Chilean Senate ousts education minister

[Judi Lynn]

Chilean Senate ousts education minister
The Associated Press
April 16, 2008 - 8:56 p.m.

Lawmakers in Chile ousted the education minister on Wednesday for failing to prevent a scandal involving subsidies to private schools that overstated enrollment.

The Senate's vote also bars Education Minister Yasna Provoste from public office for five years.

Appointed by President Michelle Bachelet in July 2006, Provoste is the first cabinet-level minister to be dismissed by lawmakers since democracy was restored in 1990 after a 17-year dictatorship.

Provoste is not accused of any wrongdoing, but opposition legislators said she should be held accountable for the alleged mishandling of millions of dollars (euros) of government funds allocated to private schools.

An investigation by the General Comptroller's office showed that steep subsidies were paid to schools that overstated the number of their students. The probe, still in progress, involves some US$580 million (euro360 million).

More:
http://www.victoriaadvocate.com/news/nationworld/story/230146.html

(If you're wondering why there are subsidies to Chilean PRIVATE schools, this may help:

MANUEL RIESCO
IS PINOCHET DEAD?

......

Schools in Revolt

~snip~
..... the loce—the national education law.

The loce was promulgated by Pinochet on his last day in office in 1990, and remains the basic framework that has spurred a continuing privatization of the school system. No democratic government has so far dared to challenge it: Bachelet’s educational programme has merely called for more kindergartens, as if everything else was all right—which is very far from the case. The dismantling of the public system, enforced quite brutally by the dictatorship and continuing at a lesser pace under loce, has resulted in a reduction of over 700,000 primary and secondary students since 1974, about a quarter of the then total. The pupils who have deserted the public system have migrated to private schools, created with the lure of public subsidies. Efforts by democratic governments since 1990 to restore public expenditure on education, which was cut in half by the dictatorship, have been ineffective in stopping this process: the public system continues to lose tens of thousands of pupils each year. Today, half of all students are in private schools and universities, and families disburse half the total fees—the corresponding figures for oecd countries are respectively 19 and 8 per cent. The resulting poor quality, social segmentation, and inequity of the privatized educational system are so severe that they prompted the student protests and the overhaul of the system that is now under way.

More:
http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2685