The project of law of fair admission and their amendments represents a setback in terms of inclusi social on the Chilean school system students.
The proposal issued by the current Government, to promote more justice to the school admission system (which by the way, ends with the selection of students), what it does is reinforce and reproduce the principles of education market with long tradition in our country . In addition, so far not be have wielded since the Government arguments founded on robust empirical evidence that realize in Chile of the convenience and the benefits of select students in the public system according to their academic performance) mainly) measured in terms of qualifications and as well as give some priority to children and young people belonging to the SENAME with NEEP (permanent special educational needs), among others.
In addition, this legal initiative comes into contradiction with the law of school Inclusion (LIE) which prohibits establishments receiving State funding to select students.
It is more, the mere fact of rigging notes and other indicators of academic performance with “merit”, it would not take into account a set of contextual, biographical and institutional variables that would weigh with ‘justice’ that learning a student has acquired during their schooling. Although, in the second proposal of the admission just Bill, other preferential conditions (SENAME, NEEP, siblings of students already enrolled in schools, among others) are considered to be the spirit of this project is the selection above the inclusion.
Furthermore, the process of classification and ranking of students based on their grades and other indicators, which would generate is the production of “deserving” students who would be entitled to an education “of quality”, at the expense of those who they do not meet the standards, and therefore they are marginalized in a highly segregated school system.
Given this, the question is: do only the “deserving” students have the right to receive education “quality”? And what about the rest?
In this sense and using the concept of “Educational eugenics” coined by the researcher Bernadette Baker (2002), the Act of admission just to their consequential amendments and corrections project, comes to reproduce speech pointing to there first-grade students and other students who do not respond to the “student standard” that you are looking for and want to politics and that therefore remain marginalized in the teaching-learning process referred to as “quality”.
In other words, “quality education” would be only right that those who earn despite the obvious social inequalities of educational inequities, economic and social barriers that must be overcome, they are able to demonstrate through its academic performance and other indicators which is a student of first category or “meritorious”.
For the rest of the student body, only the resignation and the unwanted consequences of a policy oriented by the principles of the market: the exclusion of the right to be a creditor of an education with high standards of quality in all dimensions.
In this sense, the Bill of fair admission, brings associated with “negative externalities” in economic jargon, i.e. produces a eugenics education to all students who do not meet the condition to be meritorious, which attentive to the right constitutionally these to a “quality education and comprehensive” and at the same time enters in collision course with the intentions of achieving schools each more inclusive and democratic, as set out for example in the law on school Inclusion.
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