Chile: Climbing on Giants' Shoulders : Better Schools for all Chilean Children

Chile has made impressive progress in educational attainment. Yet, despite recent improvements, outcomes, as measured by PISA results, still need to catch up with OECD standards and equity problems should be addressed. One decisive ingredient will be better teachers. Chile should aim to attract qualified individuals to the profession and bolster initiatives to improve initial teacher education and training. A second ingredient will be stronger quality assurance mechanisms. For a long time, Chile has relied to a considerable extent on competition to ensure school quality. But there has been limited success, in part due to very unequal conditions for public and private schools to compete in terms of their ability to select children, their flexibility to employ teachers and in terms of financing. Chile has started to address this by prohibiting the selection of students until 6th grade. The ongoing introduction of a nation-wide quality assurance system based on independent evaluation of results is a welcome complement. Finally, Chile will have to improve outcomes for students with poor results even more than for the rest which would lift the average and improve equity at the same time. The government has recently made important changes to invest more in students from weak socio-economic backgrounds. These extra resources can help to make considerable progress. This Working Paper relates to the 2010 Economic Survey of Chile (www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/Chile).