Chapter 7: Quality of Education: Contesting Democratization Outcomes from within International Stakes Testing

Consistent with a globalized embracement of neoliberalism, educational policies have focused on educational outcomes alone, as measured by on norm-referenced stakes tests. Many countries, including Chile, have national stakes testing that compares the performance of all students against a national mean. Intercultural and socioeconomic differences that influence differences in learning outcomes tend to be omitted in these processes.

Chile, as other countries do, also participates in international norm-referenced testing, such as the TIMS-R and PISA tests. While all of these tests measure the quality of education by using curricular content achievements and learning skills, there are some problems associated with using these tests as the single evidence of the quality of education, since social differences are unaccounted for in these tests. This discriminates against students from families of lower socioeconomic background, indigenous groups, and other minority groups that tend to be underrepresented in the higher tiers of achievement, while students from families with higher socioeconomic status are overrepresented in these tiers. Neoliberal policies in education tend to place responsibility on students and their families, ignoring the social and educational background differences that precondition learning outcomes. The end result is a conditional bias that furthers segregation. This has been the case in countries such as Chile under a liberal, market-driven educational system. Parents with higher SES are led to want to enroll their children in schools with higher scores on the national and international stakes test, which tend to be well-endowed private schools, having to place hard-to-teach children in schools that private schools and private-subsidized schools reject in their selection processes. A socially unjust system keeps escalating.