Scaling up in Chile

On international tests, Chilean students in 2006 outperformed those of all other Latin American countries in reading and were second only to Uruguay in math (see Figure 1). But although Chile?s educational performance appears to outstrip that of its closest competitors, the country?s educational system has become highly controversial among scholars throughout the western hemisphere. By and large, the education systems of most Latin American countries are all but ignored by outside scholars. However, the Chilean system has generated a veritable cottage industry of research scholarship that has yielded a range of conflicting findings.