An environment that encourages change

Chile begins to see the fruit of nearly two decades of educational reform

By Laurence Wolff

The author has been a consultant with the Education Unit of the IDB’s Sustainable Development Department since 1998. Previously he worked for 22 years on education issues at the World Bank. He has written extensively on issues such as the quality of education, education and technology, and educational assessments in the developing world. He holds an Ed.D. from Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Escuela Albert Einstein and its principal Gladys Tejea offer a compelling example of what can happen when a school system encourages innovation.

Tejea’s unorthodox proposal for pulling the school out of its cycle of failure would probably not have received approval in many of the highly centralized education bureaucracies that still predominate in Latin America. But over the last 15 years Chile has given significant flexibility and responsibility to the municipal education authorities that now manage the country’s public schools. In this environment, a motivated principal like Tejea can be encouraged to recruit a committed team of teachers and forge a dynamic partnership with local parents—all to the benefit of students who were falling through the cracks of the system. In a more restrictive environment, the transformation of Escuela Einstein might never have taken place.

But while this is an inspiring story, it is just one story among many. It is fair to ask if Escuela Einstein is just an exception. What is the state of Chile’s education system as a whole?

Learn what Chile's former education ministers have to say about the reform process (Spanish only). Order this book…

This question is particularly relevant because no country in Latin America has undertaken an effort as radical and comprehensive to reform its public education system. Beginning in the 1980s, Chile decided to vastly increase its spending on primary and secondary education while reducing in comparative terms its support of higher education. It instituted a “voucher” system that allows parents to send their children to private schools at little or no cost and a standardized testing program that enables parents to see which schools are doing a better job of teaching. At the same time, Chile launched several targeted-intervention programs (such as the P-900 program described in the link at right) that gave additional resources to the poorest schools. In the early 1990s the government began to introduce computers and the Internet into classrooms. Beginning in 1997 the government also started a program to shift from half-day to full-day schooling. Finally, the Ministry of Education also rolled out a series of curriculum changes designed to introduce modern teaching methods in Chile’s classrooms.

Most remarkably, this reform program has remained focused and consistent through many changes in governments as well as in ministries of education.

Worth the effort? In recent years researchers from around the world have visited Chile with a view to answering the obvious question: Has the reform had a positive impact?

The answer is a qualified “yes.”

Primary education enrollment and completion rates, which were already over 95 percent in 1990, are now even higher. In secondary education, enrollment rates raised from 67 percent in 1985 to 87 percent in 1998. Between 1990 and 1996 scores on Chile’s national SIMCE tests improved significantly, and the worst-performing Chilean schools clearly reduced the gap with better-performing ones. However, many experts have pointed out that these tests had technical flaws that made it difficult to accurately compare results over time, a fact that somewhat compromises the evidence of improvement during the early years of the reform. In the last few years Chile’s Ministry of Education has devised new tests that do permit reliable statistical comparison of scores from one year to the next.

Unfortunately, there have been only modest improvements in learning achievement in Chile’s schools since1996. One possible explanation for this slowdown is that by increasing the number of students who remain in school longer, the reform program has also increased the proportion of children who score poorly on exams (since the poorest students were the ones who tended to drop out in the past). As a result, it is getting harder to retain current levels of learning achievement.

Chile’s scores on recent international tests such as the Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) and the International Adult Literacy Study (IALS) are still far below those of countries in Asia and Europe. According to a UNESCO study conducted in 1997, Chile is among the best performing Latin American countries, though it lags well below Cuba, which has an achievement profile similar to that of a developed country.

Pending questions. A great deal of research has recently been conducted on Chile’s voucher-based education finance system, in an effort to determine whether this approach increases learning achievement in the education system as a whole. This research is complex and difficult to summarize. In general, it appears that the voucher system has had a neutral impact on the overall education reform effort. Private schools (which receive the same per-student subsidy as public schools) do better than public schools, but their advantage diminishes or in some cases disappears when the socio-economic status of students is taken into account.

On a positive note, the voucher system does appear to have introduced an element of healthy competition among schools that now have an incentive to retain students and improve scores (since parents are free to transfer their children to either public or private schools at no cost). However, despite exceptional cases like Escuela Einstein, the ability of public schools to respond effectively to competition continues to be hamstrung by excessive bureaucracy in the municipal governments that control them.

With these results and experiences in hand, in the last few years Chile has initiated a second round of reform, which continues the early innovations but focuses more on defining learning standards, raising teacher quality, and changing specific teacher behaviors in the classroom. The goal is to have a more direct impact on learning. As an example of this “second generation” reform effort, the emphasis has shifted from simply installing computers in schools to developing relevant virtual content to be used by teachers and students, including teaching guides and modules that can be downloaded and used in the classroom.

On the whole, Chile’s experience is probably the best example in Latin America of an education reform that shows continuity of effort, long-term consensus among all the actors, and constant revisiting and revision of programs. But Chile’s experience also demonstrates that quality improvement under even the best circumstances is a long-term endeavor, with a time frame measured in decades.

See links at right to read more about Chile’s reform program and related issues.

Date posted: April 2002