Children's rights in elite schools: A necessary regulation

Background As a social group, the elite has been scarcely studied globally. It is important to note that the available literature has highlighted the barriers imposed by elites to be studied, making it difficult to explore phenomena of great importance, such as the children's experience of learning and growing up in elite educational settings. In this context, this study advances in analyzing the protection and guarantee of children's rights in elite schools. Although the different regulatory bodies have aimed to safeguard the rights of all children and adolescents, the literature informs that, in the case of Chile and the field of education, it is possible to observe a differential legislative treatment between the rights of students who participate in public schools (which receive state funding) and public schools (which do not), among which are the elite schools. Aims Thus, this study aims to investigate how children's rights are protected and guaranteed in elite schools concerning the quality of education, school coexistence, and school participation. Method & procedures The design of this research is a qualitative multiple-case study that used descriptive quantitative data to contextualize elite education in Chile. For the descriptive quantitative context, we used multiple databases whose analyses were performed with the support of STATA 17 software. The qualitative multi-case study was composed of two cases corresponding to convenience sampling. For each case, we used two techniques to produce information: Publicly available institutional documents related to the topics of interest and semi-structured individual and group interviews. The material produced was analyzed following a thematic categorical analysis. Results & discussion Our results show that within the elite schools, there is vast heterogeneity in their educational outcomes, as well as in the quality of education they provide to their students. These findings show that there is a group of schools with the results expected by the national educative standard. Still, there is a not insignificant number of schools (n= 110) with a non-negligible enrolment (n= 13,742 students) in this sector, which does not meet the minimum learning standards and would require safeguards to guarantee the right to quality education. Moreover, looking at the cases, the main findings are the tension of the right to quality education, presenting a managerial and persuasive curriculum; the right to a healthy coexiste