99 Class Isolation: Examining Private Schools in Chile Cristina Alarcón 1 Introduction Private schools are not a fringe phenomenon in Chile. Nearly 60% of all Chilean pupils attend private schools. The country ranks at the very top among all OECD countries, in which only 10% of pupils on average attend private schools (OECD 2014, p. 5). Even in the Latin American context, Chile is the leader in the field of private schooling (OECD 2014, p. 5). A historical retrospect, however, shows that the situation was nearly the reverse just 36 years ago; in 1980, 78% of the pupils attended public schools 1 (Corvalán et al. 2009, p. 12). How can the rapid growth of private schooling be explained? And how can we elucidate the fact that Chile has the highest social segregation rate within private and public schools of all countries participating in PISA 2009 (OECD 2011a)? Chile is the country in which the most radical, far reaching and long lasting market and competition-based governance in education has been introduced (Ver- ger and Bonal 2016, p. 3). The establishment of quasi-markets through decentral- isation, free choice of schools and the introduction of educational vouchers, as well as national large-scale assessments, was imposed in the early 1980s and cre- ated the best conditions for the establishment of state-subsidised private schools. © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH 2017 T. Koinzer et al. (eds.), Private Schools and School Choice in Compulsory Education, DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-17104-9_7 C. Alarcón (*) Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, Department of Education Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany E-Mail: cristina.alarcon@hu-berlin.de 1 I will use the term “public schools” (escuelas públicas) as a synonym of “state schools”, i.e. primary and secondary schools that are maintained by the state.