Coding North and South America turned up a mechanism the school-choice literature barely names: public money paid not per pupil, but against a private school's teaching payroll. Five systems in this hemisphere work that way.
The Atlas now codes every country in North and South America. The expected finding was a spread from Chile's voucher to Cuba's monopoly, and that spread is there. The unexpected finding is what sits in the middle.
Argentina subsidises private schools as a percentage of teachers' salary costs. Fee-free schools run by non-profit entities can receive up to 100%; fee-charging schools are banded at 80%, 60% or 40%. To be paid, a school submits its teaching payroll — staff, posts, hours, salaries — to the education authority. Just over 70% of private schools receive it, covering about 22% of all Argentine students.
Ecuador runs fiscomisional schools: religious schools holding a government agreement, subsidised specifically to pay teacher salaries. Belize funds denominational and community grant-aided schools — about 62% of all institutions — through direct payment of teachers' salaries, and from 2024 covers 100% of salaries, pensions and benefits for 879 grant-aided secondary and tertiary staff. Trinidad and Tobago has paid salaries at denominational schools since the Concordat of 1960, sixty-six years, while the denominations retain ownership, management and a right to request a teacher's removal on moral or religious grounds. French Guiana, as a French département, sits under the 1959 Loi Debré, where schools under contract teach the national programme and the state pays their teachers.
Five systems, one mechanism, and it is not a voucher. The unit of funding is a teaching post, not a pupil.
That distinction is not cosmetic, and it cuts directly at the question this organisation exists to ask. A voucher moves money and leaves the labour market to sort itself out — which is how the United States arrived at 750,000 children in microschools and 34% of teachers feeling prepared to teach in one. A payroll subsidy puts the workforce inside the funding formula. The state that writes the cheque for the teacher holds a lever on who may teach, whoever owns the school.
We are not claiming the payroll model performs better. Nobody has run that comparison, which is the point. The demand-side literature measures what families do with vouchers in exhaustive detail; there is no comparable body of work on what happens to teacher supply, preparation and credentialing under salary-side subsidy, despite Trinidad having run one for sixty-six years and Belize for longer.
Two more things the region gave up. Bolivia kept church-run schools and nationalised teacher preparation outright — Law 070 of 2010 made the State solely responsible for producing new teachers, and the Catholic training institute Sedes Sapientiae was closed. Guyana went the other way in 1976, taking close to 696 church and private schools into state control, and the stated justification was a staffing question: the churches had held major influence over who taught in their schools. Both countries legislated about who is permitted to make and place teachers. Neither measured what happened next.
The limit. Six countries — Honduras, Nicaragua, the Bahamas, Suriname, Greenland and the Falkland Islands — are shortlisted rather than coded, each with a stated reason on its panel. Suriname is the one to watch: it inherited the Dutch bijzonder onderwijs model, which would make it a direct sibling of the Netherlands entry, and no Surinamese source was located in this pass.
Cite as: When Money Follows the Child. In much of the Americas, the money follows the teacher. Field Note 07, August 2026. https://www.whenmoneyfollowsthechild.org/notes/07/ Accessed [date].