Banner on the Pontifica Universidad Católica de Chile campus. Photo courtesy Alexia A. Rauen.
As education becomes more of a commodity than a right, the divide between private and public education becomes more pronounced — and dangerous, as education ceases to allow for social mobility. Across Latin America, the education system is struggling. Youth born into impoverished circumstances who cannot afford private schools are dependent on public education and must hope it is adequate and efficient. It should come as no surprise that few countries can with certainty claim this of their public education systems. For successful education reform, countries need to find and focus government funds on addressing systemic problems.
Many countries in Latin America lack the funding needed to make lasting reform that will enable students across both metropolitan and rural regions to have equitable access to low-cost, quality education. However, there may indeed be an item in governments’ budgets that, if reallocated, could be a plausible source of funding: military spending. Decreasing military spending to increase education funding could be of great benefit across Latin America.
Demilitarization has been particularly successful in the case of Costa Rica. Costa Rica has not had a military since 1948 and instead uses that budget for social services, including education. Costa Rica’s investment in education has paid off with a multilingual population highly integrated into the global market and strong foreign investment. The country maintains an active role in improving education, identifying failures — such as low school attendance among rural youth — and working to correct them — evidenced by a decrease in the rural truancy rate from 30 percent to 7 percent over a decade.
However, this is not the case across Latin America, as students born into wealth are the most likely to attend universities. This is a glaring reality in the case of Chile. The unpopular Chilean voucher system has caused even more stratification, as students are supplied a government voucher to attend any private or public school, which gives government funding to private schools that already charge tuition. Additionally, during the economic distress of the 1980s that occurred under President Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship, the government targeted education to cut overall spending, restructuring the education system so that it was primarily funded by municipalities instead of the federal government — a program that to date has not yielded positive results and has forced families to turn to private schooling. Chile needs to completely rethink its public school system model to alleviate this cyclical problem in which the poorest remain unable to access education — and with it, social mobility.
Student protests for education reform in Santiago are frequent — and often newsworthy for the violence between protestors and government — but produce no tangible results. President Michelle Bachelet has faced difficulties in attempts to reform the tax system to fund new education programs and make schools truly free. Her plans have yet to be implemented; however, Chileans as a whole still support reform to create low-cost, accessible education for all. They continue to protest in the streets and at their universities in hopes of improving their educational opportunities.
How much would the planned education reform cost in Chile? Total estimates add up to about $5 billion: $1.7 billion to cover expenses that would otherwise be funded by tuition, $2.3 billion to pay educators and $1 billion to transition local government-operated schools back to state control. In 2013, Chile spent $5.44 billion in military expenses. Chile may not be able to find all the money for education reform in its military budget, but the country would benefit from significant cuts to military spending that could fund these goals. As the military dictatorship of Pinochet is still at the forefront of the minds of the Chilean populace, the government may find that decreasing military spending even by a small percentage in favor of education would be well received by the majority of the population.
Significant reforms in Latin America’s public education systems will only occur over generations. However, in the non-war context the region is currently enjoying, it may be wise for some Latin American countries to pull away from military spending to support the education sector. It has worked for Costa Rica, and gradually, it may work for other Latin American nations like Chile as well.
Alexia A. Rauen is an intern for the Baker Institute Latin America Initiative.