Conference Program

This paper examines parental educational narratives amid the implementation of Chile’s Inclusion Act, a reform designed to address key drivers of socioeconomic segregation in schools and recognised as one of the first explicit attempts to promote social mixing (Rojas et al., 2023). Research on its implementation suggest that the reform has had limited impact on the enrolment of low-income families (Honey & Carrasco, 2023; Sillard et al., 2018). Moreover, it has faced considerable resistance from parents, who experience the new system with anxiety and heightened perceptions of risk, feeling that the reform devalues capitals they previously mobilised in school choice processes (Carrasco et al., 2021; Hernández & Carrasco, 2022).

Drawing on 47 interviews with 20 families whose children attend schools implementing the Inclusion Act in southern Santiago, this paper broadens analysis of parents’ resistance to desegregation policies by showing how their understandings of ‘good education’ extend beyond formal schooling. Parents consistently emphasised that ‘education starts at home’, using this expression to describe intensive parenting practices marked by demanding physical and emotional labour, including ubiquitous presence, vigilant monitoring of schools, and acting as moral exemplars to transmit values such as effort and respect. Yet the importance parents attribute to ‘what happens at home’ contrasts with its perceived fragility. Many feared that this home-centred dimension of education could be undermined through contact with families they regard as lacking ‘good’ parenting – particularly from other social groups – reinforcing the value they place on socially homogeneous schools.

Building on Collet & Tort’s (2017) understanding of educations as plural, the paper extends analysis of families’ enactment of desegregation policies by considering discourses beyond schooling that shape family-education relationships. It argues that parents’ conflation of ‘good education’ and ‘good parenting’ underpins their preference for socially homogeneous schools. ‘Good parenting’ becomes a crucial moral boundary that reinforces individualised educational responsibility and limits dispositions toward social mixing.