La educación en Chile no responde a las expectativas.

1. La educación en Chile, no responde a las
expectativas.
Evidenciar las razones de este diagnóstico, es
un desafío trascendente para nuestra sociedad,
y por ello, el presente documento intenta
entregar un aporte al debate.
EDUCATION IN
CHILE
As Hayek has sustained, social phenomena are
extremely complex. This complexity should
make us cautious in most public policy
objectives. However, in most cases the
contrary occurs, especially in those areas in
which empirical research and, therefore, an
understanding of social phenomena, are
severely limited. Ignorance seems at times to
create an attitude of illuminism, instead of
prudence. Therefore, certain policies are
followed with exaggerated conviction although
they have not been appropriately tested, or
they require an institutional framework that is
not in place when they are implemented.
This approach is quite frequent in education.
Although there is good research in this case1,
overall, the research that has been done lacks
enough strength to influence educational
policy. Mainly because some studies contradict
each other, or the quality of the data prevents
any strong conclusions from being reached.
Hence, there is no consolidation of widely
shared empirical regularities like what occurs
in other fields of social research or, even more
frequently, in the field of natural sciences.
Such scenario leaves in my opinion little room
for centralized policies. If they are wrongly
designed the costs for the whole educational
system may be enormous. The decisions
should be left to elementary and high schools
or, in general, to local communities. Most of
the knowledge required to generate an
effective education is local in its origin. The
evaluation of teachers is such a case.2
However, Chile recently took teacher
evaluation outside the school's scope in what
constitutes a clear example of the incorrect
approach underlying the Chilean educational
policy.
In what follows I will suggest a very basic
approach to Chilean educational policy that is
usually forgotten: those ultimately responsible
for improving the learning of students are the
schools. Accordingly, schools must be held
accountable for their results. For this to
happen, an institutional framework that
generates that accountability is required. The
creation of such a framework is the main
challenge for Chilean educational policy.
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2. INTHEPRESENT
LEVELS OF
EDUCATION
The levels of education in Chile are:
Pre-school: For children up to 5 years
old, optional for 1 grade.
Primary school: (Enseñanza básica)
for children from 5-13 years old,
divided into 8 grades.
Secondary school: (Enseñanza media)
for teenagers from 13-18 years old,
divided into 4 grades.
Secondary school is also divided into:
o Scientific-humanities
approach: From Tercero
Medio (11th grade) in high
school, students can choose a
major in either science (math,
physics, chemistry, biology),
or humanities (literature,
history, sociology), which
means they will get more
lessons in the area of their
choice.
o Technical-Professional
education: Students receive
'extra' education in the so-
called 'technical' areas, such as
electricity, mechanics, metal
assembly, etc. This second
type of education is more
typical of public schools
(Liceos), to give students from
poorer areas a chance to work
right away after completion of
highschool, as a way to fund a
possible higher education
career later.
University: a system divided in public
or 'state' universities and a private
system.
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PRIMARY AND
SECONDARY
LEVELS
According to the constitution, primary and
secondary school are mandatory for all
Chileans.
The Chilean state provides an extensive system
of education vouchers, that covers almost 90%
students of primary and secondary education.
Such extensive voucher system is based in a
direct payment to the schools based on daily
attendance; in practical terms, if the students
moves to a different school, his attendance
payments move too.
Schools are either public (nearly all owned by
the municipality in which the school is located)
or private, which may receive government
subsidies.
BASIC
The reform of 1965 established Basic
Education as the initial cycle of schooling.
Before that, by 1920, the Chilean legislation
had established 4 years of minimum
mandatory education. By 1929 the minimum
had been increased to 6 years. Finally, in 1965
a compulsory Basic Level of 8 years was
established, divided in 2 cycles and 8 grades,
ideally designed for ages 6 to 13.
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3. SECONDARY
The Secondary School is divided between
Scientific-Humanist (regular), Technical-
Professional (vocational) and Artistic, always
with a duration of 4 years. The first two years
are the same for the three kinds of schooling,
while third and fourth years are differentiated
according to the orientation of the school.
The schools offering Technical-Professional
programs are denominated:
Industrial Schools: electricity, mechanics,
electronics, informatics, among others.
Commercial Schools: management,
accountant, secretary and similar.
Technical Schools: fashion, culinary, nursery
and the like.
Polyvalent Schools: offering careers of more
than one of those listed above.
Compulsory only reached the 8 years of the
Basic Cycle, but since May 7th of 2003, a
constitutional reform under the government of
the president Ricardo Lagos, established free
and compulsory Secondary Education for all
the inhabitants of Chile up to 18 years old,
placing on the State the responsibility of
ensuring access to it. This ensures thirteen
years of compulsory schooling, which was an
unprecedented milestone in Latin America that
date. As of 2008, the LGE (Ley General de
Educación), which is currently pending,
provides and guarantees 14 years of free
compulsory education.
The coverage of the Chilean Educational
System is practically universal, like in most
highly developed countries, showing
enrollment rates that represent that reality.
Enrollment in Basic Education reaches 99.7%
of children between 6 and 14 years, while the
coverage of secondary education enrollment is
87.7% of adolescents between 15 and 18 years.
EDUCATION COSTS
Public schools and subsidized private schools
with voluntary tuition may charge a fee for the
admittance process, which is fixed by law. The
fee's cost was CLP$3.500 in 2008 (less than
US$7). The annual price of enrollment is zero
for primary school and cannot be higher than
CLP$3.500 for secondary school. A tuition fee
may be charged only in secondary school, but
it is completely voluntary for the parent.
Subsidized private schools with mandatory
tuition have the same admittance and annual
enrollment costs as in public schools, but they
are allowed to charge a mandatory monthly
tuition which cannot be higher than 4 USE
(Education Subsidy Unit). This was equal to
CLP$60,748.86 in 2008 (about US$116).
Private schools are free to set what they will
charge, which may include, admittance,
enrollment, tuition costs, as well as a fee for
being selected into the school (paid once, and
can be quite high in some exclusive schools)
and a payment to the so-called Parent Center
(Centro de Padres).
There is a third type of public school, the so-
called Delegated Administration schools,
which are owned by the State but managed and
financed by private corporations. These cannot
charge for admittance and the annual
enrollment cost is the same as in public
schools. They are allowed to charge for tuition,
but this is wholly voluntary for the parent. The
cost is 1.5 UTM (Monthly Tax Unit) annually,
which was CLP$451,824 (less than US$865)
in 2008.
There is a fourth type of public school,
administered by the Ministry of Education and
completely financed by the State. Currently,
there is only one such school: Escuela Villa
Las Estrellas in Antártica.
http://www.chileclic.gob.cl/1542/article-
46922.html
ADMISSION TO
UNIVERSITY
Students can choose between 25 state
universities and over 50 private ones, which
are increasingly growing in number.
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4. There is one single and very transparent
admission system to all state universities and
to several of the oldest private universities,
which integrate the so called Council of
Rectors (Consejo de Rectores). The system,
called PSU, an acronym for Universitary
Selection Test (Prueba de Selección
Universitaria), is very similar to the U.S. SAT
Reasoning Test. The design and the correction
of the test is performed by the University of
Chile, while the system itself is managed by
the Ministry of Education (Ministerio de
Educación).
The test consists in two mandatory exams,
mathematics and language, plus several other
specific exams, like chemistry, physics,
biology, history, etc., depending on what
career the student wishes to apply. The
cumulative grade point average achieved
during secondary school is also taken into
account in the final admission score. Every
university assigns different weightings to the
results of the various exams.
There is a big gap in PSU scores between
poorer students, mostly coming from public
schools, and more wealthy students, specially
those coming from private schools, therefore,
poorer students have much smaller chances to
enter the most prestigious universities, which
hold high entry scores. The most talented poor
students, those who achieve high PSU scores,
can obtain up to 100% of scholarship from the
Government, plus, several universities have
their own scholarship programmes to assist
poorer students, though funds are insufficient.
For students who obtained high enough scores
to enter a public university or to an accredited
private university, there is a system of
government backed loans which is offered
through several commercial banks, but the
amount and terms of the credits not necessarily
fit the needs of the students.
According to media and official statistics, in
2006 a total 241,390 students took the PSU
test.
PROGRAM
OVERVIEW
In the Chile: Education and Social Change
study abroad program, students examine the
powerful relationship between education and
social change and the ways in which
educational politics, strategy, and pedagogy
influence society in Chile and Argentina.
Students engage in rigorous academic
coursework and research on the educational
systems in urban and rural areas in Chile, and
observe first-hand the application of popular
education as a tool for social change.
The program offers students the opportunity to
interact with prominent academics, policy
makers, activists, and nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) to gain a panoramic
understanding of the forces affecting Chile
educational policies. Students also observe the
intercultural dynamics between the Chilean
government and the Mapuche, the country's
largest indigenous group, and participate in
homestays with families in Santiago, the
Mapuche region. Intensive Spanish language
study and educational excursions throughout
the semester improve students' communication
and field study skills while also immersing
them in the rich cultures of Chile.
MOBILIZATION AND INNOVATION
The program's base in Santiago, Chile,
provides students with a dynamic social and
political environment in which to study
education and social change. Chile's capital,
Santiago was the focal point of protests
involving high school students seeking
education reform in 2006. These protests,
which mobilized nearly a million people,
underscore the importance of education for the
Chilean populace as well as the controversies
surrounding education funding, content, and
distribution. Chile has a long history of
sustained governmental engagement in
educational policymaking and implementation
as well as innovation in educational approach
and delivery, and these protests reflected the
difficult transition from the educational
mandates of a dictatorship to the progressive
ideas available in a democracy.
Within this socially active atmosphere,
students interact with local schools,
community organizations, and their homestay
families to gain multiple perspectives on
education and its impact on society. As part of
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5. their field study, students participate in
observation activities in a selection of schools
around Santiago, thereby gaining first-hand
insight on the workings of public, private,
voucher, underprivileged, coed, and single sex
schools. Students will also explore Chile's
complex political history by conducting
educational excursions to places such as the
Parque por la Paz, which served as a secret
detention center during the military
dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which began
in 1974 and lasted for almost 17 years.
Students travel outside of Santiago and
conduct field studies in Valparaiso and
Temuco, Chile to compare regional and
national differences in educational systems and
community involvement with, and influence
on, educational reform.
A DEBATE ON
THE QUALITY
OF EDUCATION
Chile has increased significantly its spending
on education, going from 2.5% of GDP in
1990 to an estimated 4.4% this year. Figure 1
shows a possible relationship between
spending and the quality of education. It
suggests that the relationship between
spending per student and academic
performance is not unique. That figure presents
two curves that relate spending to the quality
of education. The curve marked A shows a
high expected performance for each level of
spending per student. The dotted curves
represent the confidence intervals of that
technology, leaving room for countries of
similar educational technology to report
differences in academic performance even
though their levels of spending are very
similar. Curve B, on the other hand, reflects a
very low academic performance for each level
of spending per student. There are huge
differences in academic performance between
both technologies for similar expenditures.
The adoption of an "educational technology"
such as the one described by curve B is
particularly regrettable for a country. However
significant the increases in spending may be,
the effect on the academic performance of
students is marginal. In this case, a change
from technology B to technology A is more
advantageous -rather than an increase in
spending- because it raises the academic
performance of students more. Evidence has
been gathered that our academic performance
lags behind tremendously. If Chile is on a
technology such as B, this would explain why
the results of the national evaluation tests (the
Simce) have not undergone significant changes
despite the heavy increases in funding.
Of course, it is unreasonable to expect
immediate change. Changes are rather the fruit
of perseverance and educational efforts. But
even so, there is no information to predict that
such perseverance will result in significant
progress over the coming years. There is a
relatively high inertia in the performance of the
country's schools, as suggested by Figure 2. In
general, schools that earned goods results on
the Simce 6 years ago did so again in 2002,
while those that did poorly at that time did
poorly again. Only a few schools managed to
revert their "initial situation."
Moreover, international comparisons suggest
that Chile's performance is lower than what its
per capita income or educational spending
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would allow (cumulative or contemporary), by
magnitudes that run from 0.18 to 0.36 standard
deviations in academic performance.
Figure 3 reveals that weak academic
performance is quite generalized in Chile. It is
comparable to the performance in mathematics
for countries with a lower per capita income,
where there is less spending on education as
well as high inequality (although certainly not
as high as in Chile) for each percentile in the
distribution of performance. This means that
educational standards are low across the entire
educational system. This must not lead us,
however, to error. Lower income youths are
more harmed by an education where there is
less learning. Of the fourth grade students who
are in the highest decile of academic
performance, 27.3% come from paid private
schools although they account for only 10% of
enrollment. That proportion rises to 33.1% in
8th grade and to 44.3% by the junior year in
high school. The "initial advantage" of
students that go to private schools is clearly
strengthened. Said crudely, the government-
financed educational system destroys talents in
children of lower socioeconomic levels, and
efforts must be redoubled to avoid that
situation.
WHAT IS THE
CHALLENGE?
Since we have said that the main deficit of the
Chilean educational system is its lack of
quality, it is indispensable to advance in the
development of an institutional framework that
unequivocally ensures that such an objective
gains force in the allocation of resources. In
terms of Figure 1, this implies moving from
trajectory B to A.
What makes an educational system move to
a higher curve? The truth is that there is no
simple answer. As we said earlier, comparative
research does not provide very conclusive
answers. We know, however, that an
educational system would be lame if the
players (students, teachers and authorities,
among others), felt no pressure to achieve a
good academic performance. In order to
achieve this, those schools must be held
accountable to the community for the
academic results of their students. Few
structures are capable of meeting these
requirements. State intervention in education
must not limit the autonomy of educational
establishments, nor alter their incentives to
provide quality education. If this is accepted,
educational programs directed by the Ministry
of Education have no place. Schools must
choose the combination of educational inputs
most appropriate to their objectives and be
accountable for their results. In this scheme of
things, the job of the Ministry is to facilitate
inputs and ensure that there is no rigidity
preventing schools from choosing the
combination of inputs they deem most
suitable. This is far from what has occurred in
Chile. The educational environment is not
designed to make schools feel pressure to do
well, and the educational authorities play an
undeniable role of pedagogical managers
where the focus is, moreover, basically on
processes and very little on results.
Progress in decentralizing the educational
system, handing over government schools to
municipalities and deregulating the supply of
schools; and the change in the way that
education is financed to a per-student subsidy

7. were all, at the time, changes in the right
direction. However, among other design
problems, no system was created that informed
parents of how schools were performing. Only
in 1995 was a reporting system implemented
for the results of the Simce test. However, the
information must be more precise, clear and
hopefully provided directly to parents. The
reports that many American schools are
sending to families are a model to imitate.
The financing system also has serious design
problems, including the fact that the subsidy
assumes that the cost of providing education is
unrelated to the socioeconomic situation of
students. In turn, the "municipalization" of
education has not yielded the expected fruits.
In part because of the lack of information
about schooling performance, but also because
in many municipalities, the levels of
centralization existing when the schools were
run by the government were replicated and
even exacerbated. Many of the municipal
schools therefore lacked a minimum of
autonomy to implement educational projects.
Also important is the fact that the quality of
education is not necessarily one of the
priorities of mayors. Moreover, students often
change from one municipal school to another,
so there is no impact on municipal finances.
This dilutes the incentives to improve the
management of municipal schools.Lastly,
nearly 20% of the boroughs in the country
have no private schools. Another 40% face a
very limited competition from the private
sector.
The design problems affecting the educational
system have been aggravated in recent years,
instead of being corrected.10 Also of influence
is a deeply rooted belief that teachers will be
incapable of dealing with the current
educational challenges. The Ministry acts as if
they believe they would be a bottleneck
impossible to overcome, which is why the
Ministry has wanted to guide the educational
process. But there is no evidence that this is
truly so. For example, Figure 4 shows that
there is a significant dispersion in the results of
subsidized private schools and municipal
schools in each of the vulnerability groups
established by the Ministry of Education. It
follows that there is no material justification
for those ministerial apprehensions. It could be
argued that the schools with good results keep
only good students (which is what teachers
usually argue), but there are no differences in
the dispersion of results within good and bad
performing schools, so there is no evidence in
favor of such claim.
It is the schools themselves that must deal with
the challenges imposed by greater
accountability for results. One of the greatest
challenges in developing institutions that
pressure schools to do well, is dealing with the
teachers labor statute and the rigidities due to
the municipalization of education. One
possible road is to allow parents to "intervene"
municipal schools where performance is weak.
This intervention could occur, for example,
whenever a municipal school obtains results
below the national average or in the lower
third of performance.
Figure 4
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The majority (or two-thirds of parents) must
back that decision in order to make it a reality.
Operationally, the management of the school
would be left to parents. They can appoint a
new principal. The administrative staff and
teachers would lose some of the privileges
conferred by the teachers labor statute, in
particular tenure. In this scheme of things, the
labor statute is a "benefit" that continues only
if the results of the schools are good.
Otherwise, the benefits are forfeited to the
parents of the children attending those schools.
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CONCLUSIONS
I have discussed a central issue in the
development of Chilean education, but it is far
from being the only one. Educational issues do
not stop here. Yet I believe that if we do not
take this fundamental step, dealing with many
of those other issues will not yield the
expected fruits. Schools more accountable for
the academic results of their students are
indispensable if one wants to create a virtuous
educational dynamic. Of course, it also
involves risks. Schools may displace students
with low results in order to show quick
progress, but there are ways to minimize these
risks. Lastly, the potential benefits of a more
accountable and transparent educational
system are so significant that it is worth taking
that risk no matter what. There are, of course,
alternatives to explore and imagine, but the
important thing is to start trying out
alternatives right away that will help us
effectively rise to a trajectory in which
spending on education is more fruitful than
what it has been thus far.
REFERENCES
Aedo, C. y C. Sapelli (2001), "El sistema de
vouchers en educación: una revisión de la
teoría y la evidencia empírica para Chile"
Estudios Públicos, Otoño N° 82, pp. 35-82.
Beyer, H. (2000), "Entre la autonomía y la
intervención: las reformas de la educación en
Chile" en Felipe Larraín y Rodrigo Vergara,
eds., La Transformación Económica en Chile,
Santiago: Centro de Estudios Públicos.
Beyer, H. (2003), "La búsqueda de una
educación de calidad", Estudios Públicos, por
aparecer.
Beyer, H., Eyzaguirre, B. y L. Fontaine (2001),
"Reseña al libro La Reforma Educacional
Chilena", Perspectivas en política, economía y
gestión, Vol. 4 N° 2, pp. 289-314.
Eyzaguirre, B. y C. Le Foulon (2001), "La
calidad de la educación chilena en cifras",
Estudios Públicos, Primavera N° 84, pp. 85-
204.
Heckman, J. y P. Carneiro (2003), "Human
Capital Policy" National Bureau of Economic
Research, Working Paper Series N&° 9495,
febrero.
* Centro de Estudios Públicos, Chile. Email:
hbeyer@cepchile.cl
See, for example, the papers included in "La
Economia de la Educación y el Sistema
Educativo Chileno," Cuadernos de Economía,
December 2002, Volume 39, No.118, edited
by Claudio Sapelli.
See, for example, Heckman and Carneiro
(2003).
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