Chileans Agree to Make Accountability Work to Improve Learning

By: Jeffrey M. Puryear
Source: Inter-American Dialogue's Latin America Advisor

WASHINGTON, DC—The grand agreement on education reform that Chilean political leaders reached last week is a victory for political consensus and a big step forward in improving the country's public schools.

President Michelle Bachelet and the presidents of Chile's two major political groups, the center-left Concertacion and the center-right Alianza, signed a long-debated agreement on the outlines of a new General Education Law in a ceremony on November 13. That all sides overcame their often bitter differences, made significant compromises, and agreed on policies that have a good chance of strengthening the country's schools says a lot about Chile's maturing democracy.

The agreement would keep in place the broad outlines of the existing public system, including parental choice (government subsidized vouchers for private schools), a mix of public, private non-profit, and private for-profit schools, municipal control of education, and substantial autonomy for schools.

But the broad changes outlined would make Chile's reforms the most ambitious in the region. The agreement would firmly place quality at the center of education policy, justifying all new measures in terms of their likely impact on student learning. It would establish a National Education Council to set macro-policy, with leaders insulated in part from presidential election cycles. It would establish national education standards that set minimum, measurable levels of learning, and a Quality Assurance Agency charged with assessing student progress, classifying schools according to their success, and making the results widely and publicly available. Schools would only need to dedicate 70 percent of teaching time to the official curriculum, and could use the remainder as they see fit. But they would be held responsible for reaching government-mandated levels of student learning each year.

The much-criticized right of publicly funded private schools to select students based on parents' income would be abolished. Schools could not start discriminating in student selection until the 7th grade, and then only on the basis of academic achievement or affinity with the school's objectives (particularly important to Catholic schools). Selection criteria and processes would be made public.

Perhaps most significantly, schools that fail to meet the new learning standards would face real consequences, thanks to a new institution—the Superintendency—charged with overseeing school compliance and applying sanctions. These would include a formal warning, help from outside experts in bringing school performance up to par, and—absent improvement—eventual elimination of public funding (for private schools) or closing (for traditional public schools). No other country in Latin America has sought similar accountability measures for its public education system.

Much remains to be done. The landmark political agreement must be converted into law, and lawmakers must get the details right. Several key issues, including how teachers are managed and extra funding for schools serving the poor, have been left out and will have to be addressed separately.

Nonetheless, Chile's agreement on education is cause for hope, suggesting that Latin America's fractious democratic governments can overcome partisan politics and make real progress in addressing their countries' social agendas.