In the early 1980's an education policy in Chile was formulated that encouraged the private sector to participate more strongly in the delivery of the educational service, with the purpose to achieve to have more students attending the education system and decentralize the education responsibility from the State. On the other hand, in the 1990's it was introduced as a mixed funding mechanism that allowed schools to charge a fee to the families and also receive a public funding. These two neoliberal policies led to the generation of an educational quasi-market model based in the belief of academic freedom of schools and families. From the perspective of rational choice theory, families are expected to choose the school based on academic and quality factors, therefore schools are necessarily forced to improve in this area and the education in Chile will gradually improve. In this article we analyze the school choice process for Chilean families across the 30 years have passed from the implementation of the first education policy around school choice. The purpose is to understand this process from the perspective of how much parents are willing to pay to reach their demands and expectations when they made their choice. This aim is situated as a national problem where school choice in the Chilean context has not been successful in terms of improvement of the education quality. The information that we used is from a quantitative study, which applied a survey to 1,811 parents. From an education policy approach the contribution of this study is to understand from an economic and sociological view the process of parental choice, and to suggest a more effective policy around school choice.