Promoting quality education in Chile: the politics of reforming teacher careers

ABSTRACT

Reformers in developing countries increasingly seek to raise education quality. Yet we know little about the politics of improving education. One significant and instructive case of reforms designed to boost education quality comes from Chile, where in 2016 the government enacted a sweeping reform of teaching careers. This paper first uses a quantitative analysis of appearances in the news to identify key stakeholders and then turns to process tracing to analyze how and when these stakeholders influenced reform dynamics. Comparatively, the Chilean case differs from similar reforms elsewhere in Latin America due to the absence of business, the strong role of policy networks, and the final negotiated settlement with the teacher union. Theoretically, the analysis confirms general theories that emphasize the roles of distributive politics and policy networks.

KEYWORDS:

• Distributional politics
• education reform
• teaching careers
• policy networks
• teacher unions

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Felipe Fabrega e Ismael Hidalgo for excellent work on the database on news items, to Martin Liby Alonso and Anna Weissman for research assistance, and to Loreto Cox, Tim Dorlach, Veronica Herrera, Leslie Finger, Merilee Grindle, and participants at a workshop at CIDE and at the 2017 Repal conference for comments on previous versions. Alejandra Mizala acknowledges financial support from PIA-CONICYT FB0003.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. The final law was called Sistema de Desarrollo Profesional Docente (System for Professional Teacher Development). We use the initial, simpler name PND throughout the paper.

2. The 2006 protests were led by high school students (whose uniforms gave them the penguin moniker). One of their core demands was improving quality, especially in public municipal schools (Donoso 2013).

3. Chile ranks highest on PISA tests among participating countries in Latin America, but ranks near the bottom among OECD countries.

4. The reforms to higher education were also designed to make university free for the poorest 60 percent of students.

5. In another education example, Finger (2017) finds that state-level reform efforts in the United States were more likely to succeed if they had strong connections to, and support from, out-of-state reform advocates. The general literature on policy networks is diffuse. For classic treatments and reviews, see Borzel (1998) and Rhodes (1997). For a recent application to education reform in India, see Ball (2016).

6. The estimate of 40–50 people in the core policy network comes from one of the co-authors who is a member of the network.

7. The Colegio is the only teacher union in Chile. For more background and history, see Murillo (2002) and Assaél and Inzunza (2007).

8. The absence of veto points in Britain and Scandinavia allowed reformers to enact sweeping performance-based reforms, whereas teacher unions in other countries such as Germany, France, and the United States availed themselves of various veto points to block reform. See also, Finger (2018) on the United States.

9. As such the Chilean case fits better Schneider’s (2013) theory on hierarchical capitalism and low-skill equilibria in middle-income countries. In their reviews of earlier education reforms in other countries of Latin America, Grindle (2004, 198) and Kaufman and Nelson (2004, 267) also found little evidence of business support.

10. [coauthor] is an additional key infrmant through consulting work with Mineduc (2014–15).

11. To simplify terminology on Chile’s education system we refer to the three different kinds of schools as private (no government support), private-voucher (private with government financing), and municipal (public with government financing). Both private-voucher and municipal schools receive per capita payments for students enrolled from the central government. Private-voucher schools are also known as ‘private subsidized’ (privado subvencionado). In 2015, 56 percent of children were enrolled in private-voucher schools, 36 percent in municipal schools, and 8 percent in private schools. However, there were proportionally more teachers in municipal schools (44 percent) and private schools (9 percent) compared to private-voucher schools (47 percent of teachers) (Mineduc 2016).

12. Portfolio evaluations have been used in Chile for many years for teachers in municipal schools. The PND extended evaluations to teachers in private-voucher schools. Using student scores in evaluations has been contentious in other countries. The PND did not propose using student scores in part because the existing system for testing students cannot be used to measure value added by teachers.

13. This figure presents salaries for teachers in municipal schools who work 37 hours a week. Pay scales vary somewhat according to contract type (hours per week), school (private-voucher or municipal), and proportion of poor students.

14. On the politics of the Inclusion Law, see Bellei (2016), Mizala (2014), and Kubal and Fisher (2016).

15. Rarely do organizations of university students get so engaged with debates on pre-university education. Elsewhere, parents are usually only weakly and not very visibly organized (Grindle 2004). In part, the overall politicization of education in Chile may have provoked a stronger parent engagement. Parent associations cared much more about the Inclusion Law than the PND.

16. Some parents associations appeared 10 times more often in relation to the Inclusion Law than to PND. In fact, one of them emerged mainly to fight the Inclusion Law.

17. Some mentions of protestant churches are included in Figure 3, but the great majority of mentions are to the Catholic Church.

18. Elige Educar and Educación 2020 were less than a decade old in 2015 (founded in 2009 and 2008, respectively). In the beginning Educación 2020 had close ties to professors at the University of Chile and students at the University of Chile and the Catholic University.

19. Nor did business participate in other less visible ways. None of the interviewees mentioned significant engagement by business.

20. In some countries, international organizations like the OECD or multilateral development agencies like the IDB (InterAmerican Development Bank) and the World Bank have played important roles in reform processes. Certainly, policy networks in Chile are well connected to all three, but the international agencies themselves were not visible participants. Press appearances by all international organizations are a small fraction of those by domestic associations, and a tiny fraction of appearances by politicians.

21. The Nueva Mayoria’s electoral platform was a long, 198 page document that headlined three core areas of fundamental reform, starting with education, followed by tax and constitutional reform (‘Programa de gobierno,’ October 2013, www.onar.gob.cl/wp-content/upLoads/2014/05/ProgramaMB.pdf, accessed 15 January 2017). The eight page section on education included proposals on: (i) new regulations for pre-school education, (ii) prohibition of student selection by schools, elimination of parental co-payments, and prohibition of profit-making in education, (iii) a national teaching career to improve teaching quality; and (iv) de-municipalisation of public education as well as reforms to higher education.

22. Proposals on teacher careers spanned the decade since 2006: Presidential Advisory Commission (2006); a joint committee (mesa de trabajo) between Mineduc and the Colegio (2008); panel of experts (2010); special proposal from Elige Educar and Centro de Politicas Publicas PUC (2012); Beyer’s bill on teacher careers (2012); and some proposals on teaching careers from the OECD (2014) (Bonifaz and Mizala 2014, anexo).

23. In contrast to the United States and Europe, policy networks in Chile did not include permanent, expert staff in Congress and in political parties. This overview of the policy network draws on the experience of [coauthor] in this network since the 2000s.

24. Membership numbers are disputed. The Colegio website puts total membership in 2017 over 100,000 (http://www.colegiodeprofesores.cl/institucion/, accessed 12 August 2017), but outside estimates put the total much lower. El Mercurio reported 52,000 (26 November 2016, p. 3). Wikipedia put paid up members at 65,000 https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colegio_de_Profesores_de_Chile, which comports with figures given informally by staff at Colegio and Mineduc. Some portion (perhaps in the 10–20,000 range) of most of these estimates includes retired teachers.

25. The speed of reform also generated opposition as many thought the reforms were too hasty and not well thought out. By 2017, reforming Bachelet’s tax reform was already a key issue for candidates campaigning to succeed her.

26. Cohesion was evident in the final voting. However, over the course of 2014, even parties in the Nueva Mayoria, especially the DC opposed many items in the government’s proposal on the Inclusion Law.

27. Interview Rodolfo Bonifaz, 17 January 2017.

28. Several associations did not participate including parent associations and further right think tanks like LyD. Business associations were again conspicuously absent.

29. The Plan Maestro successfully pushed two other changes in the initial Mineduc bill: to eliminate an entrance exam to begin teaching (also strongly opposed by the Colegio) and to make voluntary the last two of the five career levels.

30. The url for this column no longer exists, but the text is copied into online Appendix F in online Supplemental Data.

31. The Colegio’s behavior largely fits with Murillo’s (2001) more general arguments about unions, parties, and market reform in the 1990s. The Colegio cooperated with allied parties in government. However, leadership competition within the Colegio surfaced at the end of the process in greater union militancy with the 2015 strike. And, in the first post-reform election in the Colegio, the dissident challengers won.

32. Throughout process of enacting PND, the main negotiator from the ministry side was minister Eyzaguirre.

33. 200 is less than one percent of the roughly 100,000 teachers in municipal schools. However, many other reforms in other countries with provisions for firing teachers often end up blocked or not implemented, so any dismissals is already a big step, and sets an important precedent.

34. Since 2011 the government has offered tuition fellowships to pedagogy applicants with high scores on university entrance exams. For the highest scoring applicants, the fellowship also includes a stipend and the opportunity to spend a semester overseas.

35. In Rhodes’ argument, the impact of policy entrepreneurs comes from their ability to bring together coalition partners that would not naturally ally (as in African-American civil rights groups and big business). Kosack (2012) argues that where business does not push education, the poor can but only with the help of political entrepreneurs (in order to overcome the collective action problems confronting the poor).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Conicyt, Chile [PIA-CONICYT FB003].

Notes on contributors

Alejandra Mizala

Alejandra Mizala holds an economics degree from the University of Chile and a PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.  She is Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Education and CIAE, and Professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering, Universidad de Chile. Her research interests include economics of education, gender equality in education, and labor topics.

Ben Schneider

Ben Schneider is Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT and director of the MIT-Brazil program.  He taught previously at Princeton University and Northwestern University.  His recent books include Hierarchical Capitalism in Latin America: Business, Labor, and the Challenges of Equitable Development, and Innovating in Brazil.