Social segregation in public and private schools in latin america

ABSTRACT:

This research studies the relationship between private education and school segregation by socioeconomic status in Latin America. To achieve our aim, we conducted a special data mining of the database of TERCE estimating the index of Dissimilarity, Socio-Economic Inclusion, and Square Root of a sample of 119,967 students from 5,733 schools in 15 in Latin American countries. The results indicate that: (i) there is a strong positive relationship between the weight of private education and segregation index of a country, and (ii) private schools are more segregated than public schools, especially students with less socioeconomic status families; however, there are many differences between countries. Our research warns about the negative effects on educational equity policies encouraging of private education in Latin America.

Keywords:
School segregation; Public and private schools; Socioeconomic status; Latin America