Escuelas públicas para pobres, escuelas privadas para ricos: relación entre educación privada y segregación escolar de carácter socio-económico en América Latina

This research studies the relationship between private education and socio-economic school segregation in Latin America. To do so, we conduct a special mining of the TERCE, OREALC/UNESCO database with a double estimation of the Gorard segregation index and the Isolation index. The study sample is composed of 119,967 students from 5,733 schools in 15 Latin American countries. The results indicate that there is a strong relationship between the weight of private education and the socio-economic school segregation of a country, so that the more students are enrolled in private schools, the greater the segregation there is and that in all countries the private schools concentrate the higher socioeconomic students, while public students welcome the most vulnerable students. With this, it is evident that a policy of promoting private education leads to more inequitable educational systems.