UC Berkeley

The scholarship on school privatization and market-oriented reforms has demonstrated the negative effects on segregation and inequity triggered by this model, not only in Chile but globally. Less is known about how to transition toward a democratic-oriented education approach after decades of embedding the values rooted in a competition-based education system. This dissertation shows the challenges of trying to become true to democratic and social justice principles in a society penetrated by neoliberal beliefs and ideals amid forces that emerged after the sudden and abrupt immigration flow and a global pandemic. The Santa Fe Private Voucher School in Chile endeavored to welcome and accommodate emergent multilingual immigrant students of African descent (EMISAD). Its school community actively supported the integration of the newcomers. In an education context historically designed to make all actors compete for a scarce resource (quality education), where market-based ideals of success and high-stake testing mechanisms are at its core, welcoming students that need extra resources to achieve academic progress is, in the language of this system, an “unprofitable business strategy.” Nonetheless, a group of social justice-oriented educators is defying systemic barriers and forming a system of protection against many challenges that obstruct EMISAD’s appropriate integration into Chilean society. They work hard and, in some cases, risk their jobs to redistribute resources, provide extra academic support, and offer affection and care through trauma-informed practices. Regardless of all these efforts and good intentions, there is one significant hurdle, deeply harmful to students’ well-being, that educators have not been able to dismantle: overt anti-Black discrimination, deeply embedded in a society where the whitening project of mestizaje has successfully taken over the collective imaginary. This ethnographic case study is grounded in 600 hours of participant observation and more than 100 interviews. It critically analyzes the journey of a social justice-oriented voucher school in Chile that fully embraced the market-oriented educational model until 2012. Yet, it has since experienced deep and complex organizational changes: de-privatization, democratization, diversification, and de-marketization and tried to become a welcoming space for its new population of emergent multilingual immigrant students of African descent.