Private School Chains in Chile: Do Better Schools Scale Up?

Gregory Elacqua, Dante Contreras, Felipe Salazar & Humberto Santos

Cato Institute

August 16, 2011

There is a persistent debate over the role of scale of operations in education. Some argue that school franchises offer educational services more effectively than do small independent schools. Skeptics counter that large, centralized operations create hard-to-manage bureaucracies and foster diseconomies of scale and that small schools are more effective at promoting higher-quality education.  If there are policies that would make it easier to replicate the most effective schools, systemwide educational quality could be improved substantially.

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