Are selective schools good for democracy?

Where do Latin American elites come from? If the magical realist fiction once so popular in the United States and Europe is any guide, they belong to one of the 14 families (yes, that is always the number) that since colonial times have owned all arable land – along with everything else.

But reality is more complicated than fiction. In most Latin American countries, the traditional ruling families learned long ago to share their place at the table with a different kind of elite: the urban, professional, and educated graduates of the region’s top public schools and universities. In Chile, however, that may be about to change.

Chile’s Instituto Nacional, a fiercely competitive secondary school for boys, is as old as the Republic itself. With no fees and an entrance system based entirely on merit, students from middle- and working-class families comprise the vast majority of the student body.

In last year’s college entrance examinations, 22 Institute students were nationally ranked – far more than the nine who studied at the second most successful institution, an expensive private Catholic school run by the Church’s conservative Opus Dei organization. The Instituto and its counterpart for young women, Liceo 1, have educated 18 Chilean Presidents and four of the last seven, including the incumbent, Michelle Bachelet.

Chile is far from unique in this respect. From Colegio Nacional in Buenos Aires to Stuyvesant High School in New York City, institutions that are public, meritocratic, and free have long and distinguished records of achievement across the Americas.

One might expect that such schools would make a progressive leader like Bachelet proud – not least because she herself attended one. Yet she has proposed a plan, recently approved by the Chilean Congress, that will upend the system, allowing the Instituto Nacional and two dozen other highly competitive public schools across Chile to select only 30% of their students through entrance exams, with the rest chosen by lottery. The affected schools’ students, teachers, and alumni are predictably upset.

Why would anyone wish to weaken public schools in the name of equality? Backers of the reform make two arguments – neither of which is convincing.

The first argument is that these schools’ achievements seem greater than they are. By selecting only the strongest students, critics claim, they ensure strong results, without having to add a lot of value.

This is a textbook “endogeneity” problem: Do the students excel because of the quality of the school, or does the school gain strong results because of the quality of the students?

To answer this question, a recent paper compared standardized-test performance by students who barely missed gaining admission to the Instituto to that of enrolled Instituto students. It turned out that the performance gap between the two groups grew, and the difference was statistically significant. In short, there is reason to believe that elite public schools like Instituto Nacional do make a difference for their students.

In fact, the critics  who helped to craft the reform recognize this. They argue that the performance advantage is precisely why the doors of such schools should be open to all, without entrance exams.

The proposal has a nice egalitarian ring to it; but it is far from clear that these schools and their teachers, however skillful, can have such a significant impact on a randomly selected group of students. The challenge is particularly great for schools with a special focus, such as sports, music, science, or the visual arts. After all, not just any pair of legs will allow you to play soccer like Lionel Messi, and not just any set of vocal cords will allow you to sing like Maria Callas.

The Bronx High School of Science in New York City takes children of immigrants and molds them into some of the world’s leading scientists. Not even the school’s most enthusiastic boosters – of which there are many – could argue with any certainty that it could produce such impressive results if it could not select its own students.

Latin America tried this experiment once already, with many public colleges attempting to deflect accusations of elitism by eliminating entrance examinations and tuition fees in the 1960s. In a region where a university degree had, until then, represented a ticket to the good life, enrollment predictably swelled.

But, in many places, the experiment was short-lived. Institutions like the University of Chile and Brazil’s University of São Paulo resumed their highly competitive admissions processes. Those that did not, such as the University of Buenos Aires, saw their role in shaping their countries’ academic, business, and political elites diminish.

In that last sentence, underline the word “political.” Indeed, the strongest argument for maintaining elite public schools, with their merit-based admissions policies, is political. In countries where traditional wealthy elites have long wielded power, an alternative elite drawn from the middle classes and educated under republican values is politically invaluable. It is no coincidence that many of Chile’s democratic reformers of the last two centuries were once students at the Instituto Nacional.

In last year’s Chilean college entrance exam, the second-place school was not the only expensive Catholic institution with a largely upper-class student body to perform well; the rest of the top-ten schools also fit this description. Opus Dei runs most – though not all – of them.

The dominance of such conservative, elitist institutions is why schools like the Instituto Nacional are so important. Yet once the effects of Bachelet’s recent reform kick in, their graduates may no longer be at the top of the ranks. As the elite public schools suffer, so will Chilean democracy.

This article is published in collaboration with Project Syndicate. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Andrés Velasco, a former presidential candidate and finance minister of Chile

Image: Students sit for an exam at the French Louis Pasteur Lycee in Strasbourg, June 18, 2012. REUTERS/Vincent Kessle