Improvement Trajectories of Secondary Schools in Chile

• In Event: Why School Improvement in Secondary Education Is So Difficult? Learning About Improvement From Chilean High Schools

Abstract

There are very few studies about long term school’s performance at international level and for the case of Latin America this is the first one. To make it possible to compare the evolution of the educational performance of secondary schools in Chile, we created an Educational Performance Index (IDE) (authors) to identify improvement trajectories in secondary schools in the country. This was done through advanced statistical analyzes and tested its internal consistency by Cronbach-α and KMO (George & Mallery, 1995; Visauta, 1999), that allowed us to use a set of performance indicators from a decade -2002 to 2014- mainly in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and equity, as well as the magnitude, location and characterization of schools, all of them based on public databases. It was possible to analyze most of Chilean high schools (2,122 over a total of 3,000) for which there were comparable public data from the whole last decade. We found that only 174 high schools showed a sustained improvement in the period considered.

In the first place, it is important to point out that there was an important difficulty in finding secondary schools with a trajectory of sustained improvement, comparatively higher than in an equivalent previous research of primary schools carried out by the research team (Authors, 2016).

During the last decade secondary schools in Chile did not seem to have improve in aggregate terms as well as in equity. Nevertheless, when analyzing in detail the individual trajectories of about 2,000 high schools, a high heterogeneity is observed. While a quarter of these schools showed a better performance in the IDE at the end of the decade with respect to the beginning, another similar proportion showed deterioration, explaining national level average of zero improvement in secondary education at all. However, less than one in ten secondary schools showed a trajectory of sustained improvement in their educational performance. Contrasting primary education, this heterogeneity was associated with a high level of inequity, since trajectories of sustained improvement were more frequent among schools of medium-high and high socioeconomic status than among medium–low and low socioeconomic status schools, also generating a polarization process of schools´ performance. Similarly, the last decade was characterized by a more intensive deterioration between public and vocational schools, revealing a profound inequity in the trajectories of school performance. On the other side, students´ enrollment changed intensively across secondary schools during this period, reducing size among those schools with deteriorated performance and increasing for those with better results, ameliorating the average performance in secondary education level trough enrollment recomposition processes. Nevertheless, social recomposition of these better schools was characterized for more social homogeneity and therefore higher segregation and less opportunities for those students from low and low-middle social classes.

Authors

• Juan Pablo Valenzuela, Universidad de Chile

• Claudio Allende, Universidad de Chile