Paulina Schiefelbein

Three decentralization strategies in two decades: Chile 1981‐2000

In the past two decades, Chile has implemented three reform strategies that shaped its educational decentralization process, each motivated by different goals. In the 1980s, during the military regime, an economic model structured a voucher system that created incentives for parents to choose schools for their children. In theory, bad schools would improve in quality or go out of business. The second reform began in 1990 and was embedded in the transition from autocratic to democratic government. Sociologists were the intellectual authors of this initiative which focused on improving the working conditions of teachers. In 1994, the third strategy began with educational researchers focusing attention on the classroom effectiveness and the need for better instructional materials and improvements in the teaching/learning process. The continued study of educational decentralization in Chile is important because it represents the only nation in the world with a nation‐wide voucher system.

Closing the Math Learning Gap between Chile and Developed Countries

Latin American students maintained a low achievement level during the 1990s in spite of huge investments in education, but significant increments in Chilean students’ learning were the result of a carefully designed development project implemented in 2001-2002 in a high standard level K-12 school. The use of “interactive learning scripts (guidebooks)” plainly telling the actors (students and the teacher) “activities” to be carried out in each session (grades 1-8) made it easy for teachers to upgrade teaching methods. Less than 5% of the teachers were unable to adapt to the scripted methods while students kept demanding this “easier” way to learn. The external innovation team replicated methods used in the successful massive Colombian Escuela Nueva program, and supervised the project through a monthly two-day visit plus a local team monitoring of every day operations. Given that national test scores in Chile and Colombia are close to the average in Latin America, the findings of this project are relevant for the whole region and may be useful for other developing countries.