The ethics of competition: accountability policy enactment in Chilean schools’ everyday life

To align or not to align: the enactment of accountability and data-use in disadvantaged school contexts

“…During the early 2000s, after a decade of steady growth in public spending on education, policymakers identified certain areas of stagnation in student learning outcomes (Bellei and Vanni 2015). For this reason, the government implemented various compensatory programs directed at low-performing schools to promote data use and school improvement (Falabella 2020). In 2008, this policy model crystallized in the Preferential School Subsidy Law (Weinstein and Villalobos 2016), through which the state gives schools an additional subsidy for each student that they enroll from a disadvantaged context (Valenzuela and Montecinos 2017).…”

“…In Chile, PBA instruments were implemented in the context of a profound market-driven educational reform, introduced in the 1980s (Diaz Rios 2018; Gysling 2016;Verger et al 2019) but currently PBA generates political consensus among right-wing and center-left parties (Author(s) 2017). Recent educational reforms adopted by both right-wing and center-left governments have only reinforced the PBA logic to educational governance and intensified the number of national assessments, the areas covered by these assessments and the consequences of assessment results for school actors (Carrasco et al 2015;Falabella 2020). Nonetheless, despite the bipartisan support for PBA, important educational stakeholders are very critical of the current PBA approach and advocate the construction of a new assessment system that is more context-sensitive and formative in nature (Campos-Martínez and Fernández 2014; Flórez Petour and Rozas Assael 2019).…”

“…The present investigation is situated in the social and academic debate that PBA generates in Chile (see Acuña et al 2014;Assaél et al 2014;Falabella 2016Falabella , 2020Montecinos et al 2014;) and aims to provide new knowledge about how Chilean school actors understand and respond to accountability policies, with a focus on contexts of disadvantages. Specifically, the objective of this study is twofold.…”

La judicialización de la convivencia escolar en el marco del Sistema de Aseguramiento de la Calidad de la Educación chileno: El caso de las denuncias escolares

“…En los países de América Latina, durante la última década se observa un interés creciente hacia políticas de accountability que involucran el área de convivencia escolar por medio de pruebas estandarizadas con consecuencias para las escuelas y sus administradores, y la instalación de dispositivos públicos para denunciar actos de violencia escolar, contra los cuales el Estado se compromete a investigar de manera supervisora PERALES, 2019). Los elementos diferenciales de esta perspectiva son la operacionalización de indicadores para la convivencia, la planificación de metas, la instalación de órganos gestores en las escuelas, así como la supervisión y sanción institucional (ASCORRA et al, 2019;FALABELLA, 2020). En Chile, en lo que se refiere a la violencia y convivencia escolar, en el año 2002 el Ministerio de Educación formuló una Política Nacional sobre Convivencia Escolar.…”

Medicalisation in Neoliberal Contexts: Imagining Other Futures in Schools

“…On a landscape in which there is a strong emphasis to make each individual responsible for his own actions, where discipline manifests itself as an inner attribute and no as something imposed from the outside, and where academic achievement is relegated to the background in order to favour the development of specific social skills and expressions of characterproper of the elites and of a religious sensitivitythat could secure the chances of remaining in such privileged position, the raise of ADHD and the medicalisation of specific portions of children lives takes a very particular appearance. In that sense, the neoliberal logics of accountability carefully described by Falabella (2019) operate in these schools, but their effects seem to be mediated by other factors that allow that diagnoses and treatments can undergo a different becoming to the one experienced in other educational institutions, where the push for performance and the constant competition for funding forces the emergence of psy knowledge in other configurations and linked to other entanglements.…”