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Chile's education system could do better, says report
By Adam Thomson in Santiago Published: January 25 2005 21:25 | Last updated: January 25 2005 21:25 Evelyn Daz is not like her friends. Most of them want to be nurses when they grow up, she wants to be a doctor. Chile needs doctors, says the nine-year-old from the working-class neighbourhood of Parque Los Reyes in Santiago. Anyway, it would be nice to make sick people better, she adds. ADVERTISEMENT
The trouble is that Evelyn goes to the state-funded and municipally run Repblica de Alemania school and, if its recent performance is anything to go by, her ambition will probably remain a distant dream. In spite of the huge efforts of Ricardo Lagos's administration, Chile's state education system is failing the new generation. In a recent report comparing proficiency in maths and science among 14-year-olds in 46 countries, Chile came close to bottom. Almost 60 per cent of Chilean students did not reach even the lowest category in maths. The results were a shock, says Sergio Bitar, the education minister. Over the past 25 years Chile has achieved unparalleled economic growth and political stability in a region plagued by the lack of both. But experts say that unless it improves the quality of schooling, the next phase of its strategy to become a fully developed country will fail. The immense challenges facing Mr Lagos's administration are on daily display at the Repblica de Alemania school. The yellow paint is flaking away from the courtyard walls, the dining hall is small and dingy and there is no library. Dodian Tobar, the school's administrator, is all too aware of the limitations. I would love to be able to say that our students have a good chance of going to university but it is not the case, he says. Mara de los Angeles Santander of Freedom and Development, a rightwing think-tank in Santiago, believes there have been some important advances over the past two decades. Primary-school education now covers 99 per cent of the population and high school education covers 92 per cent. Those impressive figures, she says, are mainly the result of a radical education reform implemented by the military dictatorship in 1981. The reform handed control of schools to the country's municipalities. At the same time, the government based funding on individuals today the government pays the municipalities an average of 27,000 pesos for each pupil regardless of whether they attend public or private school. That has encouraged the private sector to compete for students, increasing coverage. she But is less impressed with a second wave of reform during the 1990s, ushered in by Mr Lagos's Concertacin coalition, aimed at improving the quality of education. The government has done everything with the best of intentions but
the reforms have been poorly implemented, she says. Two of the reform's pillars were to introduce a core curriculum capable of teaching the essentials while leaving sufficient time for individual schools to innovate; and to implement a full school day to replace the previous half-day system. But critics argue that the curriculum is overloaded, which prohibits schools from spending time on issues that are of particular interest or use to their students. They also say there has been no evaluation of the full school day, leaving the government with no idea of whether it has proved effective. The Concertacin coalition has designed a plethora of programmes many brought in by Mr Lagos himself when he was education minister in the early 1990s to target the worst-performing schools. The so-called P900 programme, for example, provides extra resources for schools falling into the bottom 10 per cent of the performance tables. But those resources teaching materials, not extra cash are chosen by the state rather than the school. The outcome is two-fold: a return to a more centralised model with increased bureaucracy; and schools that are often sent materials that do not address their specific shortcomings. Schools are not given the freedom to innovate or to adapt timetables or the curriculum to what best works for their students, says Ms de los Angeles Santander. Mr Bitar concedes that there are problems with implementation and admits that the government needs more detailed evaluation of the reforms. But he lays virtually all the blame with teachers, who he insists are often too old and have not adapted quickly enough to the new curriculum or adopted modern teaching methods. They are the main obstacle to achieving better r...