Social Selectivity in the Secondary Schools of Buenos Aires, La Paz, and Santiago de Chile

By comparing data on social backgrounds of students in their final year of secondary school, the value of disaggregating school system to the level of individual schools is evident. Patterns of selectivity, overall and by type of school, are found to be different for each of the three cities studied. The data support the idea that increasing access to the school system is not necessarily the same as "democratizing" access to schooling.