Full School Day (Chile)

This is a national school reform implemented in 1997 by the Chilean government. The reform called for public and subsidized private schools to gradually increase school time by 30% between 2007 and 2010, beginning to offer full-day activities.
Although the reform was intended to improve school performance rates, the increased time children spent in school restructured the routines of families with school-age children. The increase in education services contributed to the reduction of social vulnerability and increased mothers’ participation in the job market.

Impact evaluations

A quasi-experimental study showed that the reform in question reduced the number of hours adolescents spent without adult supervision, which affected risk behaviors related to teenage pregnancy and criminal activities [1].
The results presented indicate that a 20% increase in the accessibility of full-day educational establishments reduces teenage pregnancy by 3%, and that this increase can explain 1/8 of the reduction in teenage childbearing since the implementation of the reform.
Likewise, for every 20-percentage-point increase in educational reform coverage, the average crime rate at the municipal level fell by 17.5%, or 21.7 crimes per 100,000 inhabitants. The greatest impact was on property crime, which fell to 17.7 crimes per 100,000 inhabitants, a 22% decrease.
Chile’s school reform reduced violent crime by 12%, or 2 crimes per 100,000 population for every 20-percentage-point increase in the school day. The results hold when controlling for the characteristics of the municipalities, with reductions of 19%, 24%, and 11% for total crime, property crime, and violent crime, respectively.

Bibliographic reference

[1] Berthelon, M. E. & Kruger, D. I. (2011). Risky behavior among youth: Incapacitation effects of school on adolescent motherhood and crime in Chile. Journal of Public Economics, 95(1-2), 41–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2010.09.004

Information source

IDB Inventory