Democratization and Class Segregation in Puerto Rican Schooling

Puerto Rico's postwar plunge into mass secondary and higher education, in imitation of the U.S. pattern, has had several revealing consequences. First, the rapid expansion with limited resources led to a severe decline in the quality of the public high schools and the state University of Puerto Rico. Second, and surprisingly, the rate of attendance at twelfth grade for urban youths from upper, middle, and working classes was very nearly equal by 1960, even though only a third of the age group was enrolled at the secondary level. The children of the upper social strata had nothing like the disproportionate number of places in secondary education that they had in Europe and the U. S. at an equivalent stage of growth in secondary enrollments. Third, this democratization of access was accompanied by increasing segregation of the socially advantaged and disadvantaged into the private and public sectors respectively, and by a growing divergence of academic achievement between the two sectors. There is evidence that segregation is extending into higher education. Thus, despite equalization of access to high school, there is very unequal access to high schools of superior quality. Class differentials in educational achievement remain large and significant. The Puerto Rican case also shows that self-segregation into separate schools of the socially and educationally advantaged, for the purpose of maintaining their advantage, has no necessary connection with race. In the Commonwealth, it is a class phenomenon, not a racial one

Attendance · Democracy · Democratization · Demographic economics · Disadvantaged · Economic growth · Economics · Middle class · Political science · Politics · Social class · Social mobility · Social science · Social stratification · Sociology · School Choice and Performance

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