Evaluating the Functioning of School Improvement Networks: Fostering Capacity for School-to-School Collaboration in Chile

• In Event: Accountability of Educational Networks: New Avenues to Improve Public Education

Abstract

Decentralization has been a prominent feature of education reform in the past three decades, under the assumption that local problems require local solutions (McGinn & Welsh, 1999). Lately, networking has been advanced as an effective school improvement strategy in decentralized systems (Wohlstetter, Malloy, Chau, & Polhemus, 2003), promoting collaboration between people and organizations (RincónGallardo & Fullan, 2016). Chile has echoed this international trend and, in 2015, the Ministry of Education launched the School Improvement Networks (SIN) strategy to support public schools.
In this study we analyzed the collaboration of partners in the SINs in the absence of any accountability of the network. We were interested to learn how two dimensions of network functioning, social capital and network organization (see Díaz, Civís and Guàrdia, 2014), change in a context where is an emphasis on school-level accountability, strong competition between schools in pupil enrollment, and principals’ success is evaluated by increased enrollment and students’ achievement. These findings add to the evidence highlighting the potential of networking to produce a cultural change towards collaboration in competitive contexts (Ainscow, Muijs and West, 2006; Feys and Devos, 2015; Wallace, 1998).

Authors

• Álvaro González, Universidad de O'Higgins

• Mauricio Pino-Yancovic, Universidad de Chile, Centro de Investigación Avanzada en Educación (CIAE)

• Luis Ahumada, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso

• Carmen Montecinos, Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso