Latin America Advisor
June 3, 2011
Jeffrey Puryear
Co-director, PREAL
WASHINGTON-Test scores are up in Chile. Between 2009 and 2010, fourth
grade reading scores on the country's national achievement test rose
nine points-the largest one-year increase ever recorded. More
importantly, most of the gains occurred among the poorest students,
rather than among the richest. The gap in reading scores between rich
and poor students has declined by nearly 30 percent over the past
decade. At the same time, Chile's reading scores for 15-year-olds in the
OECD's 2009 PISA exam were the highest among the nine Latin American and
Caribbean countries that participated and improved more than any of the
65 participating countries. This is great news for a country where
scores on student achievement tests have been flat for decades, and
where inequality has been remarkably high.
To be sure, the test scores of Chile's students are still too low. Less
than half of fourth-graders score at the advanced levels, and roughly a
quarter are two years below grade level. Math scores have hardly
improved at all. And in the PISA exam, Chile still scores well below the
OECD average.
Still, Chile's recent progress is encouraging, and suggests that the
country is doing something right. But what? Chile was one of the first
countries in the region to establish modern, nationwide student
achievement tests and make the results widely available to parents and
local communities. It long ago decentralized education provision to
municipal governments and was the first (and only) country to establish
a school choice system that enables parents to send their children to
schools that are privately operated but publicly funded. Chile also
expanded the school day, significantly raised salaries in an effort to
persuade more talented students to become teachers, experimented with
various forms of merit pay and was a pioneer in persuading the teachers
union to agree to annual performance evaluations. It established a
"Preferential School Subsidy" that provides schools with extra funding
for the students they enroll from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Chile's leaders haven't stopped experimenting. The country is now
introducing learning standards and setting up a new education quality
assurance system that will monitor school performance and intervene when
individual schools fail to meet minimum levels. And public school
principals will soon be permitted to dismiss the lowest-performing 5
percent of teachers in their schools. It has also made education a
long-term state policy, shielding it from the short-term fluctuations of
successive administrations.
Perhaps research will eventually show that one or another of these
measures was crucial. But what is clear is that few Latin American
countries have worked harder and longer to improve their schools.
Whatever the merits of any single measure, putting quality education at
the top of the national agenda, scouring the world for good ideas,
experimenting with new approaches, evaluating results, adjusting policy
appropriately and generating a national discussion about test scores
send a powerful message to students, parents and teachers that learning
is important-and cause them to increase their effort. In Chile's
schools, strong political leadership and old-fashioned perseverance may
be paying off.
Gregory Elacqua
--
Director
Instituto de Políticas Publicas
Facultad de Economía y Empresa
Universidad Diego Portales
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