 Hello my people, my name is Meacham, welcome to the SCORE channel. The first chapter of why Peruvian education sucks focused strictly on public education, but I can't give private schools a free pass. Oh no. Private schools in Peru are part of the problem, and it would be a huge mistake to ignore the role they play in Peruvian education. So how much of a role do they play? Our first chart shows the percentage of high schoolers enrolled in both public and private schools. Both bars will add up to 100, so what you're seeing right now is what it would look like if every country had a 50-50 split. Half their students in public school, half their students in private school. Let's put these bars where they belong. I think a splash of color is in order. There we go. The yellow side represents public schools and the blue is for private schools. I guarantee that bar at the top is going to surprise you. Wanna guess where Peru is? I kept most of the countries from the last video, but I've switched a few around just for fun. Starting from the bottom, we have Ireland with just 0.2% of its students attending private schools. Costa Rica at almost 8% is the lowest in Latin America. And if you recall, they're also the biggest spenders on high schoolers in the region. Clearly, there seems to be a trend here. More developed nations have less students in private school. El Salvador is the first to jump up to 16.5%. It's almost the same percentage of viewers who are subscribed to the SCORE channel. Huh. But here's where it gets interesting. Colombia is the first country to go over 20% private, and here's France hanging out at 25% right next to Argentina. And then we arrive at Peru at 26.6%. There are a few countries in the 30s and 40s, but for the most part, it's rare to see a country over 25% privatized. The ones that are go hard into the blue. India is the first country where the majority of students go to private school. And then there's Chile at an incredible 62.2%, but nobody on earth has more private schoolers than the United Kingdom. I told you it was a surprise. So what can we make of this? It's tempting to say that a low percentage of private students equals a better education system. After all, most of the countries on the bottom of this chart are places where you get a good education. But it's more complicated than that. I don't think anybody would argue that the UK system is the worst in the world, and the country considered the best, Finland, has 13% of its students in private school. Generally speaking, if you don't have a lot of people in private school, that probably means your public system is doing such a good job that private schools aren't necessary. In a country like Peru or Guatemala, where the public system is hot garbage, it makes sense that private schools would be welcome. But still, developed countries average a 90-10 split. So what's going on with the UK? Why is Chile so high up on this chart? This chart, published by Pisa, who we'll be talking about more soon, makes an important distinction. There are private schools that are completely independent of the government. Then there are schools that are privately owned and operated, but get most of their funding from the government. Chile is a perfect example of this. Even though 62% of their high schoolers attend private schools, the majority of these private schools are dependent on the government. When the United States overthrew the democratically elected social Salvador Allende and replaced him with the benevolent and loving dictator Augusto Pinochet, neoliberal economic ideas led to massive privatization of education. Similar things happened here with Alberto Fujimori. But what makes Chilean private schools different is that most of them are funded directly by the government. Many have no fees for students while others have very low fees. This is not the case in Peru, which has the highest percentage of independent private schools in Latin America. Virtually none of Peru's private schools get government funding. Instead, all of their money comes directly from the students' families. Now, I previously calculated that Peru spends $853 a year on each of its public high schoolers. So you would expect private schools to charge at least that much, right? They don't. We're going to switch to Peruvian Soul Nace because I like round numbers in this video. It's very much about Peru. We're also going to focus just on schools in Lima for a bit because that's where I was able to find accurate data. Don't worry, rest of Peru, you do get some time in this episode. Each section of this doughnut represents the percentage of private schools in Lima whose monthly tuitions fall into a given price range. This piece, for example, represents the 7% of schools that charge between 600 and 800 soles a month. Many of you watching might think that you belong to the smallest slice here, but you'd be way off. This is the 3% of private schools that charge less than 100 soles a month. I did not even know that was possible. That's less than a third of what Peru gives to its public schoolers. Now, $853 is about 3,400 soles at an exchange rate of around one to four. Private schools typically charge families 10 months out of the year, so 340 soles is the number to beat. The largest slice by far doesn't even come close. This is the 100 to 200 soles bracket, and it represents an astounding 30% of private schools in Lima. Alright, surely the next one will do it. Nope. Darn. If you're keeping track, that's at least 58% of Lima's private schools that charge less than what the Peruvian government gives to its students. We finally eclipse the 400 soles mark with the next chunk, although, of course, some of those are also under 340. The 400 to 1,000 soles range combined for 24% of the total. Finally, we reach the last piece. 24% of private schools in Lima charge more than 1,000 soles a month. Ah, damn it, I said we needed more money into education, not less. The fact that over half of Lima's private schools have less resources than their public counterparts is not promising. But hey, economic conservatives swear that government screws everything up and the private sector is always better than the state, so maybe these schools are just super efficient. Every three years, the Peruvian government performs a standardized test to measure student performance in math and reading. Manuel Marcos published a paper at the San Marcos National University that compared Lima's private school performance to public school performance on this test. Conveniently for me, he broke it down further by looking at how much those private schools charged. He only looked at the math scores, but I think it'll be good enough. As far as the test goes, the Ministry of Education sets three milestones for students' grades. 480 is essentially the bare minimum. If you're down here, I've got some burgers that need flippin'. A score of 575 means you're doing pretty well, you're making good progress. 640 is the satisfactory level. If you're up here, you're where you should be or better. Manuel broke his schools down into five categories. We've got the public schools, which are free, low-cost schools that charge between 50 and 250 soles, mid-level schools charging between 250 and 850, high-cost schools that charge between 850 and 1700, and finally, the elite schools that charge more than 1700 soles a month. Public schools lead off with a score of 609, not bad. That's within the acceptable range. I would expect the low-cost schools would perform worse since they're getting less resources than the public schools do, and lo and behold, that is absolutely correct. With a horrendous score of 554, the average student at one of these schools is way worse off than they would be in a public school. But Manuel's mid-level goes all the way up to 850 soles a month, so you'd think they should be able to top the public sector. Praise yourselves. 608, a single point. There are families in this group providing their school with double the amount the government does, and yet the performance is identical. Next time someone tells you the government is always more inefficient, show them this. But money must be able to have some impact, right? It does, and you'd see it here now that the high-cost schools finally show a return on investment with a score of 649. The elite schools score an incredible 671 points. The maximum on the test is 700. Clearly, these elite schools do get outstanding results. Perhaps the message here is that you need at least 850 soles per student per month to have a good education at Lima. Manuel didn't explain exactly why he divided the schools up in this way, but I think I see a more profound idea in his data. Let's bake a new donut using his numbers instead of mine. Now, instead of looking at the percentage of schools, this time we're looking at the percentage of students who go to schools in each of Manuel's brackets. 47.63% of students go to public schools in Lima, which is just half a point shy of the 48.14% represented by the two lowest groups put together. Combined, these three slices make up 95.77% of all students in Lima. 95.77% is not performing at the level the government would like to see. The point this study makes clear is that just 4.23% of students in Lima get the education they deserve. The rest are stuck paying for an inferior service. Now, to be fair to private schools, they do typically outperform public schools at the secondary level, but even then, their level of achievement on this test isn't outstanding. At best, 29% of students reach the satisfactory marks for a given subject. The vast majority of private schools in Peru suck, but even the ones that are doing a good job are still contributing to a major problem in Peru. Social segregation is hard to measure, but people smarter than me have managed to do it. The Garard Index, also known as the G Index, is one way to measure social segregation in education, and it's the way Javier Murillo from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid chose to do it, so good enough for me. The G Index tells you what percent of a group would have to change schools in order to achieve perfect Thanos-level balance. Let me give you an example. Let's imagine a region with three schools. In one of these schools, there are 12 weebs. None of the other schools have any weebs, so if we want an equal distribution of weebs, we'd need to relocate eight of the original 12. That would be a G Index of 0.66, two thirds of the population. This chart shows us the G Index for secondary schools in urban areas in various regions of Peru. There are two bars for each, one for the lowest 10% of the population and the other for the wealthiest 10%. For comparison's sake, Finland has a G Index of just under 0.3, making it the least segregated school system on record. However, it's also a country with a lot of economic equality in general, so that shouldn't come as a surprise. Before I dive into this chart, I think you should know what it means to be in the bottom 10% or the top 10% in Peru. The bottom 10% of people nationwide earned 164 solos a month in 2016, the most recent year data's available. I don't know how it's even possible to survive on 164 solos a month, but apparently 10% of the population does. On the other hand, the top 10% averages 3129 solos a month per person, which is more than enough for a comfortable life anywhere in the country. I used to live on much less and I was perfectly fine. So how segregated are Peruvian students? Well, turns out we're one of the worst in the world in that regard. I took the five wealthiest urban regions, but I did split out the Lima provinces because they're quite revealing. What you'll notice right away is that there's generally a big gap between the top 10% bar and the bottom 10% bar. In other words, this means the wealthiest people are segregating themselves much more than the poorest people. The exceptions are where wealth is more equally distributed. When there's less of a gap between rich and poor, you tend to see similar G index numbers across the board. That's why Finland's two bars are almost exactly the same. Their poorest people are not that much poorer than their richest people. They're closer together. There's no reason to segregate. Lima's provinces say both the exact opposite and the exact same thing. See, the provinces around Lima are quite poor and we see that the G index only goes up by about three points. In the story, Beowulf, there's a dragon that sits on a horde of gold. That's the top 10%. But in Lima's outskirts, there is no gold. Nobody becomes a dragon. Where there is gold, we see dragons. La Libertad, Hondo Trujillo, has an enormous gap. The poorest people are fairly well distributed, but nearly two out of every three wealthy people is segregated. And similar situations play out across the country, but I really wanna focus on Arquipa and the city of Lima, which have strikingly similar and extremely high numbers. A G index of over 0.5 is considered extremely high and would rank higher than the majority of countries. Rio hasn't studied them all, but Lima and Arquipa would rank much higher than any of the European nations he's examined. But in Peru's urban regions, it's clearly marked. With the G index of 0.5255 and 0.513 over, Arquipa and Lima respectively, these are some of the most divided places on earth. We often say that the wealthy people in Lima live in a bubble, but so do the poor people. And the situation for the top 10% is even more pronounced. At 0.6664 and 6265, you're looking at extreme segregation. For reference, the United States, which used to literally prohibit black people from attending white schools, sits at 0.33 today on this scale. Peru's two most important cities are twice as segregated as the United States is today. What makes this segregation possible? School choice, the freedom to choose where you go to school. When people have the freedom to decide where they want to go to school, they essentially also have the freedom to decide who they will be surrounded by, who their kids will grow up with, who their friends will be, who will influence them. And so naturally, people will typically segregate themselves according to economic lines, but perhaps also due to other lines like religious lines or racial lines. School choice is often praised as a way to bring competition into education and bring up school quality, but it's not all it's cracked up to be. Here in Peru, you seem to have plenty of school choice. There are tons of private schools, but what choice are you making really? The poor have no choice, but to get whatever crappy education they can afford. Meanwhile, the wealthy have some choice, but given the small number of quality schools, it's not much of one. And that's why a lot of these supposedly great private schools are actually terrible for their students and I wouldn't send my hypothetical child to them in a thousand years. Ultimately, there really is no choice. School choice hasn't improved the quality of education in Peru. All it's really done is allow the wealthiest people to hide from the school problem. And even they're not getting the best service that they could possibly be getting. Here's the proof. The program for international student assessment, or PISA, is a great way to look at educational outcomes. It removes national curriculums from the equation and measures everyone with the same stick. I took the average scores from the 2018 PISA test for all the Latin American countries that took it and some of our popular destination countries, along with a couple of top performers, just to show you how far we are from being even remotely competitive internationally. Good news, Peru is not dead last today. Argentina and Brazil actually sit behind Peru, whose score of 401.7 is still remarkably low, 65th in the world to be precise. We see a step up for Costa Rica and Mexico, followed by another jump up for Uruguay to 423.7, and then we arrive at our Latin American leader, Chile, with 437.7. But Chile's success still only puts it in 46th place worldwide. Italy's in 34th. We've got France and the USA right next to each other to around 495 points. We finally break into the 500s with countries like the Netherlands and UK. Ireland is number 12 in the world, which again lends credence to the idea that a well-funded public school system with minimal privatization is probably the best recipe for success. Canada takes 8th place with 516.7 points, but this massive bar here. This one belongs to the students of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Shenzhen. I probably butchered that pronunciation just now, but those are students in mainland China with an absolutely jaw-dropping score of 578.7, they lead the world. If privatization is the answer, these results suggest it's the wrong answer. While there are high-performing countries with lots of private schools like the UK or the Netherlands, those schools are mostly funded and regulated by the government, unlike Peru's. Chile likewise takes a mostly hands-off approach to its private schools, and while their results certainly are better, they invest a lot more into their students, so you'd expect even more performance than what they're actually getting. Peru's public system needs more money so that it can push the private sector to step up its game. The government probably should get more involved in these private schools, funding them directly and regulating them more strictly. Peru's education system needs to be redesigned from the ground up. If only there was someone who understood the problems in education and had the power to make the change we all need.