Chilean Education Reforms: Focusing on Proven Success Over Unimplemented Policies
Chilean education reforms enacted in 2011 and 2015 aimed to improve educational opportunities by ordering schools by performance and requiring non-profit status for subsidized schools, respectively. The 2011 Law of Quality Assurance in Education intended to guide families in school selection and inform state intervention for underperforming institutions. The 2015 School Inclusion Law sought to eliminate profit generation through rent and promote better subsidy use by mandating property purchases by school operators. However, both reforms faced significant implementation challenges and failed to achieve their stated goals. The performance ranking system has been stalled for seven years, with families still relying on outdated information, and no schools have been closed due to poor performance. Similarly, the property purchase mandate has seen fewer than 300 transactions, while existing operators continue to use rental agreements, creating an uneven playing field. The article attributes these failures to the high, unassessed social and economic costs of the chosen regulatory tools. A new reform currently before the Senate proposes a different approach: allowing high-performing school operators, with at least three consecutive years in high or medium performance categories, to manage underperforming schools. This strategy avoids school closures and corporate restructuring, focusing instead on transferring management to proven entities. The proposed system aims for tangible results by adapting agreements to local conditions and ensuring oversight from the Quality Agency and the Ministry of Education. The authors argue that replicating successful models and those preferred by families, rather than relying on the status quo or new school creation, is the most effective path to rapid improvement in educational outcomes for students.
The Chilean government's past educational reforms, while well-intentioned, highlight a common policy challenge: the gap between regulatory design and practical implementation feasibility. The focus on punitive measures like school closures or radical structural changes, without adequately accounting for the associated social and economic costs, led to policy paralysis. The proposed shift towards delegating management to proven, high-performing entities represents a pragmatic pivot, leveraging existing successes rather than attempting wholesale disruption. This approach aligns with systems thinking, prioritizing adaptability and incremental improvement by identifying and scaling what demonstrably works. The long-term success of this new strategy will depend on robust oversight mechanisms and the ability to adapt management frameworks to diverse local contexts, ensuring that efficiency gains do not compromise educational quality or equity.
AI-generated to prompt reflection — not editorial opinion, not advice, not a statement of fact. How this works.
