The Politics of Schooling

Mauricio’s school, Liceo 1 Javiera Carrera, is built with a large, open courtyard, flanked by three levels of classrooms. It is the only all-girls public school in Santiago, named for a heroine of the early-nineteenth-century Chilean independence movement, the woman who fashioned the Chilean flag. The school is the first high school for girls in Chile, established in 1894, shortly after the Chilean civil war that ousted the president, Jose Manuel Balmaceda, and initiated a period of broader representation and human rights. At the entrance to the school, a white plaque bears the names of graduates who are among the “disappeared” – ten Liceo 1 students who vanished from the streets of Santiago during the Pinochet regime. Their death dates are all recorded between 1974 and 1977, though the bodies have never been recovered.

There is no heat or air conditioning in Liceo 1. Students wear their coats in the winter and bear the very hot summer as best they can, while still following the school dress code: navy skirt, white shirt, and a cotton overcoat or “lab jacket” that marks Liceo 1 students on the sidewalks and subways around the school. “The private schools have heat and air conditioning,” Mauricio says, as one of a thousand examples of how privilege operates in the country. Entering the high gate of the school each morning, one is greeted by the principal, the assistant principal, and two secretaries, who stand in a receiving line, smiling at the students as they enter. In all, there are 120 teachers in Javiera Carrera, which averages about 170 students per teacher. Of them, Mauricio estimates, forty are male; he is the only man in the English department.

The current educational system in Chile, its structure, and financing still bear the stamp of the Pinochet regime. The Chilean Constitution, reframed by Pinochet in 1980, established a “free market” model for schooling inspired by the theories of the neoliberal economist Milton Friedman. Under Pinochet, traditional public schools were largely dismantled and replaced by a modified voucher system wherein schools would have to compete with one another for students. School funding became based on attendance on the days of government inspections, a system that inspired paranoia in staff and ultimately seemed to reinforce inequalities.² Today, schools in Chile fall into three categories. First, there are private schools, tuition-based and primarily reserved for the children of the elite. Then, there are public “subsidized schools,” schools that receive subsidies from the government but that also charge mandatory tuition to students to supplement expenses. These represent the majority of schools in the country. Finally, there are traditional public schools. These schools are completely free, though they are allowed to ask parents for a nominal additional fee (financiamiento compartido) that they are not obliged to pay. According to recent statistics, only 37 percent of the schools in Chile are true public schools; the rest are private schools or subsidized schools with required fees.³ Ironically, Mauricio says, subsidized schools are most often utilized by poor families who believe their children will get a better education from these schools than from regular public schools, where fees are not required. From Mauricio’s perspective, this is absolutely not true. “Poor people are persuaded to send their kids to subsidized schools because of the uniform, because the school is clean. They’re clean because they use their resources for unimportant things. But the standards are not so good.” Salaries are lower in subsidized schools, there is no tenure, and students perform worse on objective measures – largely because these schools are run like private businesses, with those in charge pocketing the school funds, unchecked. Mauricio says that teachers are often let go after two years, replaced by younger and less-expensive recruits. Subsidized schools can fire teachers who attend protest marches; they don’t pay their teachers on time.

Protest marches often target subsidized schools as symbols of the exploitation and corruption rampant in the education system. In 2011, nationwide protests erupted across Chile, and students occupied schools from June to January. Mauricio didn’t work the entire second semester, though luckily, he was paid. Did the students achieve any of their demands? I ask. “Not a thing,” says Mauricio.

From Mauricio’s perspective, one of the more damaging reforms that persists since the Pinochet regime is the decentralization of funding for schools. As it stands now, school funds are dispersed from the central government to the local city halls, which control how the money gets spent. Each city hall sets its own standards for salaries and other school expenses. This shift from state to local authority has created serious inequities in the system, he says. Though funding is supposed to be the same in each district, in reality, schools are vulnerable to the whims of the city hall systems. There is a minimum of funding mandated by the state; beyond that, local bureaucrats can allocate funds as they see fit, and some schools suffer under the system. Indeed, funding differences can be considerable. Liceo 1, with a generous city hall, receives almost 30 percent more in funding than other schools in the area. These kinds of discrepancies happen often, Mauricio says, and schools and teachers are powerless to do anything about it.

The move toward budget decentralization meant that many of the longtime incentives for teacher improvement (salary hikes for additional degrees, for example) were removed. Teachers who were due these funds at the time that the reforms were first instituted ended up stuck in a decades-long fight for lost compensation. “The government said, ‘okay, don’t worry. We will give you that money very soon.’ Then time went by, and nothing happened. Most of the teachers have died waiting for the money, which is called here deuda histórica (historical debt).” Mauricio explains that, though the current administration is more progressive in its policies, no government wants to pay out the many millions of pesos to this elderly cohort that has little political power. “You can see them at the strikes with their white hair,” says Mauricio, “holding up protest signs, still calling for their stolen funds.” While these poor teachers struggle, he says, the wealthy thrive. They send their children to the schools near the mountains, on the outskirts of town, where buildings are lavishly appointed and teachers are well paid. Mauricio says that people who live in those regions tend to be right wing. “They are not supportive of the unions. You can ask them,” he says. “They will not be embarrassed to tell you.”

***

Unlike most of his colleagues, Mauricio had an unusually easy time getting his first position, a fact he attributes partly to good grades and largely to luck. “When I finished the university, I decided to move to Santiago, because Valdivia was a very small town with few schools, very few positions,” he explains. “This was 1998, and I needed to work not only for me, but also for my family that was depending on my income. One of my professors advised me, ‘okay, why don’t you leave your resume at the Santiago city halls?’ So that’s what I did. It was a lucky day.” Almost immediately, the human resources department called Mauricio and told him about a retirement that had just taken place at Liceo 1. The need was urgent, they said; it was already the second week of the semester. Mauricio was interviewed immediately. “I remember that I was received by one of the assistant principals. She looked at me and said, ‘You are so young’ … and I was! I remember her face,” Mauricio laughs, mimicking the look of incredulity he encountered. “Then, because they needed a teacher, she said, ‘Okay, we’ll see.’ … I’ve been teaching at the school ever since.”

The match of teacher and school was a good one. Mauricio fit in immediately and enjoyed the work. Several years into his work, however, his temporary position was reclassified as a tenured post. In order to stay on, he would need to compete for that permanent position with candidates from around the country, since these tenured positions in Chile are open to anyone with three years of full-time teaching experience. Mauricio says that the position was advertised in El Mercurio, the national paper. He still vividly remembers the formal interview that followed his application – the first such interview he had ever done. “There was one representative from the Ministry of Education, one representative of the city hall, one representative of the teachers’ union, a teacher of English, of course, and the principal of the school; four people there,” he says. Mauricio spoke about his commitment to teaching, his philosophy of education, his love of English. “They told me afterwards that mine was the best interview.” From that point on, Mauricio kept winning awards: in 2007, he received a national Teacher of the Year award that was presented to him in a lavish ceremony by Chilean President Michelle Bachelet. Only two years after that, Mauricio’s colleagues voted him Teacher of the Year in his own school. Then, he also won the citywide award. “There’s nothing left but a global award,” he laughs. All of this early success led to offers that would have taken him out of the classroom. He describes, for example, a 2004 invitation from the Chinese government to work at a Chinese television station in Beijing. “They were looking for someone who could speak Spanish and English – to help with their programming.” Mauricio considered it very briefly. But the salary they offered was so low, he says, “I would have returned poorer than when I left.”

As a veteran teacher, Mauricio has gained real flexibility in the way he organizes his weekly schedule. He now teaches three days a week, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and then grades papers on Mondays and Fridays. Given his enormous enrollments, this structure works best for him. Grading days are mostly uninterrupted, and Mauricio can work in the teachers’ room, the library, or even at home. The downside of this schedule is that midweeks are crammed with teaching from morning to evening. At Javiera Carrera, there are eight forty-minute periods in a day. On Tuesdays through Thursdays, Mauricio teaches all eight of those periods, with two fifteen-minute breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. It is an extra challenge, with 200 students, to learn everybody’s name, let alone to get to know their private interests or problems. Students understand this, he says, and they forgive their teachers for it. Sheer numbers also end up dictating the contours of the curriculum. Mauricio spends most of this time on reading, grammar, and listening skills. Writing necessarily takes a second place in the curriculum, as Mauricio and his colleagues grapple with the huge volume of papers.

Mauricio’s first stop on a typical Tuesday is in the massive, open teachers’ room on the first floor. The space, the size of a small auditorium, is laid out with round work tables and small lockers in which teachers stow books and personal belongings. Behind the locker area is a smaller space with some old stuffed chairs; the walls here are lined with photographs of distinguished alumnae of Javiera Carrera, which include the current Chilean president herself, Michelle Bachelet. Teachers come and go, greeting one another, stowing books and papers in their lockers. Mauricio introduces me to one of his friends, an English teacher, Sandra, who, at sixty-two, will be retiring at the end of the year. “Thank God,” she says. She has a bad back, Mauricio says. “It is grueling work, hard on the body.” In retirement, without 200 papers to grade, Sandra plans to return to her first love, music. She plays the guitar and loves the folk music of Chile. Finally, she’ll have time to do these things, she says. Sandra is taking advantage of a new government incentive for older teachers to retire, a one-time payment of 21 million pesos, plus pension. From Mauricio’s perspective, the incentive is very worthwhile and won’t last long. Each time a new administration comes in, at four-year intervals, teachers need to renegotiate salaries and pensions, he says, and there is no guarantee that such a generous deal will come around again.

In the Chilean system, students stay together in one classroom all day, and teachers move from room to room. Before each of his classes, Mauricio picks up a large green ledger book from the office and brings it into his classroom. There, he records both attendance and grades. At the end of each class, the book is returned to the office so that the next teacher, teaching that particular group, can pick up the ledger and record his or her grades. There is a lot of walking throughout the day, from classroom to classroom, office to office. Teachers lug large canvas bags from place to place; stopping to chat with colleagues on stairwells and in the open hallways.

Mauricio’s first-period class is in the “modern” part of the building, an annex built in the 1960s and aging in the particular way that modern buildings do. Water seems to be leaking through the metal window frames, and the cement exterior walls are stained. It is late April, and Mauricio’s classroom is chilly; one of the dark-blue curtains is falling off its rod, the Formica floor has seen better days. There is a ceiling-mounted projector and screen, a series of large fans, a white board, and cabinets, some broken from their hinges, lining the back wall.

The class begins at 8 a.m., but because of the city’s unpredictable transportation system, Mauricio says, students are allowed to arrive ten or fifteen minutes late. Because Liceo 1 admits students through competitive testing, many live fairly far away and must travel for up to an hour each morning. At the start of class, there are forty students present. As the session progresses, half a dozen more trickle in, quickly pulling out their workbooks, heads lowered. Twenty-two double desks fill the space from front to back.

“Now, misses … we begin!” he calls out. “Good morning, students!”

“Good morning, teacher!” they sing back in unison.

Mauricio starts the class by asking for volunteers to fill in answers to grammar questions he has put up on the board. “Don’t worry. Don’t worry,” he says, over and over. “Don’t be afraid to get it wrong.” He selects two volunteers to approach the board and write their answers underneath his chalked questions.

“First one,” Mauricio says, “yes or no? … . No.” He points to a student’s incorrect solution – “Frank asked to Ellen when the party begun” – erases it, and writes the proper response. “Past perfect,” he says as he writes, “Begun or began?” The class calls out the answer and he writes it as they bend to correct their own papers.

After correcting both sentences on the board, he distributes a Xeroxed worksheet and reviews the instruction with the students, asking them to work alone or in pairs, to use their books, and consult him if they have any questions. Forty-six heads bend to the task. Several minutes pass.

“So any questions, misses?” Mauricio circulates around the class as the students work, consulting a bright, soft-colored textbook with explanatory exercises. After ten more minutes, a soft rumble of voices begins.

“Questions, doubts, problems?”

At twenty minutes, the conversation level rises, signaling that students are finished.

“Hurry up,” says Mauricio, “it’s almost time to be done.”

The thrust of the next exercise is to convert spoken dialogue into “reported dialogue.” The worksheet, drawn from an Internet resource, documents a two-way conversation between the fictional “Liz” and “Ian” about the use of invisible ink. The students must convert the worksheet’s “conversation” into an “objective report” of the conversation, as if they were journalists. The worksheet begins with an example:

Sample – Liz: “What is invisible ink?”

Answer – “Liz asked Ian what invisible ink is.”

Everyone gets to work, and the room is silent. Mauricio moves up and down the aisles, looking over the shoulders of his students.

“Any questions? Any problems?” he says. Then, “Hurry, misses, only ten minutes left.”

This work, Mauricio tells me, is review for next week’s test on the unit. Mauricio has designed his classes around month-long units in which two weeks are devoted to the introduction and practice of new material, then a week of review, and finally an examination. Everyone approaches the material differently, he says, but faculty share and support each other. Given the large class sizes, much of the period is spent on deskwork, with students collaborating on worksheets that Mauricio has created from textbooks, Internet sources, or his own imagination. Mauricio and his colleagues send their materials each evening to the school’s official Xeroxer. Then, when he arrives at school the next morning, he picks up the giant packets of Xeroxed materials for the day’s classes. It’s an efficient system for the teachers, and one that spares them long lines waiting for a machine. It also spares students the burdensome cost of textbooks, which are not provided by the school itself.

Ninety percent of Mauricio’s curriculum is grammar and reading comprehension, with little classroom time devoted to literary analysis or discussion. Students are sometimes assigned reading at home, Mauricio says, but the focus is only on comprehension, because it is this that the examinations will measure. Mauricio says he is keenly aware that this emphasis on mechanics puts his students at a disadvantage compared with their wealthy counterparts. Private schools, according to Mauricio, don’t use the ministry’s curriculum because they find it too basic. These affluent schools create their own curricula and scope and sequence, often based on what is being done in the United States or in other affluent countries. It is another example of the uneven distribution of cultural capital and a strategy for maintaining the status quo. Mauricio says he would love to do other things with his class: break them into small groups, engage in conversation, and do group projects. But the massive class sizes are daunting, and it would be cumbersome and impractical to try moving desks around. The best he can do to vary the tedium of direct instruction is to have students go up to the board to write their answers. This is a strategy he uses often, and students seem willing to make public mistakes without embarrassment.

At the end of the class, Mauricio calls two girls up to the front, and they write their responses beneath his written prompts. Again, both answers are incorrect, and Mauricio again solicits the class to correct them.

“Present perfect, past perfect. ‘She said she had drawn … ’ Remember, if you change one tense, you change all of them. Had done. Past perfect. Had been … ”

Minutes before the end of class, Mauricio takes roll call (a strategy he uses to record all the late arrivers). He calls out the names, and each student in turn responds with a formal acknowledgment: “Present, teacher.” All forty-five students are present and accounted for.

***

Between classes, Mauricio introduces me to Anna, the union representative for Javiera Carerra. She is a warm, open-faced woman who has spent more than two decades in the school. When I explain my research to her, Anna replied that the schools in Chile “are going downhill.” She, like Mauricio, has taught through numerous political administrations and has developed a kind of resigned and bemused perspective that seems common in veteran activists. The classes are too large, she says, the workload is impossible, the resources get smaller and smaller. Mauricio encourages me to describe to her the draconian cuts I saw in the Athens schools, the strikes and protests there, and the erosion of standards. Anna shakes her head, smiles ruefully, and shrugs with resignation. “Nothing surprises me,” she says.

Mauricio’s second class is in the “old building,” the original structure built in 1894. Here, the architecture is very pleasing, with long cool corridors and higher ceilings, wooden moldings and floors. The air smells of damp stone and paper. In his classroom, Mauricio again distributes Xeroxed sheets for review. The work is the same: seat-work done alone or in pairs, punctuated by board-work and recitation. Here again, forty-five students fill the classroom, leaving no seat free. Again, the students listen compliantly, bend to the task, and volunteer when called on to bring their work to the board. By the end of this second class, I have begun to feel the massive nature of the job, the weight of so many students whose futures rest in the hands of their overworked teacher. Fourth and fifth periods bring more groups of forty or forty-five. Mauricio again reviews grammar; again fills in his roster book with grades and attendance notations, again coaxes and praises his quiet and tractable students. Suddenly, in the middle of his sixth class, the silence is interrupted by protesters outside the window. Several hundred teenage boys are marching past the school, demonstrating for lower university fees and changes in the curriculum. At one point in their passing, the class collectively draws in its breath. Some of the protesters have called out a curse word to the girls inside. No one speaks, and the shock of the vulgarity hangs palpably in the air. “I think maybe they did this because they want you to join them outside,” he says. Then: “Chop! Chop! Ten minutes,” and everyone gets back to work. Even under these circumstances, there is no disruption, no insubordination, no off-task behavior. Mauricio leaves the room for several minutes to track down an aspirin. While he is gone, there is not a peep. “You see,” he says, when he returns, “they are such good students. They work even without their teacher.”

Mauricio takes me through the library, a pleasant two-level room that sits centrally between the old and new parts of the school. “We don’t have a lot of books,” he says, “and no English books at all.” On multiple occasions, Mauricio has bemoaned the fact that books, in Chile, are extraordinarily expensive, since most published books for sale in the country are printed elsewhere. What’s more, the city halls and Ministry of Education provide no resources for the acquisition of books. It is up to the individual school to decide what little discretionary funding to reroute toward their purchase, a decision that is hard to justify when there are so many other more pressing needs. Most of the books in the library are very old, hard-bound volumes that look as though they have been on the shelves, unused, for decades. There are four or five computers, some old, some newer, in an area separated by shelves. The Internet is out on this day, so no one sits at the terminals. Half a dozen students occupy the long wooden tables, doing homework.

Despite these resource limitations, Javiera Carrera is ranked high among public schools. As the only competitive-entrance, all-girls public school in Santiago, it draws a special population of bright students who have made a conscious decision to study in a single-sex environment. Mauricio says that parents choose Javiera Carrera for a range of reasons. Some merely perceive the school as a safer alternative to coed education, but many others see it as a place that encourages female empowerment. Given their academic focus, Mauricio reckons that almost all of his students will be attending college. The fact that the president attended the school also lends it prestige.

On their way out, Mauricio calls six students up to the front of the room and asks them to stay after to speak to me about their aspirations. They are among the strongest English students in Mauricio’s third-year class, all serious-faced young girls with dark hair drawn back in braids and ponytails. We begin, as I have done in other classes, by asking if any of them hope to become teachers. Five of the six say no, immediately. The sixth smiles guiltily and says, “Perhaps, if nothing else works out for me.” We all laugh. “Why don’t you want to teach?” I ask. There’s a long silence: “The work is too hard,” one volunteers. “Hard in what way?” I say. “The motivation,” says the same girl. “The students aren’t interested, and they are rude and loud. Not in this school, but in most others.” We talk about the professions they hope to pursue. Most list professions in the sciences: engineers, biologists, doctors. These are professions that bring substantial salaries and that are respected. “As long as I am going to this school [a school with an entrance exam], I might as well try for a top profession,” says one of the students. “Teachers are the very bottom of the university classes. Anyone can get a degree in teaching. It is the least competitive subject.” The students tell me that, from their perspective, there are many “lazy, ignorant teachers,” teachers who just come into the class, tell kids to open the book, and then zone out. “They hate teaching,” says one girl. “They hate kids!” says another. “Less so in this school,” says the girl who will consider teaching. “Here, it’s fifty-fifty.” “Mr. Ramirez is great,” one says. “He will work with you until you understand. But honestly, it is hard to learn to speak English with forty-five students in the room. We can learn to read or to write. But we cannot learn to speak. And because there is no English exam for entrance into the university, there is less incentive to work on English than other subjects.”

I ask the students what their parents feel about the teachers. “The same as we do. In their day, it was harder to become a teacher,” someone says. “My grandmother is a teacher, and my sister is studying to be a teacher. My sister says the other students in her class are very poor students. My grandmother says that in her day, they were the very best.” I’m reminded of what Mauricio has told me about the plethora of universities established under Pinochet, and the expansion of programs in pedagogy – the fact that there are so many people graduating with degrees in education, and no jobs. “I want to live a good life, to travel, to support a family. I can’t do that as a teacher,” concludes one of my interviewees. “My parents would be disappointed if that was all I became.”

Once every two weeks, Mauricio takes each of his classes to the computer lab, where they work on software programs designed to reinforce their grammar and expose them to American-accented spoken English. The lab was built in 2005, and though there are forty-five computers for his forty-five students, only thirty-seven of them are working. Out-of-order signs have been placed over the monitors, and students double up when they have to. The class loves the Internet, they say, but that, too, was not working on the day I tried to get online in the library. The computer teacher is a first-year recruit whose goal is to be an English teacher. She tells me she will spend one year monitoring the computers, and then she can hopefully be assigned to a regular teaching program. “Next year when I’m a regular teacher,” she says, “I’ll get pregnant and start my life.”

Throughout the day, Mauricio is free to come and go as he pleases from the school building. When he leaves the school during a free period, he signs out with an electric fingerprint machine. The machine was installed last year, “not to keep tabs on teachers,” he assures me, but rather to confirm if they are in the building should a problem occur. Mauricio repeats this distinction to me several times. The sign-in and sign-out are not punitive measures to control teachers. They are implemented to protect teachers, “should something happen.” This seems like an interesting psychological vestige of the recent past, when people did indeed disappear.

Haves and Have-Nots

One evening, Mauricio and I have dinner with a former student of mine who is now principal of the international school in Santiago. Like many educators in the international school world, Kevin and his family have moved from one international school to another. His previous posting was in Beijing; he has signed on for a two-year stint in Chile, and will soon be moving on to another country.

At dinner, we are joined by Kevin’s wife, Ann, and also the headmaster of the school and his wife. The HOS, the acronym by which he is addressed, was a former faculty member from a top U.S. university’s school of management; he has taken the post in an effort to help the school boost enrollment and update its programs. Mauricio has explained to me that the school is the most exclusive in Santiago, located in the “rich area” outside the city center. Kevin’s apartment is a beautiful, spacious retreat, high above the city. Like many of the apartment buildings in this affluent neighborhood, the picture windows offer spectacular views of downtown. Modern and graciously furnished, the apartment could be located in any major city of the world.

Our conversation at dinner underscores the differences between the world of Liceo 1 Javiera Carrera and the world of the affluent private schools. There is talk of “project-based learning,” of “design thinking,” of “cutting-edge pedagogies” and how to integrate them into the curriculum without sacrificing rigor. Kevin says that at least 40 percent of his students are native-born Chileans; the rest are from other countries. But the Chileans who enroll their children in the school tend to be the most affluent, the least likely to need financial aid. As the children of the elite, many will go on to universities outside the country, including the Ivy League. Graduates from the international school are well positioned for Ivy League colleges, the HOS says, because top American schools, intent on diversity, are interested in students from Chile, a country that is often underrepresented in their institutions. Teachers, I’m told, are also drawn from elite American schools. The head of school spoke excitedly about a new hire for next year: a young woman who had graduated from Yale and the Iowa Writers Workshop. “She is exactly the kind of teacher we look for,” he says. Toward the end of our dinner, Mauricio mentions that I have asked to be taken to the protest march the following day, and we speak about the students’ demands. The conversation turns to the subject of teachers’ salaries. At the international school, Chilean teachers make less money than foreign teachers, and I question the justice of this. “It’s just,” the HOS says, “because they are still making more than they would in a regular Chilean school.” Mauricio and I talk about this later. “How would he feel if he was paid less in a school with endless resources?” he asks. The class system is deeply entrenched.

Protests and Strikes, Redux

Thursday, there is a planned, city-wide student strike scheduled for 10:30 in the morning. Javiera Carerra students have been given permission to participate if they bring a note from their parents. The school, in other words, is tacitly endorsing their attendance at the protest. Mauricio and I also plan to attend the demonstration, and he tells the teachers this when we arrive in the teachers’ room in the morning. “Be careful of the tear gas,” a math teacher says. Today’s protest is sponsored by students; the teachers’ protest happened last week. “Too bad you missed that one,” Mauricio says.

At 10:30, most of the school leaves for the demonstration, crowding around the Xerox printer to get their permission e-mails run off. In Mauricio’s first-year class, only fourteen students remain, and the calm, quiet mood is palpably different, warm and informal. He continues the review as he did in other classes, but now each student has a chance to speak, and after several minutes, the class engages in a discussion about the differences between Spanish and English verb tenses. There is some laughter at the illogic of English grammar, and the mood in the room turns light – lighter than I have seen before. “Imagine if all the classes were like this,” Mauricio says to me. And then again for the students to hear: “You see, with a small class I can help each student. We could even talk. I don’t do this with forty-five.” The students nod, gravely.

During lunch, Mauricio and I make our way down to the area near the Parliament building, the Palace de la Moneda, past the neoclassical, art deco, and neo-Gothic buildings that line the avenues of the old city. The seat of government is located in a grand white-marble building, visible from a distance, where thousands of students and teachers have gathered. Indeed, the streets are swarming with people, many holding signs calling for budgetary and curricular reforms, for the closing of subsidized schools, for a more equitable examination system. Young men sell buttons at the side of the road, reading “No Hay Futuro Sin Educacion: Publica, Gratuita, y de Calidad!” (There’s No Future Without Education: Public, Free, and High Quality). Their complaints are the ones I have been hearing about all week: the lack of promised reform since the fall of Pinochet, the city hall system, the expense of the university, the tremendous segregation between rich and poor schools. Most politicians now support the continued fees charged by the high schools, says Mauricio, and the irony is that they themselves studied free, in a time before Pinochet.

The atmosphere is almost festive, but for the dour soldiers lining the streets, all armed with machine guns. Mauricio points out a group of white-haired protestors chanting in unison. “Those are the retired teachers who never received their wages,” Mauricio says. “They’re here at every protest. We all know they will never get their money.” He warns me not to wander to the end of the march, since tear gas is invariably used at that point. Some of the students like to taunt the police, Mauricio explains, and it always ends up in some kind of violent confrontation. As we walk, former students greet Mauricio from the thick of the crowd; a contingent of girls from Liceo 1 pass by cheering at the sight of their teacher. “Teacher! Teacher!” they cry, and Mauricio waves from the sidewalk. The demonstration continues for several hours, only to be repeated the following week and the one after that.

Salaries for Chilean teachers are an ongoing issue of concern. They are very low and getting lower, relative to the rising cost of living. Losses against inflation have occurred over the course of decades, and most teachers speak about this with a mixture of anger and resignation. Mauricio is lucky because of the generosity of his particular city hall. As a veteran teacher, he earns 935,000 pesos, or $1,300 a month. He also earns a supplement from being selected as City Teacher of the Year (asignacion de excelencia pedagógica) in 2007. The honor gave him an additional 500,000 pesos a year, paid out in two parts, fall and spring. He will receive this supplement for the next ten years. Finally, Mauricio supplements his public school salary by teaching an English class for adults at the local university every Monday and Wednesday evening. It is an easy class to teach, he says, because the group is small and the students are motivated. The work keeps him connected to the university in a way that might prove useful at some future point, he says. Full-time university teaching is a long-term goal. Mauricio’s salary allows him certain luxuries that other teachers can’t afford. He loves to travel, for example, and every year, since he began working at Liceo 1, he has used his winter vacation to explore another international city. As a single man on a strict budget, he has been able to visit Hungary, Austria, Peru, Great Britain, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Greece, Croatia, France, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium.

Still, as everyone reminds me, most teachers with comparable experience earn considerably less. Mauricio says that the starting salary for the average teacher is about 500,000 pesos a month, or $720. Unions, according to Mauricio, have had little success making headway on the issues of salaries and resources. Their impotence in forcing change has made the union unpopular with some teachers. Though he himself is a member, not all public school teachers have chosen to join. For most who don’t join, their reasons are financial and not political: 5 percent of a teacher’s salary is withdrawn for dues, and many teachers who are just scraping by cannot afford that fee. Still, Mauricio feels strongly that union membership is necessary. Successful or not, unions try hard to negotiate fair salaries each year. “They defend you. If you have a problem, they are with you. If you have an issue with your principal or the city hall, they are there. When we are fighting for an increase in our salary, they are there.” But Mauricio doesn’t judge those who can’t afford to join.

Mauricio has a deep commitment to equity and social justice, and speaks often about politics, the injustices of class, and the tyrannies wrought in the name of religion. For example, divorce in Chile was not legalized until 2004, he says. The resistance from conservative factions was full of dire warnings that preyed on the worst fears of the poor: “The family is going to disappear!” he says, mimicking the hysteria that preceded the vote. “Abortion, of course, is against the law, in every circumstance. Pinochet, before leaving office, passed a law outlawing abortion, even when the pregnancy threatened the health and life of the mother. ‘It’s an act of God,’ say the conservatives. Still they have debated this since 1992,” Mauricio says. As we walk downtown together, a group of bedraggled men and women chant against homosexuality, holding signs in a small park near the Parliament. “Nut cases. Crazies,” says Mauricio. “Everyone knows these are insane people.” Still, it is rattling.

Mauricio sees the rise of the right as an imminent danger to his country. Sebastian Pinera, Chile’s previous right-wing president, is hoping to come back into office, he says, and if that bid is successful, he will eliminate all the progressive programs that Bachelet has tried to implement. Mauricio returns to this threat again and again: The conservative forces are dead set on undermining all the enlightened policies. “They discuss and discuss in order to postpone a vote for implementation,” a kind of stonewalling strategy that has so far allowed few reforms to pass. Conservative dirty tricks have persisted, he says, since the time of Pinochet. The most damaging was a change in voting policy that continues to allow conservative politicians to stall legislation that would help the poor. In a Pinochet-era strategy designed to maintain conservative control, all political challengers have to get double the votes of incumbents in order to win their elections. The Bachelet administration is trying to change the system, but nothing has passed so far.

Mauricio’s dramatic descriptions of the “two Santiagos” – one rich and one poor – seem borne out in our meeting with the head of the private school. The people who live in the rich areas, Mauricio says, never go downtown. They stay in their own area, go to their own schools, shop in the lovely malls that ring the center section of the city. “Did you notice that the HOS doesn’t know the downtown area – the names of the streets, the location of the school?” he says. In a large demonstration against abortion a month ago, Mauricio says, conservative forces shipped in protesters from other parts of the city. “Wealthy blonds were brought in with their maids,” Mauricio says. He could tell, he said, because the maids were wearing their aprons.

The injustices of class prejudice touch on many aspects of his life. Most of his friends, he says, are not schoolteachers, because teachers have neither the time nor the discretionary income to socialize, travel, or go to the cinema or restaurants. He is keenly aware of the differences between his own experiences at Liceo 1 and those of his colleagues in other schools. “In some schools, you have very difficult discipline problems, and teachers are alone; they don’t have support.” Resources, too, are very limited. “Basic things like paper,” he says, “are in short supply.” In order to receive resources like laptops and DVD players, schools must compete with other schools, submitting applications for improvement projects. Javiera Carerra’s status as a test-enrolled school – and the alma mater of the president – puts it at an advantage. Some schools get nothing. It isn’t a fair system, says Mauricio, “but fairness has never driven the decisions of people in power.”

In the winter term after my visit, Mauricio writes to say that the school is once again closed down because of student strikes. Recently, protests have turned violent as police fired tear gas and students set fires to cars and to trash cans. He has no idea how long it will last, but several weeks have already passed with no change in the status of negotiations between the students and the city. From the outside, student complaints seem ironic. The current education minister, Nicolas Eyzaguirre, has been trying to enact a progressive agenda that would close down many of the pay-for-service schools created under Pinochet and address the practice of requesting copayments in public schools. Eyzaguirre has pledged to reform the system so that, by 2017, “Ninety-three percent of elementary and secondary schools would be free.” For this, he has been attacked from both the left and the right. Both claim he is trying to eliminate choice.

Elsewhere, there are other forms of protest. To bring attention to rising student loan debt, an artist named Francisco Tapia, or “Papas Fritas” (French fries), confessed to burning $500 million in student loan documents after stealing them from the Universidad del Mar in Santiago, during a student takeover of the campus. “It’s over; it’s finished,” Tapia says in a video, posted on YouTube. “You don’t have to pay another peso. I am just like you, living a shitty life, and I live it day by day – this is my act of love for you.” In a sequence of events that seemed to underscore the absurdity of Chilean politics, the ashes from Tapia’s student loan documents were then put on display at the Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral, the national cultural center in the Santiago. Soon after, police collected the ashes as evidence to investigate the theft of university property. To complicate matters further, Chile’s Education Ministry has now shut down the university for financial irregularities, and, according to the Santiago Times, a court has ruled that the university will have to individually sue each student whose promissory note was burned, in order to continue to collect on the student loan debt. Tapia, says the paper, may also face jail time. ⁴

Mauricio has returned to Valdivia to wait out the strike and get a bit of rest and relaxation.