This presentation addresses the societal consequences of the rise of private education provision in Peru, especially its impact on widening patterns of segregation within the school system that operate against poorer families and its impact on broader ideas about the role of education for social justice and as vehicle for strengthening citizenship and social cohesion. The presentation also examines the regulatory and accountability framework within which private education provision operates and the consequences this has for poor families and discuss how families from poor backgrounds make educational decisions and how and why they choose to send their children to private schools.

1. The default privatization of
Peruvian education and the
rise of low-fee private schools:
better or worse opportunities
for the poor?
María Balarin, PhD

2. The rise of private education in
Peru
• Two failed early attempts in the 1990s to
introduce endogenous privatization reforms
(following the Chilean model)
• In 1998 the government passed the 882
Legal Decree for Promoting Private
Investment in Education
– Liberalised investment enabling schools to
operate for-profit
– Simplified procedures for opening schools
– Provided tax incentives for investors
• Explosive growth of private education,
especially in major cities, with no public
funding

3. Evolution of national enrollments in
private and public educationucation
86% 81% 75%
14% 19% 25%
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
1997 2005 2012
Distribución de la matrícula en EBR Escolarizada para
menores a nivel nacional según gestión
Perú 1997, 2005, 2012
Privada
Pública

4. Private education in lima
• Lima, a desert city of
9million people at the feet
of the Andes,
concentrates almost 1/3
of the country’s
population
• And almost half of
enrollments in basic
education
Proportion of private and public
education enrollments in Lima (2012)
57%
43%
Distribución de la matrícula en EBR
Escolarizada para menores según gestión
Lima 2012
Pública
Privada

5. The rise of private education in Lima

7. Assessing the impact of private
education growth
Avoiding simplification: Importance of considering equity and social cohesion
impacts and not only ‘productive efficiency’ and freedom of choice (Belfield and
Levin 2002)
When considering equity and social cohesion we need to take into account:
• Markets and segregation: Educational quasi-markets have been shown to
increase seggregation through combined effects of selection by schools and
self-selection by families, where higher SES families are better positioned to
make choices. In full markets segregation effects can be expected to deepen.
• Segregation and composition effects: In highly seggregated and stratified
education systems, poor students concentrated in schools wih high poverty
intakes tend to fare worse. Why should this differ in low-fee private schools?
• Methodological issues when considering private vs public school efects:
test results need to be controlled by average school SES rather than individual
SES level. When this is done, general differences between private and public
schools tend to disappear (see Somers, McEwan, Willms 2004; Carnoy et al
2005)

8. The context in which poor families choose private
schools
• The private school sector is tremendowly diverse and
stratified along a very wide range of quality
• Residential segregation is high and National
Assessments have shown that achievement in
private schools in the poorest areas is similar and
sometimes worse than in public schools
• Recent research using PISA test results, show that
Perú is the Latin American country with the deepest
educational segregation and where students’ SES is
most strongly corelated with achievement (Benavides
et al 2014)
• Educational segregation has deepened during the
period in which private education growth has been
highest

9. Peru’s unregulated private education market
• How well regulated private services are “is
perhaps the single most important issue in
the privatization of basic social services”
(Klees 2008)
• In Peru effective regulation of the private
education sector is almost non-existent
• Especially after decentralization when
executive and supervisory capacities were
transferred to regional governments

10. Peru’s unregulated private
education market
• There are a number of norms that often superimpose or contradict each
other, as well as normative voids
• There is confusion as to whether the Ministry of Education or the Consumer
Protection Agency should regulate private schools
• Regulations are not properly applied due to functional weaknesses at
regional and local levels (no regular personnel, lack of resources, etc)
• Local authorities do not collect or process data nor perform any regular
supervisory role with regard to private schools (only ad hoc inspections
when problems emerge)
• Little is known about what happens inside private schools – no data on
profit/not for profit status; student SES, etc.
• Great degree of heterogeneity: from elite high quality and more self-
regulated schools to schools of unaceptably low quality that cater for the
poor
• Many unlicensed private schools that are under the radar

11. Poor families’ choice of low-fee private schools

12. Poor families choice of low-fee
schools
• Families pay monthly fees of between 25
and 50 US$
• Rather than being ideologically or status
driven their choice of private schools
responds to very concrete/practical
considerations – a reluctant choice for the
private sector (Walford 2011).

13. Practical concerns
• Availability of schools in
their area
• Closeness to the home
(greater security from
local risks)
Child-centred concerns
• Lower student-teacher
rations
• Closer attention to
students needs
• Protection from bullying
Academic concerns
• Narrow notions of quality
• More courses/copybooks
= greater learning
• Reponse to common
desirable and marketable
ideas: english and
computing, etc.
Most of all: High hopes
and expectations
• Education = progress

14. The other side of the private school
experience
• When faced with problems – schools demands for
greater economic contributions, unavailability to pay,
etc. – parents realise they are unprotected and
schools are often unresponsive
• This happens often for parents who often are in
precarious/unstable employment
• This has a strong impact on pupils trajectories,
which often get interrupted for variable times and
children go in and out of different schools and in and
out of the private and public sector
Will their children’s opportunities really improve?

15. Exploting the expectations of the
poor?
• Great mismatch between parents’ expectations
and the reality of low-fee private schools
• Default privatization ‘behind’ the state – very
weakly regulated and known
• Great degree of heterogeneity and evidence of
segregation and stratification in the private
sector – where quality is correlated with fees, but
higher fees don’t necessarily imply better quality
• Poor families choose from schools offering
below-standard services, with little information
and weak criteria to guide them