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EDUCATION
In 2006, high-school students in Chile took to the streets to protest the country's education system, sparking President Michelle Bachelet's first major crisis. Known as the Penguin Revolution (a term that refers to the students' white and black uniforms), the protests accomplished what decades of public debate had failed to do: force a political agreement to reform institutional practices in place since the 1980s. The student movement-perhaps the most successful in the country's history-responded to widespread complaints that despite public education funding, the system's guiding principles perpetuate socioeconomic differences.
As a result, needed change has come to Chilean education. But there is still much work to be done.
In practice, Chilean schools are segregated by socioeconomic levels. The Education Ministry classifi es them into fi ve groups using a methodology that combines information about household income, parents' educational level and characteristics of the particular educational institution. Gaps in the educational outputs of these groups increase with years of schooling. For example, upon completion of their fourth year, the gap between students belonging to the high and low ends of this segregated system reaches 26 percent in reading comprehension and 36 percent in mathematics. By the tenth year, these differences increase to 36 percent and 55 percent, respectively.
Although formal education is compulsory up to middle school, this gap in quality severely limits the ability of students in the lower socioeconomic...