Chile: Reducing Achievement Gaps and School Segregation
Abstract
Dear future Minister of Education,
Chilean education is at a turning point. Chile has the greatest level of income inequality of any OCED nation and the educational achievement of the nation’s children is equally divided by socioeconomic lines. The percentage of Chilean students who come from disadvantaged social or economic backgrounds that score in the top quarter of the nations’ Programme for International Assessment scores is well under the OECD average for this particular statistic. The percent variation of PISA scores explained by socioeconomic status is 14 percentage points higher for Chile than the OECD average. Not only are there disparities in students’ achievement grounded in socioeconomic status, schools themselves are segregated as well. While 80 percent of students whose families with incomes in the top quartile attend private schools, only 38 percent of students whose families’ incomes are in the bottom quartile attend private schools. The national government of Chile has aimed to reduce these achievement gaps, particularly through legislation passed in the past few years; some inspire cautious optimism. These reforms can be built on to further their efforts in reducing achievement gaps between students of different backgrounds. In order to build on the progress of previous administrations,
Fortunately making education more equitable is a policy priority of President Piñera. He certainly wants to avoid the backlash against the injustices of the Chilean education system he experienced in his previous presidency. And those protests have not subsided. President Bachelet has also endured loud criticism against the weakness of reform. President Pinera certainly feels the pressure to succeed in increasing his legitimacy to endorse / create sound education policy, but also to bring legitimacy back to the Chilean education system as a whole.
However education reform is not the only priority of Piñera. He is facing pressure to seek easy fixes, namely reversing the tax increases that in large part pay for recent education reform programs and decreasing public spending, to reverse slow economic growth. And further, Piñera’s commitment to conserving a privatized system constrains your reform options.
To address the first constraint, education = economic growth. And to address the second constraint, all recommendations assume the continuation of a fully privatized system.
Recommendations
This section contains three recommendations for decreasing achievement gaps and reducing the degree of school segregation in Chilean communities, two phenomenon which are related. These recommendations fall under two main categories:
1. Teacher Professional Development
2. Parental Engagement
Teacher Professional Development
The first two recommendations focus on increasing the quality of teaching and learning in Chilean schools. Teacher development is crucial to this aim and recent reforms indicate the Ministry of Education recognized the important of high quality instruction. Although these policy changes aimed at improving pre-service teacher training will surely improve educational outcomes, teacher development must be sustained throughout a teacher’s career. In order to build upon existing teacher training the Ministry of Education could:
1. Promote the adoption of Teacher Working Groups among schools with high proportions of priority students
2. Clarify the relationship between the teacher evaluation framework and guidelines for teacher development
There is a strong relationship between teacher quality and student achievement in Chile, which makes professional development a promising policy for reducing achievement gaps. Improvements in teacher quality, as defined by strength of pedagogical practices, mastery of content knowledge, length of experience, and teacher education background, correlate with significant improvements in math exam scores of Chilean 10th graders. Although this specific study cannot prove a causal relationship between these two factors (due to research design limitations), the varying levels of student achievement found in the study suggest that teacher quality is more closely related with improvement than overall level of achievement. This indicates high quality teachers are not simply teaching students who are more likely to perform well on exams, but rather that high quality teachers increase students’ outcomes. Again, the strong relationship between teacher quality and student achievement highlights professional development as an incredibly important area of focus for education reform aimed at reducing achievement gaps.
Teacher Working Groups
Teacher Working Groups are the most promising teacher professional development program for the particular context in which the Chilean education system operates. Teacher working groups are a process through which “educators develop a shared practice of observing, discussing, and analyzing learning and teaching”. Teachers, typically grouped by the age of the students they teach or by subject, work together to solve specific instructional issues. The diagram below outlines what TWGs look like in a school:
Although teacher professional development can take many forms, Teacher Working Groups are the most promising, considering the Chilean context because they allow for school autonomy in improvement and are less resource intensive than other forms of professional development. TWGs hone in on instructional issues specific to the school, grade, subject, and even cohort. This level of specificity is a critical feature of TWGs for education reform. Teachers teaching in the same city or commune, but in different schools, can be working with children from very different backgrounds. Due to the high degree of social stratification between schools, a one-size-fits-all teacher development program is unlikely to be as successful as one tailored to each schools specific needs. Teacher Working Groups allow for this autonomy in solving relevant instructional problems. Further, because TWGs take place entirely within schools and utilize the knowledge and collaborative problem solving skills their own teachers provide, they are much less resource intensive than other common forms of professional development, like instructional coaching or external consulting work. The relatively low cost of TWGs will appeal to President Piñera as he faces pressure to decrease corporate taxes and public spending in light of slow economic growth.
Not only are TWGs particularly good for the times, they also work. And although there is little research on the use of Teacher Working Groups specifically in Chile, the similarity of a successful program in Chile showcases the potential of TWGs. The practice of frequent teacher-teaching-teachers model of professional development has been successful in schools from underserved communities in rural Chile. Although this practice does not completely align with the TWG model, its similar characteristics make TWG a viable method of teacher development.
The Ministry of Education could promote the use of TWGs among schools with high proportions of priority students. This teacher development program can be integrated into the existing program for preferential school subsidies in one of two ways. Schools that currently apply for the preferential school subsidy could receive an increase in the subsidy they receive and teachers at these could be allowed an increase in their non-instructional hours if they choose to adopt TWGs. We believe that schools will choose to opt in due to the high percentage of schools that have opted into the PSS program. Although TWGs may be less costly than other professional development programs, it is important to recognize that this policy will require resources. In considering the subsidy increase, the Ministry of Education should take into account not only the cost of the increase in per-student subsidy, but also the potential need for schools to take on more staff due to the increase in non-instructional hours. Alternately, the use of TWGs could be mandated in the school improvement plans underperforming schools that receive the preferential schools subsidy receive. This alternative could prove to be less costly and is more targeted to the schools with the highest need for professional development help.
Teacher Evaluation
Teacher evaluation is critical to improving teacher quality as it should be the basis of professional development. Chile’s teacher evaluation program has the potential to be a critical tool for teacher professional development. The evaluation program has quite a few strengths: it uses data from a variety of sources to get a comprehensive view of a teacher’s practices, the guidelines for evaluation are made transparent, and there are clear levels of achievement for teachers . Although assessment results can be informative, there is little connection between the teacher evaluation and teacher development, making it difficult for teachers and administrators to use evaluation results to inform in-service training. There is confusion among many teachers about whether to teach to professional development guidelines or evaluation results and what to do with evaluation results.
The Good Teaching Framework serves as a guideline for Chilean teachers which makes clear what excellent instructional preparation, teaching, fulfillment of professional responsibilities, and classroom environment look like. It provides clear criteria, examples for each criteria, and levels of performance. The overall framework for the Docentemás assessment of teaching is made up of a self-evaluation, a peer evaluation, assessment of students’ test scores, classroom evaluation from school administration, and a portfolio created by the teacher which contains a video of his teaching and materials such as lesson plans and worksheets. The self-evaluation, peer evaluation, administrator evaluation, and video evaluation use a set of questions that is updated each year, while only the school administrator evaluation uses the GTF. The disconnect between the Good Teaching Framework and the evaluation framework are in part due to the variety of sources of assessment.
Evaluation results must be easily translatable into professional development strategies. We recommend two ways that these two frameworks can be made into a more coherent, easily navigable system. One, although the Good Teaching Framework is not applicable to all the mediums of evaluation, it could become the framework for peer classroom evaluations, evaluation by administration, and video evaluation. Alternatively, the Ministry of Education could create teaching and evaluation frameworks that better reflect each other and clearly delineate the relationship between each other. Two, the Good Teaching Framework or the newly created consolidated framework should be integrated into the teacher pre-service training the National System for Teacher’s Development Law mandates. We recommended pre-service training over in-service training as the topic, frequency, X of in-service training is largely at the discretion of individual schools. Further, the use of the GTF or combination framework would require….
Parental Access / Involvement
The third recommendation focuses on decreasing school segregation based on socioeconomic status. Segregation is not only problematic in itself, it facilitates large achievement gaps between students from advantaged backgrounds and students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Chilean schools are heavily segregated by socioeconomic status and research conducted by the Universidad de Chile and New York University indicates that the socioeconomic breakdown of the school has an impact on students’ educational achievement in the Chilean context. And this relationship does not seem to be grounded in the SES of individual students. The correlation between achievement and students’ SES is consistently weak within individual schools, while it is strong between achievement and the average SES of schools. So while there is insignificant difference between students of unlike backgrounds, there is a significant difference between schools with high proportions of low SES students and those with high proportions of high SES students. And this relationship is linear; the greater the difference in SES between schools, the greater the achievement gaps. Because school segregation generates inequality of outcomes, addressing it is both a viable solution to reducing achievement gaps and of course to reducing school segregation itself.
Chile has already taken many measures to diminish school segregation, particularly the policies introduced in the Preferential School Subsidy Law of 2008 and the School Inclusion Law of 2016. Although these measures are promising, they fail to consider what equalization of opportunity means in practice. Simply barring most schools from charging above the amount of money subsidies provide and creating a common enrollment system does not guarantee all parents will be able to navigate the common enrollment system equally. As Sen recognizes, it is important to remember the difference between the ability to earn something of value and the ability to use something of value. Sen elaborates on this principle by applying it to a handicapped person: “The very factors that may make a person unable to find a good job and a good income may put the person at a disadvantage in achieving a good quality of life even with the same job and income”. In the Chilean context, parents with low incomes or low levels of education attainment basically do have the ability to have access to the same value of vouchers that a parents from a higher socioeconomic household does. But, the former are at a disadvantage in using these vouchers to secure their children spots at high performing schools. Chilean schools, despite reform from nearly nine years ago, are still heavily segregated. This is likely because parents lack the tools to navigate the enrollment system with ease. Parents who are less likely to have social capital, access to the internet, time to look into many schools, will be less successful in placing their children in high performing schools, even if the “income” or vouchers they have are the same as any other parents’ vouchers because of their “unequal disadvantage in converting income into capabilities”.
The third recommendation is a complement to the already existing common enrollment system which will increase low SES parents’ capabilities to put their vouchers to use. The Ministry of Education should mount an informational campaign to educate parents about the common enrollment system and their options. These recommendations are not the only ways to increase access to information about local schools. Input from parents should be an important tool to adding to or reforming the informational campaigns for future years. Specific recommendations include:
Expanding the Reach of Information Centers Parents can get help applying or learning about schools at Information Centers. Currently, most information centers are set up in schools or colleges in the region. The Ministry of Education could mandate the expansion of Information Centers to other public buildings such as offices for civil registration, libraries, and post offices. Strategic partnerships with churches could be especially successful considering the high percentage of religious individuals in Chile and the pretty equal distribution of religiosity across the income range. Although setting up Information Centers may be impractical, churches could be good locations for smaller-scale outreach, like tabling.
Distributing School Report Cards
School report cards give information about the average SIMCE scores of each school in the region. The distribution of report cards has been shown to increase low income parents’ enrollment of their children in higher achieving schools. These report cards can be distributed at Information Centers, churches, schools, colleges, and other public buildings. Not only will report cards increase the enrollment of lower SES students at higher achieving schools, they have been shown to increase the exam scores of all schools in low income communities in India, likely due to the increased competition for students they foster.
Text Alerts
High frequency texting to parents has been shown to decrease “parent-school” information gaps and improve educational outcomes in low-income elementary schools in Chile. Although the text messages in this study concerned students’ performance in school, absences, and behavioral incidents, the success of this program in increasing parental engagement and information make it applicable to the current context. Regional Ministries of Education can gather parent contact information from schools. Although most of Chileans own cell phones, it is important for Ministries of Education across Chile to use other means of communication as the 7% of Chileans who do not own cell phones are predominantly those that should be targeted by the informational campaign.