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Harald Beyer

The quality of education in Chile is earning a failing grade. Public school teachers tend to be underpaid, under-skilled and generally not up to the task of preparing generations of future leaders, which is reflected in the poor test results of their students.

This is the problem facing the government of President Sebastian Piñera which is determined to make a “revolutionary” change in the country’s education system. Paying teachers more is part of the answer but it is certainly not the whole solution. To determine what else is needed, Education Minister Joaquin Lavín created an independent panel of experts, including former ministers, mayors and school principals, to come up with suggestions. The panel, headed by economist Harald Beyer of the Santiago think-tank CEP Chile, handed its first report to President Piñera in July. bUSiness CHILE sat down with Mr. Beyer to discuss the report’s findings.

Chile’s education system has been widely criticized for failing to produce students with the skills needed to succeed. What’s going wrong? 

Chile has been discussing how to improve its education system for some time and there is a general agreement that the teaching profession is a weakness. The results from all three types of Chile’s educational establishments: public schools, subsidized private schools and private schools, are poor compared to more developed countries. Even the elite private schools don’t do very well in international rankings. There are different reasons for this, but there is an agreement in Chile that one of them is the quality of teachers and principals. This report aims to tackle this problem in different ways but the main objective is to strengthen the teaching profession.

And how does the report propose this could be achieved?

Rethinking the whole profession is important to attract the most talented young people into teaching. Like the United States, the pool of students who apply to teaching programs is shrinking. Over half of the students studying education in Chile scored in the bottom 50% on the Chilean SAT equivalent, the PSU exam. The question is how to change this. Part of the solution we propose is raising teacher salaries between 27 and 55 percent starting in the early stages of their career and simplifying the way they are paid. Depending on the available financial resources, the salary gap with other professions should be reduced by 50% in five years and closed completely in ten years.

Will paying teachers more improve the quality of education?

Higher salaries should make students who opt for other professions like law or engineering choose teaching instead. But this alone is not enough. We suggest drastic changes in the requirements to get into education programs. Today, almost anyone can become a teacher. Chile is graduating between 15,000 and 18,000 new teachers a year, but only between 5,000 and 7,000 retire each year. For this reason, institutes can afford to be much more stringent in their requirements.

But it’s not fair to put requirements at the end of the program, so we favor putting restrictions on students before they start. For example, we suggest that successful applicants are chosen from those with scores in the top 30% on the PSU. We also think that scholarships must be repaid if the student does not complete the program to stop them leaving once they’ve started.

So on the one hand we want to make it more difficult to get into teaching programs and on the other we aim to improve their quality. There are around 400 programs in Chile but many of these are poor quality and the accreditation process cannot be trusted. This needs to change.

It seems the report is advocating the decentralization of the education system, is this accurate?

The system is already decentralized because the public schools are municipally run, but the municipalities and the principals don’t have a say in the education system. The curriculum is defined by the government, principals have no responsibility for their school’s results, they can’t fire or hire teachers and they decide how much to pay them. We are pushing to give principals greater accountability and a greater say in how their schools are managed.

Are municipalities and principals prepared to accept greater responsibility for the quality of education in their schools?

We are looking at whether municipal employees should be given training to manage schools or whether another type of institution should be set up to do this. The panel will finish a second report that addresses this issue in September.

What concrete results do you hope will come from this report?

The government will meet with the teachers union in August and it should consider some of our proposals in the negotiations. It’s important to give a signal to new teachers that they can earn a decent salary and there should be changes made to the 1991 Teachers’ Statute, which is very restrictive when it comes to firing teachers based on their performance.

We also want the government to improve the way principals are trained and selected because all this has to be bundled together. You cannot advance in one area without advancing in the other.

Did you look at the education system in other countries?

Yes, we looked at the experience of European countries like Finland which has a very selective process for teachers. The UK, Singapore, Korea and other countries have also decided to make the teacher selection process much more restrictive and they are reaping the rewards from that approach. New Zealand is an interesting example for organizing public schools because most of their schools are public but they have good corporate governance.

Chile ranks very near the bottom of the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), especially in math and science, so we are looking at countries that are at the top like Finland, New Zealand and Canada to see how they are doing it.

How has the report been received?

There has been some negative reaction from the teachers’ union but this was expected. There are two proposals they don’t like very much. First, we suggest that municipalities should be responsible for evaluating teachers instead of the central government. Teachers don’t like this because it’s a more aggressive system and they might get fired.

A bill currently before Congress will impose quality standards on all public schools and if these standards are not met, schools can be closed. So principals will have an incentive to hire the best teachers to meet the standards and fire those who don’t perform.

We think younger teachers especially will appreciate that under the new system the risk of being fired is greater, but the rewards are also greater.

If the report’s proposals are implemented, how long before they will have an impact?

Not long, especially if principals are given more flexibility to manage their schools. Better paid principals who are evaluated on their performance should achieve better results very quickly.

Julian Dowling is the Editor of bUSiness CHILE