Vouchers. Charter schools. Privatization.

As the corporate education reform movement reshapes public education in much of the United States, a logical question is: How might this end? What could U.S. education look like in 20 years if current trends toward privatization continue?

One possible scenario can be found 5,000 miles south in Chile.

Chile endured a military coup in 1973 that overthrew the democratically elected president and installed General Augusto Pinochet as dictator. The coup led to decades of political repression. It also spawned a radical education overhaul inspired by the free-market economics of Milton Friedman.

The end result is that enrollment in the country’s public schools has plummeted by nearly half, from 78 percent to 40.7 percent, between 1981, when Pinochet launched the reforms, and 2010.

Enrollment in new for-profit, state-subsidized private schools, meanwhile, has grown to more than 50 percent of all Chilean students.

Even more alarming is the wealth stratification within the system, with most children in the public school poor and most in the state-subsidized private schools affluent.

“This is where we are headed,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten, who led an American Federation of Teachers study mission to Chile in May, 2013. “We saw up close the inequity embedded in the system after 30 years of full-scale privatization —the most advanced education resources for the schools that cater to the privileged, and outdated methods and practices for those that serve the poor.”

Pinochet’s reign ended and democracy was restored in 1990. But the education reforms remain.

One of the dictator’s signature reforms was to introduce a nationwide school choice system akin to voucher systems in the United States.

The government allows families to choose between public, private or religious schools and provides a subsidy to that school for each student. With few exceptions, the funding of Chilean schools is directly tied to these per-pupil state vouchers.

The result has been the creation of for-profit, state-subsidized private schools that have grown tremendously in number and which have siphoned significant resources from the public school system into the private sector and private hands.

Because the private schools often employ selective admissions policies and charge significant tuition above the value of the government voucher, they are accessible only to affluent families or to those willing and able to borrow to pay the private tuition.

That’s why three-quarters of students in the public schools come from families with incomes in the bottom 40 percent for the country. In the private schools, 90 percent come from the top 60 percent in family income.

Jaime Gajardo, the president of the Chilean teachers union, said some families make huge sacrifices in the hope that their children will get a better education at private schools. “People spend years paying back the money that they borrow from private banks to pay for their kids to go to school,” he said.

Even with the shrinking number of students in the public schools, class sizes of 45 are not unusual because of the lack of adequate government funding, Gajardo said.

How well has this national experiment in free-market education worked?

The World Economic Forum has ranked Chile’s primary schools 119th out of 144 countries, and its math and science education 117th.

The Chilean school system has also become an engine for the perpetuation of the massive gap between the haves and the have-nots. Chile, Mexico and Turkey have the highest levels of income inequality in the world.

AFT Deputy Director for Educational Issues Rob Weil said many voucher proponents in the United States claim that vouchers have never been tried on a large scale.

“But they have, in an entire country, and they have failed,” Weil said. “Chile proves that in some institutions choice and competition are not better.”

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