2010) ‘When Schools Are the Ones that Choose: The Effects of Screening in Chile’, Social Science Quarterly 91(5): 1349–68.

19.

Crozier

Reay

James

Jamieson

Beedell

Hollingworth

, et al. (2008) ‘White Middle-class Parents, Identities, Educational Choice and the Urban Comprehensive School: Dilemmas, Ambivalence and Moral Ambiguity’, British Journal of Sociology of Education 29(3): 261–72.

20.

Elacqua

Schneider

Jack

(2006) ‘School Choice in Chile: Is It Class or the Classroom?’, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 25(3): 577–601, https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.20192

21.

Flores

Carrasco

(2016) ‘Elegir lo que hay: ¿Cuentan las familias en sus barrios con una oferta de escuelas que responda a sus preferencias?’, in Corvalan

Carrasco

Garcia-Huidobro

J.E.

(eds) Mercado escolar y oportunidad educacional en Chile: Libertad, diversidad y desigualdad. Santiago: Ediciones UC.

22.

Gallego

Hernando

(2010) School Choice in Chile: Looking at the Demand Side. Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Documento de Trabajo No. 356, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1725911.

23.

Gewirtz

Ball

S.J.

Bowe

(1995) Markets, Choice and Equity in Education. Buckingham: Open University Press.

24.

Hernández

Carrasco

(2020) ‘The Transition from a Deregulated Market to a Centralised School Admission System in Chile: Mapping Middle-class Responses to New School Choice Rules’, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, doi: 10.1080/03057925.2020.1851592.

25.

Kosunen

Carrasco

(2016) ‘Parental Preferences in School Choice: Comparing Reputational Hierarchies of Schools in Chile and Finland’, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 46(2): 172–93, doi:10.1080/03057925.2013.861700.

26.

Lareau

Evans

Yee

(2016) ‘The Rules of the Game and the Uncertain Transmission of Advantage: Middle-class Parents’ Search for an Urban Kindergarten’, Sociology of Education 89(4): 279–99.

27.

Madrid

(2016) ‘“Diversidad sin diversidad”: Los colegios particulares pagados de élite y la formación de la clase dominante en una sociedad de mercado’, pp. 269–99 in Corvalán

Carrasco

García-Huidobro

J.E.

(eds) Mercado escolar y oportunidad educacional: Libertad, diversidad y desigualdad. Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile.

28.

McEwan

Carnoy

(2000) ‘The Effectiveness and Efficiency of Private Schools in Chile’s Voucher System’, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 22: 213–39.

29.

Méndez

M.L.

Gayo

(2018) Upper Middle-class Social Reproduction: Wealth, Schooling, and Residential Choice in Chile. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89695-3.

30.

Moya

Hernández

(2014) ‘El rol de los colegios de elite en la reproducción intergeneracional de la elite chilena’, Revista Austral de Ciencias Sociales 26: 59–82.

31.

OECD (2019) PISA 2018 Results, vol. II: Where All Students Can Succeed, Paris: OECD Publishing, https://doi.org/10.1787/b5fd1b8f-en.

32.

Orfield

Frankenberg

(eds) (2013) Educational Delusions? Why Choice Can Deepen Inequality and How to Make Schools Fair. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

33.

Papapolydorou

(2014) ‘“When You See a Normal Person . . .”: Social Class and Friendship Networks among Teenage Students’, British Journal of Sociology of Education 35(4): 559–77.

34.

Power

Edwards

Whitty

Wigfall

(2003) Education and the Middle Class. Buckingham: Open University Press.

35.

Raveaud

van Zanten

(2007) ‘Choosing the Local School: Middle-class Parents’ Values and Social and Ethnic Mix in London and Paris’, Journal of Education Policy 22(1): 107–24.

36.

Reay

(1998) ‘“Always Knowing” and “Never Being Sure”: Familial and Institutional Habituses and Higher Education Choice’, Journal of Education Policy 13(4): 519–29, https://doi.org/10.1080/0268093980130405

37.

Reay

Ball

(1997) ‘“Spoilt for Choice”: The Working Classes and Educational Markets’, Oxford Review of Education 23(1): 89–101.

38.

Reay

Crozier

James

(2011) White Middle-class Identities and Urban Schooling. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

39.

Saporito

(2003) ‘Private Choices, Public Consequences: Magnet School Choice and Segregation by Race and Poverty’, Social Problems 50: 181–203.

40.

Savage

(2000) Class Analysis and Social Transformation. Buckingham: Open University Press.

41.

Savage

(2015) Social Class in the 21st Century. London: Pelican.

42.

Seppänen

Carrasco

Kalalahti

Rinne

Simola

(eds) (2015) Contrasting Dynamics in Education Politics of Extremes: School Choice in Finland and Chile. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

43.

van Zanten

. (2003) ‘Middle-class Parents and Social Mix in French Urban Schools: Reproduction and Transformation of Class Relations in Education’, International Studies in Sociology of Education 13(2): 107–24.

44.

Vincent

(2017) ‘“The Children Have Only Got One Education and You Have to Make Sure It’s a Good One”: Parenting and Parent–School Relations in a Neoliberal Age’, Gender and Education 29(5): 541–57.

45.

Vowden

K.J.

(2012) ‘Safety in Numbers? Middle-class Parents and Social Mix in London Primary Schools’, Journal of Education Policy 27(6): 731–45.