Experts Trace Challenges To Address The Critical Situation Of School Education In Chile

Given the global educational lag, and in particular its consequences in Chile, the Chilean Ministry of Education has promoted an Educational Reactivation Plan , made up of three backbones, aligned with the measures that the educational systems of other nations have adopted. These focuses of action are consistent with the recommendations recently raised by the World Bank (2023), aimed at recovering the levels of human capital prior to the pandemic.

However, the pandemic is not the beginning of the current critical scenario . Here are four challenges that the Chilean case could consider to support its expected effects:

1. The spiral of lags
The post-pandemic socio-educational crisis should be conceptualized as the expression of accumulated, persistent and unaddressed inequalities in the school system.

Affirming today that the global pandemic has suddenly caused relevant educational inequalities ignores the verification of international evidence that links social origin with educational destiny.

It should be considered that during and after the global pandemic the gaps observed in certain groups of schoolchildren express inequalities and have been exacerbated, especially in students with fewer resources at home, and who will most likely face the greatest obstacles to reversing the lags. that have been superimposed on those that previously accumulated.

2. Synergy in times of crisis
The acute atomization of the Chilean school system is a risk for the reactivation strategy, which demands greater efforts of vertical and lateral synergy.

Achieving convergence of purpose and, in short terms as required by the Educational Reactivation, in a highly fragmented system, with heterogeneous institutional capacities and multiple precariousness, is a major challenge that the Ministry of Education is facing.

In turn, the financing mechanism based on demand subsidies and vouchers, which governs almost 90% of school education, has surely inhibited the expansion of lateral collaboration practices between establishments in this system.

Given this, it will be key for the multiple agents to place the general interest and that of the students at the center of their motivations, as well as the persuasive capacity of the government to communicate it and the decision to mobilize resources.

3. The benefits of the “chain of influences”
The evidence shows that top-down and bottom-up educational policies have limits in their ability to generate change and that it is necessary to enhance the capacity for transformation “from” the intermediate leaders.

Recently, Hargreaves (2023) and a study by UNESCO & Education Development Trust (2023), drawing on case studies of educational reforms in various school systems, highlighted the transformative potential of educational leadership “from” the local or intermediate levels (in Chile this refers to Local Education Services, municipal or subsidized supporters and, at the establishment level, heads of UTP, area coordinators, psychosocial teams).

Hargreaves (2023) documents effective leadership experiences “from” the intermediate level and develops a theory of change from the territories that can be useful to project the challenges of the reactivation agenda: ability to generate diagnoses and solutions adapted to local needs and its diversity; cultivate own initiative and agency instead of implementing the actions of agents located outside the local area of ​​influence; connect and intersect one’s own agenda with the priorities of the center of the system; build a collective responsibility for joint learning and improvement and, finally, develop lateral collaboration tactics (between schools) as a catalyst for change.

4. The future is the present
Do not succumb to presenteeism and design with long-term purposes in mind.

The socio-educational challenges of the reactivation are closely linked to debts, deficits and pending bills to strengthen Chilean education. Perhaps each action in this sense should be thought of in connection with policies and initiatives that last or contribute to others in the medium and long term.