External technical support for school improvement: critical issues from the Chilean experience

Abstract

To what extent school improvement processes can be initiated and sustained from the outside has been a relevant question for policy-makers seeking to increase quality in education. Since 2008, the Chilean Government is strongly promoting the use of external technical support (ETS) services to support school improvement processes, as part of the Student Priority Voucher programme, a compensatory policy that provides significant additional resource to schools serving the poorest 40% of students. Participating schools and ETS providers negotiate services and prices in a market-like dynamic. In this paper, we describe the Chilean ETS policy, discuss the ETS policy implementation, review the empirical evidence about the effects of ETS services in schools, and critically analyse the ETS policy as an instrument for school improvement. We argue that experts who are knowledgeable in the field of education have the potential to effectively support schools in need of improvement. However, brokers and external consultants providing school support in Chile within a market-oriented framework typically lack the characteristics associated with positive effects; this raises the critical issue of developing professional capacities within schools to produce genuine and sustainable improvement processes.

Keywords:

• consultancy services in education
• school improvement
• accountability policies
• privatisation policies
• process evaluation
• impact evaluation

Acknowledgements

We thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Alejandra Osses is a Sociologist from the University of Chile. She earned her master's degree in Educational Sciences at the University of Burgundy, France, and completed her Ph.D. in Education at The University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests focus on school improvement and student assessment.

Cristián Bellei (Doctor of Education, Harvard University) is an associate researcher of the Center for Advanced Research in Education and assistant professor in the Sociology Department, both at the University of Chile. His main research areas are educational policy, school effectiveness, and school improvement; he has published extensively about quality and equity in Chilean education.

Juan Pablo Valenzuela (Ph.D. in Economics, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) is an associate researcher of the Center for Advanced Research in Education and an associate professor in the Economics Department, both at the University of Chile. His main research areas are economics of education and social inequality.

ORCID

Cristián Bellei http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6963-7809

Notes

1. An ETS service is defined as an education policy strategy whose purpose is to provide technical and pedagogical support directly to schools in order to initiate or sustain education improvement. ETS services are provided by individual consultants or institutions with expertise in education and are implemented directly with school actors. An ETS service is not an action regularly undertaken by the school managers. It is rather an intervention limited in time, although not necessarily brief (González and Bellei 2013).

2. Spanish acronym for Subvención Escolar Preferencial.

3. The SEP programme shares an important number of elements with the US No Child Left Behind programme, including the use of ETS services and the accountability component (Source: Ley de Subvención Escolar Preferencial 2008).

Additional information

Funding

This study was partially supported by the PIA-CONICYT Basal Funds for Centers of Excellence [grant number BF0003]; and the PIA-CONICYT ANILLO [grant number SOC-1104].