March 2010 Archives

Adjunto un informe de política publicado hoy por el Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación (CPCE) de UDP que presenta datos (rendimiento acádemico, datos demográficos, y otros indicadores) de las 321 escuelas (168,279 estudiantes) derrumbadas o con daños severos a causa del terremoto (8,8 en la escala richter) del 27 de febrero de 2010.  Los autores sostienen que la tragedia representa una oportunidad para el gobierno chileno de mejorar las escuelas vulnerables y de bajo rendimiento en las zonas afectadas. Se presentan 6 propuestas concretas, la mayoría basadas en la experiencia del distrito escolar de New Orleans post-Huracán Katrina.

Puede ver el informe con las tablas y las citas a los artículos sobre la experiencia de reconstrucción e inovación en el sistema escolar de New Orleans Post-Katrina en:
http://www.cpce.cl/es/publicaciones/docman/cat_view/32-noticias

Gregory
http://www.cpce.cl/educar/
---------------
Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación - UDP

Terremoto 27/2: Oportunidad para mejorar las escuelas en Chile

Gregory Elacqua, Humberto Santos y Felipe Salazar
http://www.cpce.cl

"Llegó el tiempo, no de olvidar, pero sí de ser capaces de secar nuestras lágrimas, poner manos a la obra y trabajar sin descanso para enfrentar esta tragedia, para superar esta emergencia y para reconstruir, y mejor, nuestras viviendas, nuestras escuelas y nuestros hospitales." (Primer mensaje en cadena nacional del presidente Sebastián Piñera, 18 de marzo 2010). En las palabras del Presidente hay un mensaje claro. Su objetivo no sólo es reconstruir, sino mejorar la calidad de las viviendas, escuelas y hospitales destruidos por el terremoto. Sin embargo, hasta ahora el acento parece estar puesto en la urgencia de que todos los estudiantes estén asistiendo a clases. Las lecciones aprendidas en otras tragedias nos pueden dar luces del camino a seguir.

El 29 de agosto de 2005 el Huracán Katrina devastó la ciudad de New Orleans, incluyendo sus escuelas. Casi dos tercios de los establecimientos de la ciudad fueron dañados por las inundaciones, ocasionando costos estimados en 800 millones de dólares. Más que limitarse al levantamiento de las escuelas, el proceso de reconstrucción incluyó la discusión e implementación de políticas destinadas a entregar a todos los estudiantes una educación de calidad. Aceptando las diferencias con el caso chileno, la experiencia de New Orleans ha demostrado que dentro de la tragedia hay oportunidades para mejorar.

Efectos del terremoto en cifras

Datos Generales
•    Existen, según el catastro de MINEDUC, 321 establecimientos totalmente derrumbados o con daños severos y 4,546 con daños leves o moderados a nivel nacional. Considerando a los estudiantes en establecimientos totalmente derrumbados o con daños severos, la matrícula total afectada (parvularia, básica y media) es de 168,279 estudiantes.

•    El costo estimado de las reparaciones en los establecimientos dañados es de 1,600 millones de dólares. (Fuente: MINEDUC).
Establecimientos totalmente derrumbados [Ver anexo 1]

•    A nivel nacional, 30 establecimientos se derrumbaron completamente (afectando a 8,568 estudiantes).

•    Subvencionados - Todas las construcciones derrumbadas corresponden a establecimientos que reciben subvención estatal (26 sostenedores municipales y 4 sostenedores privados).

•    Alta vulnerabilidad escolar -  Son establecimientos que atienden a alumnos de nivel socioeconómico bajo y medio bajo, con un alto porcentaje de estudiantes prioritarios (alumnos en condición de vulnerabilidad, según está definido por la ley SEP). En algunos casos, el 100% de su cuerpo estudiantil pertenece a algún pueblo originario.

•    Pobre desempeño - Varios de estos establecimientos tienen porcentajes muy altos de alumnos que no han alcanzado las competencias básicas (nivel inicial), según los últimos resultados disponibles de la prueba SIMCE, incluso comparándolos con establecimientos que atienden a alumnos del mismo nivel socioeconómico.

Establecimientos con daños severos no totalmente derrumbados [Ver anexo 2]

•    Existen 291 establecimientos con daños severos que no se derrumbaron en las regi
ones V, VI, VII, VIII, IX y Metropolitana (159,711 estudiantes afectados).

•    Mayoría municipal - Tres de cada cuatro establecimientos con daños severos corresponden a establecimientos municipales.

•    Varios colegios nuevos - Existe un porcentaje importante de establecimientos particulares subvencionados con daños severos que son relativamente nuevos. Uno de cada tres empezó a funcionar después de 1993.

•    Alta vulnerabilidad - Dos de cada tres corresponden a establecimientos que atienden a alumnos de nivel socioeconómico bajo o medio bajo y uno de cada cuatro tiene más de 70% de estudiantes en condición de vulnerabilidad (definido por la ley SEP).

•    Pobre desempeño - Existe una fracción importante de establecimientos (25%) con una alta concentración de estudiantes que no han alcanzado las competencias básicas (nivel inicial), según los últimos resultados disponibles de la prueba SIMCE. Por el contrario, existen también establecimientos con alumnos que obtienen buenos resultados: El 15% tiene a más de la mitad de sus estudiantes alcanzando el nivel avanzado en Lenguaje y un 7% en Matemática).


No existe una única solución

Si bien es cierto, es de suma urgencia restablecer el servicio educacional en las zonas devastadas por el terremoto--sobre todo considerando que muchas de las escuelas con daños atienden a una fracción importante de estudiantes vulnerables--es necesario aprovechar la oportunidad para mejorar la calidad de la educación entregada. La forma en que esto se puede conseguir dependerá de la evaluación de cada caso en particular. Existirán tantas opciones como escuelas destruidas.

El bienestar académico de los estudiantes exige que no se reconstruyan escuelas de mala calidad. Es probable que la asistencia a un establecimiento de buena calidad académica compense las semanas perdidas de clases en una mala escuela. Esta situación se presenta por ejemplo en el Colegio Insular Robinson Crusoe ubicado en Juan Fernández (Ver ficha), el cual fue totalmente derrumbado por el maremoto. De 100 establecimientos que atienden a estudiantes de nivel socioeconómico similar, este colegio está en el puesto 95 en Lenguaje y 97 en Matemática, pero es la única opción que tienen los habitantes de la isla. Una situación similar se vive en la comuna de Carahue, con la Escuela Particular Vista Hermosa. De los 11 estudiantes que rindieron la prueba SIMCE 2008 (todos indígenas), 10 se encuentran en el nivel inicial de lectura y matemática (es decir, no logran las competencias básicas).

En el otro extremo está la Escuela Enrique Donn Muller ubicada en Constitución (Ver ficha), una de las zonas más devastadas por el terremoto. A pesar de tener una importante fracción de estudiantes vulnerables, esta escuela había sido capaz de subir 39 puntos en la prueba SIMCE de Lenguaje y 48 en la de Matemática entre el 2007 y el 2008, ubicándose dentro de las mejores de su grupo socioeconómico.

Claramente la estrategia de reconstrucción en ambos casos debe ser distinta. Por un lado, en el caso de los establecimientos de buenos resultados, es necesario apoyar el proceso de reconstrucción de la infraestructura, para restablecer el servicio educativo en forma pronta, manteniendo los recursos humanos y la capacidad administrativa, las cuales representan aspectos claves que explican los buenos resultados. Por otro lado, en el caso de las escuelas de resultados deficitarios, es necesario evaluar la conveniencia de su restablecimiento, analizando en forma profunda las causas de su bajo desempeño. Dicho diagnóstico permitirá no replicar un modelo educacional que ha sido poco efectivo en mejorar los aprendizajes.

¿Cómo construir mejores escuelas en las zonas afectadas?: 6 propuestas

1)    Entregar más recursos focalizados: Subvención terremoto
Una condición necesaria para mejorar la calidad de las nuevas escuelas es la disponibilidad de mayores recursos. Por ejemplo, una opción sería entregar una subvención especial transitoria para los establecimientos que se establezcan en las zonas afectadas, la cual actúe como incentivo para el arribo de sostenedores privados que hayan dirigido procesos exitosos y que garantice la disponibilidad de recursos para los establecimientos municipales, considerando el aumento de la carga financiera que tendrán los municipios en las zonas de catástrofe. También se podría implementar la entrega de créditos blandos a sostenedores privados de buenos resultados académicos, cuyos establecimientos hayan quedado con daños severos.

2)    Acelerar Aprobación de Ley de Aseguramiento de Calidad
En forma simultánea, el proceso de entrega de recursos debería ser acompañado de un sistema de Aseguramiento de Calidad, reforzando la autonomía de los establecimientos y al mismo tiempo estableciendo los estándares que regulen la calidad del servicio entregado. Esto deja de manifiesto la importancia de acelerar la aprobación de la Ley de Aseguramiento de Calidad que crea la Agencia Nacional de Calidad y la Superintendencia de Educación, proyecto que tiene el apoyo transversal del gobierno y la oposición (aparte de algunos diputados de la Concertación). 

3)    Entregar administración de establecimientos municipales a sostenedores privados: Modelo charter schools
Una solución alternativa es la entrega temporal (o permanente según el caso) de la administración de establecimientos municipales a sostenedores privados, similar al caso de las charter schools en Estados Unidos. La municipalidad firmaría un contrato con un sostenedor privado que haya demostrado buenos resultados en sus colegios, cediendo la gestión de las escuelas públicas por un plazo fijo. Para poder renovar el contrato con el municipio, el sostenedor tendría que demostrar buenos resultados académicos en el periodo estipulado. Después del huracán, el distrito escolar de New Orleans entregó la administración de varios de sus establecimientos públicos de baja calidad a charter schools - que habían demostrado buenos resultados en forma sistemática en otros estados. La experiencia ha sido bastante exitosa en la mayoría de los casos .

4)    Vouchers de transporte y para asistir a colegios pagados
En el caso de escuelas de pocos estudiantes, es posible reemplazarlas por un medio de transporte que traslade a los estudiantes a escuelas de mayor tamaño en sectores cercanos geográficamente . En New Orleans se exploró también la alternativa de utilizar vouchers para asistir a colegios privados pagados . El gobierno podría generar acuerdos con establecimientos particulares pagados para que estos abran cupos a estudiantes de establecimientos destruidos, entregando a cambio un subsidio que cubra una fracción de la mensualidad.

5)    Reclutar docentes de calidad con vocación de servicio
La presencia de docentes de excelencia es un aspecto clave para garantizar buenos resultados educativos. Se debe estímular a docentes que puedan lograr buenos resultados con alumnos vulnerables a trasladarse hacia las zonas afectadas y al mismo tiempo asegurar la permanencia de aquellos profesores bien evaluados. En New Orleans se reclutó a 75 profesores de Teach for America para trabajar en las escuelas afectadas por el huracán Katrina. Esta organización recluta jóvenes motivados y recién egresados de las mejores universidades de EEUU para trabajar en las escuelas más vulnerables del país. El gobierno chileno podría generar un convenio con organizaciones privadas que tienen una misión similar - como Enseña Chile - para reclutar nuevos docentes con vocación de servicio, altamente motivados y con altas capacidades académicas dispuestos a trabajar en las zonas afectadas.

6)    Aumentar la capacidad de gestión
Finalmente, la capacidad de gestión de los establecimientos es otra de las condiciones necesarias para conducir el proceso de cambio. Estímulos para el traslado de directores líderes y la capacitación de profesionales para administrar establecimientos educacionales es una forma de desarrollar capacidad administrativa al interior de los establecimientos. Experiencias de este tipo han sido importantes en el caso de New Orleans. Por ejemplo, New Leaders for New Schools - organización que capacita a directores líderes para trabajar en escuelas vulnerables de bajo rendimiento - colaboró con el distrito escolar de New Orleans, introduciendo capacidad de liderazgo en las escuelas más necesitadas. El gobierno chileno podría colaborar con instituciones académicas en Chile que tienen programas de formación de directores - como Fundación Chile, PUC, UDP entre otros - para identificar y reclutar a los líderes escolares con vocación de trabajar en los nuevos establecimientos. 

Conclusión

Los efectos del terremoto han sido devastadores. Más de 300 escuelas han quedado totalmente derrumbadas o con daños severos, afectando a más de 160 mil alumnos. La tarea de reconstrucción será difícil y costosa. Pero tal como ha señalado el nuevo Presidente, deberíamos tomar el terremoto como una oportunidad no sólo para reconstruir, sino para levantar mejores escuelas.

Las escuelas de buenos resultados que resultaron afectadas, deben recibir el apoyo necesario para volver a funcionar lo antes posible. En el caso de las escuelas de mal desempeño, se deben realizar los esfuerzos necesarios que permitan levantar no sólo la infraestructura sino también el rendimiento escolar. Para esto, hemos propuesto 6 ideas concretas, que deben ser implementadas según la realidad de cada comunidad: 1) Subvención terremoto, 2) Acelerar la aprobación de la Ley de Aseguramiento de Calidad 3) Entrega de administración de escuelas municipales a privados, 4) Subsidios al transporte, 5) Reclutar docentes de calidad y 6) Aumentar la capacidad de gestión.

Si bien es cierto, no existe una receta que nos permita construir escuelas de calidad de la noche a la mañana, es necesario ser creativos, poniendo sobre la mesa distintas soluciones alternativas. Será necesario evaluar en cada caso cual es la combinación óptima de políticas. El proceso seguramente será largo y estará lleno de dificultades, pero los resultados y lecciones que saquemos de él pueden ser claves para el debate acerca de la calidad de la educación en Chile. 

--
Gregory Elacqua
          --
Sub-director
Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación
Universidad Diego Portales
56-2-676-8535
56-09-6-206-5993
www.cpce.cl
 

Paul Peterson, cientista político de la Universidad de Harvard, escribe sobre el legado de James Coleman.   Fascinante!

Gregory
 http://www.cpce.cl/educar/
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Education Next

Spring 2010 / Vol. 10, No. 2
Paul Peterson

A Courageous Look at the American High School

The legacy of James Coleman

Excellence was seldom to be found in 2006, when David Ferrero, an officer of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, reviewed five firsthand, book-length accounts of teaching and learning at individual high schools. In one account, a rookie teacher, telling her own story, "struggles to establish authority in her classes and generally fails;...her students ritually defy her, going so far as to openly declare their intention to get her fired for the sheer sport of it." At another school, "numerous attempts" by well-meaning, hardworking teachers fail "to coax students out of their shells, engage them in important issues, and motivate them to perform on tests." On and on such tales go. A powerful but hostile peer group seemed in charge of the learning process.

According to Cornell economist John Bishop, the problem begins in middle school, where "nerds" are harassed. "Studiousness is denigrated...in part because it shifts up the grading curve and forces others to work harder to get good grades.... Victims of nerd harassment hardly ever tell their parents, their siblings, or their friends. Most accept the proposition that...acting like a dork is bad.... Complaining to a teacher is self-defeating. Squealing on classmates only exacerbates [the situation]."

The problem did not appear suddenly at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Fifty years earlier James Coleman, reflecting on his own adolescence, had detected something quite similar and then provided a sociological explanation for the phenomenon.

James S. Coleman

Born in 1926, Coleman began his graduate studies in sociology at Columbia University in 1951, one year before [John] Dewey died at the age of ninety-two. The two intellectuals had much in common. Both came from ordinary, small-town families, but they both had entrepreneurial spirit, tremendous energy, and personal fortitude that belied their surface modesty. Neither was a brilliant lecturer, but both were kind, gentle, supportive mentors, surrounded by devoted graduate students. Like most Americans, both were pragmatists--concerned less about systematic theory than about learning what worked in practice. Neither saw his work on education as the centerpiece of his life's work. Dewey was a philosopher, Coleman a social theorist and mathematical model-builder. Yet neither man would have made as lasting a contribution were it not for his work on schools.

Despite the similarities, Dewey and Coleman walked in contrasting intellectual worlds. If Dewey's thinking was shaped by Rousseau, Hegel, and the Romantic tradition more generally, Coleman's owed more to two Scottish empiricists: David Hume and Adam Smith. The "Emile" of significance to Coleman was not Rousseau's mythical child but Emile Durkheim, a sociologist whose point of departure was not the state of nature but a well-defined community context. Coleman's work was more disciplined than was Dewey's. Trained in survey research and modern analytic techniques--random sampling, systematic data collection, rigorous comparisons--taking hold at Columbia, Coleman was able to test his ideas in ways unavailable to Dewey. Most important, Dewey and Coleman had separate agendas: Dewey's ideas shaped the public schools of the twentieth century; Coleman deconstructed what Dewey had built.

Unlike Dewey, Coleman never became a household name, yet his impact on American education has been immense. At his memorial service in 1995, New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed that the man they were remembering was among "a very small number of people who end up defining a major part of the intellectual agenda for their times. Their work is both so powerful and so well argued...that others are inspired to focus on these same issues." Coleman's impact was not without its ironies, however. His research served the civil rights movement King had begun but also the reaction that was to follow. His studies first accelerated and then helped put the brakes on school desegregation. A part of his work has been taken to mean that schools are insignificant, while another part suggests they are decisive. Coleman himself saw no contradictions.

We know few details about Coleman's early educational experiences, in part because Coleman himself wanted us to believe that at age twenty-five he had sprung directly from the head of--well, not Zeus, but Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld, two men in Columbia's sociology department whom many students thought had godlike qualities. Reflecting back on what seems to have been something like a conversion experience, Coleman said: "I left a job as a chemist...and took on a new life.... The transformation was nearly complete. Except for my wife (and other kin who lived far away in the Midwest and South), I shed all prior associations.... [After] the resocialization I underwent at Columbia from 1951 to 1955... I was a different person." It was Merton's social-theory course that did the trick, "a conversion experience for those of us eager for conversion."

The grandson of an evangelical preacher, Coleman certainly knew the religious meaning of the concept he was invoking. But his first twenty-five years left more of a mark on him than he was willing to acknowledge. Born in Bedford, Indiana, he began high school in Greenhills, Ohio, a place he wrote about almost wistfully: "School life had, for a few of us, a more academic focus, in retrospect surprisingly so." Shortly thereafter his father took a job as a factory foreman in Louisville, Kentucky, a city that had two public high schools for boys: "Male (with a college preparatory curriculum) and Manual (with vocational and pre-engineering curricula)."

Coleman adjusted to his new school [Manual High] by becoming a member of the school's football team. The "boys who counted in the school," he writes, "were the first-string varsity football players," because "Male and Manual were locked in a fierce football rivalry that culminated every Thanksgiving Day but flavored the whole school year." He was quickly drawn in. "[The] environment had shaped [his] own investment of time and effort, intensely focused on football, although arguably [his] comparative advantage lay elsewhere." Otherwise, high school "failed" him. Apart from an eleventh-grade algebra class, he could not find anything "to excite my interest and capture my full attention." One day, while hitchhiking to football practice, he thought longingly: "If only they would not destroy in us the interest with which we came to school, I would ask for nothing more." Only when Coleman arrived at Columbia did he find faculty members with a "personal (that is, selfish) interest in some of their students. They seemed to be interested in those students in a way I had never felt since the ninth grade," perhaps because "graduate students help bring professors closer to immortality."

He nonetheless attended a small college before joining the Navy in the middle of World War II. After his discharge, he used his benefits under the voucher-like GI Bill to earn a B.S. degree in chemical engineering from Purdue University. Though he was then hired by Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York, Coleman was still a frustrated product of Manual High, a technician who wanted a more intellectual challenge. Despite his limited resources, he made a dramatic career decision to pursue a Ph.D. in sociology. Rejected by Harvard and Michigan, he won admission to the overcrowded program at Columbia.

He could not have been more fortunate. In 1951, Paul F. Lazarsfeld was using newly developed quantitative techniques to look at practical topics: mass media, advertising and political campaigns. At the same time, Robert K. Merton was systematizing his sense of the ironic--unexpected things happen for reasons no one anticipates--to which he gave the rather pompous label "latent-function theory." Coleman drank from both professorial wellsprings, but it was Merton who "provided the inspiration for it all." In his italicized words: "I worked with Lipset, worked for Lazarsfeld, and worked to be like Merton." Like Merton, Coleman viewed the world with an outsider's irony: things are not as they seem, and consequences differ from what is expected. At a personal level, Merton endeared himself to Coleman the day he asked the young man about his dissertation plans. Told that none had been devised, Merton suggested that Coleman simply use the chapters he had drafted for a study of trade unions he was writing in collaboration with Seymour Martin Lipset, the department's up-and-coming assistant professor. Acting on this advice, Coleman had his thesis completed just three years after matriculation. Shortly thereafter, he submitted a research proposal to the U.S. Office of Education's new Cooperative Research Program.

Until this point, nothing in Coleman's early career indicated he would become the premier education sociologist of the twentieth century. No one at Columbia specialized in educational sociology, a field Coleman disparaged as languishing in the cellar of the discipline. But as he was ruminating over possible topics for a federal grant proposal, Manual High came up one night at a dinner party the Colemans were hosting for Martin Trow (coauthor, with Coleman and Lipset, of the trade union study) and his wife. The Trows had attended elite schools where sports were subservient to academics, not only in the schools' official focus but also in the students' interests and social relationships. How different from Manual High!

Turning the conversation into a research proposal, Coleman laid out a plan to study several schools in Illinois, near the University of Chicago, where Coleman had been hired as an assistant professor. The book that emerged, The Adolescent Society [1961], which is as much a theoretical commentary on Manual High as an analysis of ten schools in Illinois, remains Coleman's masterpiece. According to Coleman, the focus at these schools was on sports stars, cheerleaders, and other members of the leading crowd, known more for smart dressing than for smarts per se. Those who studied hard and got good grades were edged to the social sidelines. For those who excelled scholastically, success must appear to have been "gained without special efforts, without doing anything beyond the required work." Otherwise, one is socially isolated by "the crowd." Ostensibly, schools are educational institutions, but their latent function is social and quite inimical to educational purposes. It is the way in which U.S. schools are organized that is the problem, Coleman says. They resemble jails, the military, and factories: all of these institutions are run by an "administrative corps" that makes demands upon a larger group (students, prisoners, soldiers, workers). In response, the larger group develops a set of norms that govern the choices individuals make. "The same process which occurs among prisoners in a jail and among workers in a factory is found among students in a school. The institution is different, but the demands are there, and the students develop a collective response to these demands. This response takes a similar form to that of workers in industry--holding down effort to a level which can be maintained by all. The students' name for the rate-buster is the 'curveraiser,'...and their methods of enforcing the work-restricting norms are similar to those of workers--ridicule, kidding, exclusion from the group." With his typical irony, Coleman dedicated the book "To my own high school, du Pont Manual Training High School, Louisville, Kentucky."

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

The occasion for his contribution was provided by a little-noticed clause buried in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which called for a "survey concerning the lack...of equal opportunities...by reason of race, color, religion or national origin in public education." Though not a prominent public figure, James S. Coleman was the logical choice for directing the survey. He had been trained in survey research, was an acknowledged expert on high schools, and was sympathetic to the civil rights movement--he and his son had been arrested at a demonstration in Baltimore. Coleman...agreed to take on the assignment only after "some hesitation" and "extensive discussion" that transformed what at first seemed to be nothing more than a collection of racial-segregation statistics into the first nationwide study of the factors that affect student achievement. Students at 4,000 randomly selected schools across the country were tested in various subjects. The study also collected information on characteristics of the schools the students attended: racial composition, per-pupil expenditures, the college degrees teachers had earned, teacher ability (as measured by performance on a test), the number of books in the school library, and much more. Family background information was collected as well.

The study was to go forward with more-than-deliberate speed, as results were expected to reveal a need for federal action to equalize educational opportunity, the keystone of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society." Imagine, then, the shock inside the White House when a draft of the report began circulating inside the administration. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of Johnson's top domestic advisers, gave a sense of the reaction when he recalled being greeted in the spring of 1966 by Harvard professor Martin Lipset with the query: "You know what Coleman is finding, don't you?" "I said, 'What?' He said: 'All family.' I said, 'Oh, Lord.'" The next day Moynihan informed the secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) to get ready, as the research project was about to produce findings the administration "was not going to like." The project report [Equality of Educational Opportunity, 1966], later known as "Coleman I" after two additional reports appeared, was released on Independence Day weekend, 1966. That was thought to be a good time to announce negative news, since much of the press was on holiday. The strategy worked: few but academics paid attention, and only gradually did its message sink in.

To everyone's surprise, Coleman I found that within regions and types of communities (urban, suburban, and rural), expenditures per pupil were about the same in black and white schools. Even more remarkable, students did not learn more just because more was spent on their education. Nor did any other material resource of a school have much of an effect on how well Johnny and Suzy read--not the number of students in the class, nor the teacher's credentials, nor the newness of the textbooks, nor the number of books in the library, nor anything physical or material that schools had for years considered important. What did count were a host of family-background characteristics: mother's education, father's education, family income, having fewer siblings, the number of books in the home, and other factors--all of which together explained more of the variation among students in their reading achievement than any school-related factor.

One finding in Coleman I saved the day for the Johnson administration. The authors found that student achievement was affected by the social composition of the pupils at a school. If a low-income African American child had fellow students who were white or from a higher socioeconomic status, the child did better at reading. The converse was not true, however: a white child did not suffer educationally from having black classmates. In other words, the influence of peers was asymmetrical. Desegregation helped blacks without hurting whites. Many years later, the Nobel Prize-winning econometrician James Heckman and his colleague Derek Neal called that asymmetrical result Coleman's "least robust" finding. But Coleman never doubted it. Testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, he said black students at segregated schools were "deprived of the most effective educational resources contained in the schools: those brought by other children as a result of their home environment." Whatever regrets the Johnson administration might have had about some parts of Coleman I, it was pleased by the ammunition the report provided for the ongoing desegregation campaign.

So it was truly ironic that Coleman, the very academic whose work provided the clearest educational justification for school desegregation, would in his next major study [Trends in School Segregation, 1968-73, 1975], the "white flight" study (known as Coleman II), produce findings that called into question many of the policies being used to desegregate the schools. Using data collected by the newly established Civil Rights Commission, Coleman II tracked trends in black and white school enrollments in cities across the United States. He and his colleagues found that white families were moving outward more rapidly from those central cities where racial desegregation plans were being implemented.

Coleman expressed concern that, as a practical matter, busing of students within districts was self-defeating. Within school districts, to be sure, the segregation index fell from 0.63 to 0.37 in the years 1968-1972. But that only intensified segregation between districts. Said Coleman, "The emerging problem with regard to school desegregation is the problem of segregation between central city and suburbs." Schools were at risk of being as segregated as they had ever been, exactly as Justice [Thurgood] Marshall had predicted.

Not since Cleopatra heard about Antony's dalliances has a messenger come so close to being poisoned. Scholars turned on Coleman with an unexpected vengeance that introduced a more virulent tone into the world of education policy research. Well-known Harvard psychology professor Thomas F. Pettigrew claimed that Coleman II "should not be taken seriously." The NAACP general counsel called the Chicago sociologist "without a doubt, a first-class fraud.... He is not entitled to any credence or any reliability or any belief with respect to the things he says he has found." A Washington Post columnist questioned whether Coleman was mixing research with advocacy, quoting then deputy director of the National Science Foundation (and future president of the University of California) Richard Atkinson as saying, "A lot of what goes under the name of social science is just junk.... Too often [when] speaking on issues of education [scholars use] research evidence as a disguise for advocating a particular policy." Atkinson was careful not to mention Coleman by name, but such innuendo by distinguished leaders fed the anti-Coleman fire. It flamed into an effort, led by the sociologist Alfred McClung Lee, then the president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), to censure or expel Coleman from the organization's membership for having spread "flammable propaganda." Though that blaze was contained, "few sociologists ever had to endure the high profile public controversy which swirled around him." Years later, Coleman recalled the ASA plenary session held to debate the report: "The passions generated at that session are hard to reconstruct now, but I still have the posters that were plastered at the entrance to the ballroom and behind the podium, covered with Nazi swastikas, epithets, and my name."

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

In 1981, Coleman wrote his third major report, identified here as Coleman III. Two years previously, Coleman and his colleagues at the University of Chicago had been asked by the National Center for Educational Statistics to extend the work begun in Coleman I. The study was to be more than a single-shot survey along the lines of Coleman's earlier work. Instead, several rounds of data were to be collected. A nationally representative sample of high schoolers was to be tested as sophomores and then again as seniors, after which they would be followed into college and the labor force. In this way, Coleman expected to find out how much students learned between their sophomore and senior years, as well as the impact of schooling on college attendance and labor force participation. Coleman also convinced the U.S. Department of Education, which was funding the study, to look at private schools as well as public ones. He now got his chance to see if private and public schools across the country were as different from one another as Manual High differed from those elite schools his friends at Columbia had attended.

The survey of some 70,000 students at more than 1,000 high schools was conducted in the spring of 1980. Working at his usual extraordinary pace, Coleman reported his team's findings back to the government that same September, even as a presidential election campaign was in full swing. After the election was over and the Reagan administration had assumed office, the results from the first round of data collection were released. Coleman reported that sophomores in Catholic schools performed at higher levels than those in public schools, apparently showing in practice what [Milton] Friedman had argued in theory. In education circles, it was about as dramatic as the first proof of Einstein's theory of relativity. Coleman explained his findings by claiming that students at Catholic schools benefited from the "social capital" surrounding the religious school: parents knew and supported one another as they attended Mass and participated together in other religious activities. As another group of sociologists put it, "Catholic schools benefit from a network of social relations, characterized by trust, that constitute a form of 'social capital.'... Trust accrues because school participants, both students and faculty, choose to be there."

The attacks on Coleman III were no more polite and detached than the attacks on Coleman II. The day it was released, "people entering the auditorium were handed leaflets attacking the study." The executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals insisted that the study used "incomplete data inappropriately applied." The New York Times chided Coleman for publicizing his results, saying that "sociologists invite trouble" when they seek "the stardom of advocacy based on their fallible predictions." Its news reports quoted Coleman out of context in order to give the impression that he himself thought "the study was deeply flawed and that [he] was retreating from his conclusions," though Coleman had said nothing of the sort. A number of professors and education experts denounced the report. One called it a "premature" report of "an ax-grinding nature." Fumed one Harvard faculty member, "While the findings are wrapped in a mantle of social science research, the report is inconsistent with the notion of disciplined inquiry," curiously objecting to the fact that "the findings are presented quite plainly." Another set of critics opened their essay with: "The methods and interpretations used by [Coleman and his colleagues] fall below the minimum standards for social-scientific research."

A good deal of the rhetoric can safely be ignored, but two criticisms were valid. (1) Students at fee-charging private schools cannot easily be compared to those attending free public schools, because they come from families who are willing to pay for their children's education. Although Coleman III adjusted for parental education and many other family background characteristics, that adjustment did not necessarily take into account the greater educational commitment of parents who were willing to pay for their children's education. (2) The study showed that sophomores in private school performed at a higher level, but it did not prove that they had learned more there. It was possible that the children who were being sent to private school were, to begin with, more capable students.

Coleman and his colleagues replied to these criticisms two years later when the second round of "High School and Beyond" data became available. This time, they were able to show that students in private schools had learned more between their sophomore and senior years than their counterparts in public school had. The findings calmed the skepticism of the more reasonable of their critics.

Coleman and his colleagues made some errors. They might have decided to withhold their results until they'd gathered information on student gains in achievement in high school, not just the initial sophomore scores. And they made various methodological errors, as frequently happens when one is undertaking an innovative project. But the biggest tactical errors were made by Coleman's opponents. By relentlessly attacking Coleman III, they helped to place school choice on the national political agenda. What had been an academic debating point during the 1970s became, in the 1980s, a part of the national conversation.

--
Gregory Elacqua
         --
Sub-director
Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación
Universidad Diego Portales
56-2-676-8535
56-09-6-206-5993
www.cpce.cl

Diane Ravitch, historiadora de NYU, presentó su libro la semana pasada que explica su crisis intelectual y cambio de opinión en las mayoría de sus posturas sobre política educativa (accountability, estandares, charter schools, school choice, vouchers, etc.) en un evento en American Enterprise Institute (AEI) en Washington DC.  Mark Schneider, cientista político de AIR y AEI y ex-Comissioner del National Center for Education Statistics, fue el comentarista.  Adjunto sus comentarios que son bastante críticos y entretenidos.


Gregory

---------------------
http://www.aei.org/event/100200

Mark Schneider

Comments on

Diane Ravitch: The Death and Life of the Great American School System

Diane is arguably the best educational historian working today and one of the best the nation has ever produced.

She is also a sharp critic: I found myself cringing at Diane's analysis of how so many programs I thought were reasonably good have gone astray.

Of course it's not only programs that get skewered, the behavior of some very prominent reformers and  researchers also come under close scrutiny.

Chapter after chapter she confirms what we all know about education policy and practice--it is relentlessly based on fads built on the flimsiest of evidence. Diane shows that good ideas are often taken to scale without any thought about how any of reforms might work in a larger venue.

Even worse, as Diane shows in case after case, ideas often become invested with magic properties so that people see them as a silver bullet that will cure all our ills.

And of course Diane is a great writer, so the book goes down easy and there is a compelling personal odyssey in here that makes the book a great read.

I'm not sure if it was Diane's intent, the book depressed the hell out of me.

But - and, of course, there was going to be a but--after going through the book and finding myself in a funk, I picked myself up and reread the book--and ultimately came away disappointed.  

I always viewed Diane as a hard-headed sharp analyst. But I didn't know that she was also a hopeless romantic and I think that her romantic vision of what schools were and where they should be just doesn't work with the reality of the world we live in.

As Nelson Smith from the National Alliance for Charter Schools described it to me: much of this book is like looking through a rose colored rearview mirror.

Why do I say Diane's vision of what we want from our schools is romantic:

From Page 230: "Certainly we want our students to be able to read and write and be numerate. Those are the basic skills on which all other learning builds. But that is not enough. We want to prepare them for a useful life. We want them to be able to think for themselves when they are in the world on their own. We want them to have good character and to make sound decisions, about their life, their work, and their health. We want them to face life's joys and travails with courage and humor. We hope that they will be kind and compassionate in their dealings with others. We want them to have a sense of justice and fairness."

The list expands to include an appreciation arts, music, and science, to be multicultural, to be great citizens, and so on and so on.

From the picture on the cover, I suppose all this great stuff is supposed to happen in a broken down one room school house in the middle of a prairie, where every teacher is a Mrs. Ratliff, Diane's high school English teacher, who stars in chapter 9.

In Diane's vision if we can't have a one room school house in the middle of the prairie we should strive for a neighborhood school that is a beautiful, well maintained facility that is amply resourced.

This is an idealized version of what education might have been in a simpler time gone by.

·        A time when there were lots of Mrs. Ratliff's because women had no other alternative occupations,

·        a time when neighborhoods may have really been more cohesive and safe, and

·        a time when public schools may have actually delivered a broader education that prepared people for work and society.

But in today's world, there may be more teachers in rubber rooms in NYC than there are Mrs. Ratliffs, there are neighborhood schools that fail to impart even the most basic knowledge to their students year after year after year, and it's a world where only 3% of Detroit's fourth grade students are proficient in math according to the latest NAEP results.

Again, let me say how much I liked parts of the book but let me delve into a couple of her arguments in more detail--places where I think she got things wrong.

A key theme throughout the book is the importance of a broad liberal arts curriculum. This shows up in many chapters and in many contexts. Of course, her call for such a curriculum matches her notion of what we should want from our schools.

I have at least two problems with her argument.

The first is factual--I'm not sure how much the curriculum has actually narrowed--something she charges happened under NCLB and is antithetical to her vision of what schools should be doing.

There is some evidence at the elementary level that there has been an emphasis on math and reading, driven no doubt in part by the testing requirements of NCLB, but I don't think we really know the actual extent to which the curriculum narrowed.

I also think that the real problem is not narrowing of the curriculum but that in order to get what we want and need from our schools, the agrarian model of the school day and the school year has to go--180 days, 6 hours a day is simply not enough time to fit in all that needs to be done.

One of the things we do know--and it's not a fad or a magic bullet--time on task matters. And if we persist with a short school day and a short school year, we are simply never going to get schools that produce the students and citizens that the nation needs.

While the evidence on the K-8 world is not all that good regarding the narrowing of the curriculum, the evidence from the high school world is clearly opposite of this supposed narrowing. As well documented in NAEP high school transcript studies, students are taking more credits than ever before and they are taking more rigorous sounding courses than ever before.

This leads me to the second question: if schools have focused so single mindedly on math and reading in the last 8 years, why have the results on NAEP, PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS, been so lackluster.

Something doesn't compute.

And if high school students are taking more social studies, which they are, and taking more world history, which they are, and more geography, which they are, and more arts--again, have we seen how a broader curriculum have increased the abilities and talents of our recent graduates?

Something more than a narrow curriculum is at play and that has to do with the poor job that far too many schools are doing with the students they have and the quality of the teacher workforce.

Saying that schools should have a broad liberal arts curriculum does nothing to address those problems.

A second area that I want to comment on is Diane's analysis of choice, particularly charter schools.

Diane exults neighborhood schools.

From page 113: "when I was a child in Houston in the 1940s and 1950s, everyone I knew went to the neighborhood public school. Every child on my block and in my neighborhood went to the same elementary school, the same junior high school, and the same high school. We car-pooled together, we cheered for the same teams; we went to the same after school events." 

I'll swap anecdotes about neighborhood schools to present an alternate reality to the idealized vision of Houston public schools in the 1950s.

Both my daughters went to neighborhood schools in suburban Long Island in the 1970s.

The schools were well funded--per pupil expenditures were always in the top five school districts in the state, the facilities were good, there was one elementary school, one middle school, and one high school, so kids cheered the same teams, went to the same concerts, etc. Every morning, I waited with other parents to send my kids off to school on the school bus and that created neighborhood cohesion and built friendships and social capital.

My daughters even had their own Mrs. Ratliff--who like Diane's Mrs. Ratliff taught them English in their senior year.

By the way, I always wondered why they had to wait until the very end of their school careers to get such an incredible teacher and why so many of their teachers were so clearly mediocre.

More tellingly every morning when I sent them off to school, my prayer was "please don't ruin the love for learning that these young kids have." And mind you this is in one of the best funded school districts in the nation!

For three years I taught in a neighborhood middle school in New York City. My prayers during those years was rather different and even more pessimistic than the prayer I had for my children--during those years, my prayer was "please get me through this day in one piece."

Yes, it would be wonderful if neighborhood schools were what Diane wants them to be, but they aren't. If they were what she wanted, then I understand her antipathy toward charter schools, but far too many traditional public schools are failure factories.

Let me turn to in more detail to the issue of choice and charter schools:

Diane's analysis of charter schools is at the tail end of an analysis of the evolution of choice--hitting the usual notes, Milton Friedman, Chubb and Moe, vouchers--and then the displacement of vouchers by charter schools as the preferred vehicle of reform for choice advocates.

She begins by reviewing the empirical evidence concerning the learning gains among voucher students and finds that there were few cases where the gains of voucher students were greater than students who were offered but did not accept vouchers.

This is taken as an indicator of failure--but Milton Friedman actually argued that voucher schools could either produce higher outcomes at the same price or the same outcomes for a lower price. Since vouchers, for example, in DC carry a price tag that is about half of what traditional students get, the second condition of Friedman's hypothesis is actually met--that is students are doing as well for far less money.

Incidentally, the same thing is true of charter schools, which as Diane notes produce pretty much the same results as traditional public schools--but charters are funded at around less than 90% of the traditional public schools, so from Friedman's second perspective they are doing better.

Vouchers as she rightfully notes have hit a dead end and charter schools have taken their place as the preferred mechanism for using choice as a mechanism for reform.  Diane's take on charter schools is pretty negative--and much of her criticism has to do with creaming.

She writes:

"Regular public schools are at a huge disadvantage...because charter schools may attract the most motivated students, may discharge laggards, and may enforce a tough disciplinary code, but also because the charters often get additional financial resources from their corporate sponsors"

This is an interesting argument--but where does it leads us?

On one hand it is hard to prove. As others have noted on observed measures, like race, ethnicity, free lunch, ELL, special education, there are few if any systematic differences between charters and traditional public schools.

There may other types of parent/student differences, such as motivational issues, that distinguish charter school parents from traditional public school ones, but first I'm not sure how we can really measure them--they are called "non-observables" for a reason.

Let's set aside the measurement issue and focus on some implications of Diane's argument.

Diane worries that the success of charter schools will draw off the most motivated students and parents and create havens for good students, who attend schools for longer hours and more days, who have dedicated teachers, and excellent curriculum, outstanding teachers and a culture that emphasizes hard work.

And as these schools succeed the public schools will fail, because they will collect the students with less motivation--but if we took the kids in charter schools and distributed them back into traditional neighborhood schools would the performance of students in those schools really go up?

As a specific example, if we closed the Thurgood Marshall Academy in DC and sent those 400 students back to the neighborhood high school, what would be the outcome? We would most likely lose most of those 400 students, who are now on the track to college. Is that a good tradeoff?

Diane also notes the differences between "No-excuse schools" like KIPP that emphasize proper behavior and the attitudes needed for success. She notes that far too many public schools stopped expecting civility and proper behavior.

But that difference helps explain why parents choose charter schools: they are looking for small, safe schools, that often emphasize basics and accept no excuses.

In short, don't many of the charter schools come closer in aspiration and often in practice to the image that Diane has of what defines functioning school?

And more importantly, if we close down all the charter schools and wait for neighborhood public schools to improve, who pays the costs? Middle class parents will move to the suburbs or send their kids to private schools, leaving the burden of bad schools to fall on the usual less affluent victims.

Conclusion

While I have emphasized my disagreements with the book, let me return to the positives.

The book tells a depressingly familiar story of a field wracked by fads and innovations that have gone off the track.

While I disagree with some of the analysis, overall her diagnosis of where we've gone wrong is often nothing short of brilliant--although as noted above, there are big places where I believe she got things wrong.

But more fundamentally, I can't make the leap that Diane makes--the disconnect between the diagnosis her concluding "Lessons Learned" chapter is too far for me to go.

I, like so many people in this room, have good friends who actually do the incredibly hard work of teaching or running schools. They face real problems day after day after day. They are looking for help, for a way forward.

Can we in good conscience say "look to the little school on the prairie" or "a shining neighborhood school on the hill" and all will be good? I don't think so.

--
--
Gregory Elacqua
         --
Sub-director
Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación
Universidad Diego Portales
56-2-676-8535
www.cpce.cl

Dos propuestas distintas sobre como avanzar en la educación chilena tras el terremoto.
Gregory

--------------------
El Mercurio
14 de marzo
La educación tras la catástrofe

El Mineduc debe evitar que los niños golpeados por la naturaleza sean ahora castigados por la sociedad.

JOSÉ JOAQUÍN BRUNNER
Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación
Universidad Diego Portales

No cabe duda: hacerse cargo de la emergencia escolar es la primera tarea del nuevo Gobierno en este sector. Representa un desafío de gran magnitud. Hay más de 2.500 escuelas y liceos inhabilitados, donde estudian cerca de 800 mil alumnos. Adicionalmente hay otros 1.200 establecimientos dañados, pero que pueden repararse. Una estimación inicial indica que deberán destinarse 1.600 millones de dólares para reconstruir la infraestructura escolar.

Sin embargo, la gestión de la emergencia supone mucho más. Se debe restablecer a la brevedad la plena provisión educacional, especialmente en las zonas más afectadas y en favor de los estudiantes más vulnerables. No parece lógico arrancar la tarea con la idea de reducir al mínimo la provisión, con tal de reunir a los alumnos en un recinto y darles unas pocas horas de convivencia y trabajo escolar al menos. Ni es correcto partir de la premisa de que, inevitablemente, la solución consistiría en acortar y comprimir la jornada escolar.

Bien puede ser -pensado con realismo y carácter temporal- que deban disminuirse los estándares materiales de la provisión (es decir, encontrar soluciones constructivas de emergencia). Pero debe reclamarse a las autoridades que hagan todos los esfuerzos necesarios para mantener -y, cuando sea posible, mejorar- los estándares académicos de dicha provisión.

De no procederse así, estaríamos ante la paradoja de que los estudiantes castigados por la naturaleza recibirían ahora, más encima, el castigo de la sociedad, rebajándose en su caso el nivel del servicio formativo que se les ofrece, el cual, lo sabemos bien, ni siquiera alcanza todavía para compensar las desventajas que estos niños y jóvenes acarrean desde la cuna.

Para poder gestionar adecuadamente la emergencia, las nuevas autoridades del Ministerio de Educación deben poner en marcha, desde el comienzo, un proceso de modernización de esa secretaría de Estado. Es imprescindible reforzar sus órganos ejecutivos y de planeamiento, hacer una reingeniería de sus principales procesos, eliminar y simplificar procedimientos burocráticos y controles innecesarios, mejorar las funciones de evaluación y apurar los procesos de decisión.

En paralelo, el ministerio deberá ocuparse de obtener, a la brevedad, la aprobación de la ley que crea la agencia nacional de calidad y una superintendencia de educación, cuidando que ambos organismos sean diseñados de tal forma de reforzar la autonomía de gestión de los establecimientos municipales y apoyar el mejoramiento de los resultados de aprendizaje de los alumnos. El proyecto correspondiente se encuentra en avanzado estado de tramitación y cuenta con respaldo transversal entre los partidos del gobierno y la oposición.

Además, la autoridad necesitará ocuparse desde ya de evaluar la subvención escolar preferencial (SEP), programa que otorga recursos adicionales a las escuelas que atienden al 60% de alumnos más vulnerables de la enseñanza básica. Se trata de un instrumento clave para mejorar las capacidades de compensación de las desigualdades de origen socio-familiar que poseen las escuelas, pero cuyo funcionamiento no se ha evaluado aún. Para poder cumplir con eficacia su fin público, se requiere revisar su operatoria e impacto real en los niños y niñas a quienes está destinado. Este es un asunto de alta prioridad.

En suma, el nuevo Gobierno se estrena en un escenario educacional que se desenvuelve en circunstancias turbulentas y bajo alta presión. Debe administrar eficientemente la emergencia y, al mismo tiempo, hacerlo con sentido de equidad. No tiene tiempo que perder ni hay tareas claves que pueda postergar.

Para poder gestionar adecuadamente la emergencia, las nuevas autoridades del Ministerio de Educación deben poner en marcha, desde el comienzo, un proceso de modernización de esa secretaría de Estado.


-----------------
El Mercurio
Tribuna
Sábado 13 de Marzo de 2010
No reconstruir todas las escuelas


Ernesto Tironi B.
Economista

El Presidente Piñera ha llamado a aprovechar la catástrofe del terremoto para reconstruir dejando las cosas mejor que antes. En educación es una de las áreas en que eso es posible y está a la mano lograrlo si se gestiona bien.

La baja calidad de la educación que reciben miles de niños se debe al pequeño tamaño de las escuelas donde estudian, lo que les impide contar con mejores profesores y suficientes recursos pedagógicos. En ellas tomaría mucho tiempo y dinero capacitar más a tantos docentes dispersos y equipar tecnológicamente esos establecimientos. Es preferible reemplazar muchas escuelas por minibuses escolares que lleven y traigan a los alumnos a otra escuela de mayor tamaño en un pueblo cercano. Esto se aplica especialmente en zonas afectadas por el terremoto.

Tomemos el ejemplo de la comuna de Curepto en la región del Maule, que conocí el sábado pasado. Tiene menos de 10 mil habitantes en total, cuatro mil de ellos en el pueblo del mismo nombre, y 2.016 estudiantes en total. Esos niños podrían educarse bien en unos cinco a siete colegios de tamaño eficiente, considerando que la distancia máxima entre los poblados más alejados de la comuna alcanza a unos 25 km. Pues bien, allá hay 32 establecimientos públicos municipales. El promedio de estudiantes por escuela es de sólo 63 alumnos. Veintiocho de las 32 escuelas (casi el 90%) tienen menos de 50 alumnos; 14 tienen menos de 20. ¿Alguien cree posible entregar una educación de calidad para el siglo XXI en escuelas de ese tamaño, aunque tengan abnegados profesores que enseñen desde kinder a octavo básico a menos de 11 alumnos? ¿Es justo continuar con esa educación pública si queremos terminar con la pobreza en pocos años? Situaciones análogas se repiten en centenares de comunas en todas las regiones del país.

¿Cuáles son los impedimentos para reorganizar esto que sería tan obviamente beneficioso? No son muchos, aunque son grandes. Pero con un buen trabajo y disposición pueden superarse.

El primero: los legítimos temores de los apoderados. Las mamás y papás piden tener a sus niños cerca, donde los puedan ir a buscar si necesitan, y tengan menores riesgos de accidentes, en un lugar de más fácil acceso que un pueblo más grande y alejado. Cierto y comprensible. Pero eso se puede mitigar por varias vías. Uno, haciendo que el minibús sea parte de la nueva escuela: que vaya a cargo del profesor. Que las actividades educativas comiencen al momento que el alumno se sube al bus. Dos, permitiendo a los padres acompañar a sus hijos en el bus cuando son chicos. Tres, habilitando un espacio para los apoderados en la nueva escuela e incorporándolos a colaborar más con los docentes en las salas de clase, etc.

El segundo impedimento son los profesores de las pequeñas escuelas que no deberían reconstruirse. Ellos, por estar en poblados apartados, reciben ingresos adicionales y además tienen un estatus y poder que perderían al trasladarse las actividades escolares. Incluso, a veces tienen vivienda gratis dentro de la escuela. Hay que respetar esas condiciones si se desea hacer esta modernización, manteniendo sus beneficios, pero no permitiendo que ellos se opongan al traslado de alumnos. Tampoco permitir que predispongan a los apoderados en contra de ese traslado. Habría también que convenir estos aspectos con las organizaciones gremiales docentes y asegurar el puesto de trabajo de los profesores de las escuelas que se cierren.

El tercer obstáculo a superar es la resistencia de las comunidades a "perder" su escuela. Esto se logra evitando "cerrar" los locales y, muy por el contrario, abriéndolos más a toda la comunidad: transformándolos en un centro comunitario con internet gratuito, biblioteca y conservando las canchas para fútbol, básquetbol y otros deportes. Así debe ganarse a toda la comunidad a favor de la idea y superar las presiones de los pocos que querrían mantener el statu quo.

Debe insistirse en que esta reforma no debe hacerse para ahorrar plata. Es para dar mejor educación y abrir más oportunidades a los estudiantes. La mayoría de ellos no se podrán integrar a la sociedad globalizada del siglo XXI si no se educan desde pequeños expuestos a la amplitud y diversidad de mundos mayores.

En educación, este lamentable terremoto se transforma así en una oportunidad si se actúa pronto.
Hagamos una experiencia piloto en las zonas más afectadas. En lo práctico e inmediato, antes de prometer reconstruir toda escuela dañada o destruida, la autoridad gubernamental concernida debe preguntarse: ¿No sería posible y mejor comprar y operar un bus escolar para enviar a estos estudiantes a una escuela cercana donde reciban mejor educación? En eso podrían concentrarse donaciones y subvenciones. Contamos con las mejores condiciones posibles para hacer esta reorganización ahora. Entre ellas, un ministro que, además de tener las competencias técnicas para comprender la significación de esta reforma, tiene el carisma para persuadir a las personas clave para llevarla a cabo --apoderados, profesores, gremios y comunidades--. Invito a conversar y a perfeccionar estas ideas, y poner manos a la obra.

-- 
Gregory Elacqua
--
Sub-director
Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación
Universidad Diego Portales
56-2-676-8535
www.cpce.cl

El reciente artículo téorico publicado por los economistas de la Universidad  de Columbia - Bentley MacLeod y Miguel Urquiola (Miguel recibe EDUCAR) - explora el tema de lo que debería ocurrir cuando se permite y no se permite la selección de alumnos en un mercado educacional, como en el sistema de vouchers en Chile.  El artículo, que es bastante técnico, ha causado mucho ruido en el debate político entre impulsores y detractores de vouchers.  Aquí va el resumen del paper y un link al artículo completo.  Abajo adjunto algunos de los comentarios que ha recibido el paper en la blogosfera. 

Gregory
http://www.cpce.cl/educar/
----------------------
Anti-Lemons: School Reputation and Educational Quality

W. Bentley MacLeod, Miguel Urquiola

NBER Working Paper No. 15112*
Issued in June 2009
Friedman (1962) argued that a free market in which schools compete based upon their reputation would lead to an efficient supply of educational services. This paper explores this issue by building a tractable model in which rational individuals go to school and accumulate skill valued in a perfectly competitive labor market. To this it adds one ingredient: school reputation in the spirit of Holmstrom (1982). The first result is that if schools cannot select students based upon their ability, then a free market is indeed efficient and encourages entry by high productivity schools. However, if schools are allowed to select on ability, then competition leads to stratification by parental income, increased transmission of income inequality, and reduced student effort---in some cases lowering the accumulation of skill. The model accounts for several (sometimes puzzling) findings in the educational literature, and implies that national standardized testing can play a key role in enhancing learning.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w15112.pdf
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The Atlantic
School Choice Markets Work--If the Rules Are Right

By Megan McArdle
There is more to a market than buying or selling.  Armchair economists and parlor libertarians often act as if all you need to make a market is to remove the government barriers to trade.  This can be true (ag subsidies, I'm looking at you!), but in many places it's nowhere near enough.  You need the social norms that support market trade, and you need to set good rules by which trade happens.  What we did to Russia is a good example of why the "get government out of the way" theory is not sufficient.

Matt Yglesias has a post on school choice that makes this point very well, I think, citing a paper by McLeod and Urquiola:

Friedman (1962) argued that a free market in which schools compete based upon their reputation would lead to an efficient supply of educational services. This paper explores this issue by building a tractable model in which rational individuals go to school and accumulate skill valued in a perfectly competitive labor market. To this it adds one ingredient: school reputation in the spirit of Holmstrom (1982). The first result is that if schools cannot select students based upon their ability, then a free market is indeed efficient and encourages entry by high productivity schools. However, if schools are allowed to select on ability, then competition leads to stratification by parental income, increased transmission of income inequality, and reduced student effort--in some cases lowering the accumulation of skill. The model accounts for several (sometimes puzzling) findings in the educational literature, and implies that national standardized testing can play a key role in enhancing learning.

The rules surrounding markets matter a lot--and the reason we don't know this is that the rules that work have disappeared into the background, faded out of our consciousness, become part of the miasma of "the market".  For example, I recall a web debate years ago in which someone made the standard point that cartels are very difficult to hold together, which means anti-trust rules about this sort of thing have dubious utility.  I believe it was Eugene Volokh who pointed out that this was true . . . but only because courts refused to enforce cartel agreements.  If courts did enforce them, cartels would work pretty well--which is why we still have professional sports leagues.

Luckily, this is the sort of rule that most voucher programs enforce--and because I find this paper pretty convincing, I'd say they should continue to.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2010/02/school-choice-markets-work-if-the-rules-are-right/36008/

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Cato Library
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/02/16/its-not-camelot-its-only-a-model/
 
It's Not Camelot, 'It's Only a Model'

Posted by Andrew J. Coulson

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/wp-content/uploads/Camelot-HolyGIn Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail, the assembled knights look in awe upon the imposing walls of "Camelot"... until someone points out that "it's only a model."

I feel I'm watching a remake of Quest every time I read another blog post about the economics paper "Anti-Lemons" by MacLeod and Urquiola.

Matt Yglesias reproduced its abstract last month, saying "I would have to pay $5 to read the whole paper, but the abstract conveniently supports political positions I like, so I'll talk about it some more." That, needless to say, isn't the sort of talk that calls for a thoughtful response.

But now that Megan McArdle has picked up the thread from a second Yglesias post, read the paper, and it given it a favorable verdict, it's time to point out that "it's only a model" ­ and not a very good one at that.

"Anti Lemons" is not an empirical study. Instead it presents a series of abtract mathematical models with arbitrary assumptions. The final model purports to demonstrate the authors' conclusion that "For-profit entry turns out to be feasible, despite these assumptions, as long as private schools can cream skim the highest ability students from the public system."

What are the authors' assumptions?

i) individuals differ only with respect to innate ability

ii) all schools are equally productive

iii) for-profit schools must operate unsubsidized

The first two of these assumptions are nonsense and the third contravenes the whole point of a school choice program (whether tax credits or vouchers), which is to subsidize access to private schooling for those who could not otherwise afford it.

As if these problems were not enough, the model also incorrectly assumes that when academic selectivity is permitted, every private school will not only select students based on academic entrance tests, but that they will all use the same test. Like the others, this assumption is out of touch with reality. When I analyzed survey data for Arizona private schools in 2006, I found that nearly half of all private schools were not academically selective. Only a third actually administered an academic admissions test of any kind. The only admissions criteria applied by a majority of schools were measures of student and parent desire to attend the school and students' and parents' willingness to abide by its code of conduct.

So the MacLeod and Urquiola model has precious little to do with reality. It tells us nothing about the real world or about tax credit or voucher programs or proposals. In fact, it seems to serve no productive purpose whatsoever, unless one considers it productive to give left-wing bloggers a study abstract to talk about that "conveniently supports political positions [they] like."

Though MacLeod and Urquiola briefly discuss a modified model that relaxes the proscription against subsidization of private schools, its other erroneous assumptions remain and so it produces a result that is, not surprisingly, completely at odds with the reality established by the large body of empirical findings in this field.

Last year, I reviewed the worldwide literature comparing public and private schools ( 65 studies reporting 156 different statistical findings) and found that the statistically significant findings favor private schools by a margin of roughly 8 to 1. More importantly, when we focus more precisely and compare truly market-like school systems to monopolies such as U.S. public schooling, the statistically significant results favor markets by a margin of nearly 15 to 1 (and they greatly outnumber the insignificant findings as well). It is thus the least regulated private schools that show the most consistent advantage.

MacLeod and Urquiola mischaracterize that research literature as follows: "there is no consistent evidence that introducing choice substantially improves learning, or that private schools have higher value added than public ones." The sources they cite to back up their mischaracterization are both incomplete and imprecise, failing to look at a large swath of the research and failing to distinguish among various forms of "choice" with fundamentally different features.

So, no, the "Anti-Lemons" study is not the Camelot it is cracked up to be by recent rhapsodic blog posts. It's not even a good model.

[Should anyone want to interject Hsieh and Urquiola's 2006 empirical study of the highly regulated Chilean voucher system at this point, I've already offered my thoughts on it here.]
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Center for College Affordability and Productivity
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
The Anti-Lemons Paper is Great, Not Useless
by Andrew Gillen

I've had the effects of reputation on higher ed on my mind a lot lately, so I was intrigued to read a slew of blog postings on W. Bentley MacLeod and Miguel Urquiola's new Anti-Lemons paper.

For those of you who haven't read it, the basic story is as follows. M&U created a theoretical model to analyze when reputation is a sufficient incentive to yield normal market outcomes (i.e. that a free market is better than a government controlled one). They find that as long as schools cannot select their students based on ability, than doing vouchers and private schools instead of government schools is better since "competition raises average school productivity and improves learning" just as the free market story says.

However, if schools can select their students based on ability, than vouchers are no longer better than government controlled schools. The reason is that schools have an incentive to cream-skim the best students, which bolsters their reputation. This anti-lemons effect- "entry by selective schools that derive their reputation for high quality from selectivity", in turn means that students have an incentive to go to selective schools (because employers use school reputation as a signal of employee quality), which means that once they get in to a selective school, students have less of an incentive to study.

Liberals like Matthew Yglesias tend to like the paper since one of the findings is that free markets aren't a panacea.

    I would have to pay $5 to read the whole paper, but the abstract conveniently supports political positions I like, so I'll talk about it some more.

    [AG: Don't let the paywall stop you - just enter your old .edu email and they will send an email to that address that allows you to view the paper.]

Libertarians are more split. On the "we like the paper" side are Megan McArdle and Tyler Cowen's GMU posse (7th comment on Yglesias' blog).

On the "we don't like it" side is Cato's Andrew Coulson. Coulson was really the only one to discuss the specifics of the paper (everyone else just said "we like it"), but in contrast to his superb book Market Education, I didn't find him convincing.

Coulson seems to have two main objections to the paper. The first is that " 'it's only a model' -- and not a very good one at that", with the reasoning being that the assumptions made are unrealistic.

Needless to say, I don't find that a very convincing critique. I'll reuse a quote from Paul Krugman to illustrate why:

    I am a strong believer in the importance of models, which are to our minds what spear-throwers were to stone age arms: they greatly extend the power and range of our insight. In particular, I have no sympathy for those people who criticize the unrealistic simplifications of model-builders, and imagine that they achieve greater sophistication by avoiding stating their assumptions clearly. The point is to realize that economic models are metaphors, not truth. By all means express your thoughts in models, as pretty as possible (more on that below). But always remember that you may have gotten the metaphor wrong, and that someone else with a different metaphor may be seeing something that you are missing.

The last part of the quote, that the model might be missing something important, is related to Coulson's second objection: that the predicted results are

    completely at odds with the reality established by the large body of empirical findings in this field.

I'm not up to date on all the relevant studies, so this may well be true. However, even going by Coulson's numbers in figure 2 here, we would expect to find a positive impact of markets over government on achievement in slightly less than 2 out of 3 studies (with insignificant findings making up the majority of the others). If the case for free markets over government schools is really so clear cut (and I lean strongly in this direction), than why isn't this 3 out of 3?

And here is where the usefulness of the M&U paper for Cato's free market case comes in - it offers a convincing theoretical explanation for why free markets are only convincingly showed to be better 66% of the time. And even more importantly, if it is correct, the paper indicates how school choice programs can be structured to ensure that they make things better.

--
--
Gregory Elacqua
         --
Sub-director
Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación
Universidad Diego Portales
56-2-676-8535
www.cpce.cl

Este articulo interesante publicado en el New York Times Magazine de ayer explora el debate entre practicantes y academicos sobre como identificar y formar profesores de calidad. El ensayo enfatiza lo difícil que es lograr conectar las mecánicas pedagógicas que resultan en la sala de clases con el manejo de los contenidos.

Gregory
http://www.cpce.cl/educar/
-----------

NYTimes Magazine
March 7, 2010
Magazine Preview
Building a Better Teacher
By ELIZABETH GREEN

ON A WINTER DAY five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager -- desperate, in some cases -- for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.

Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students' strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn't reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he'd seen before: "a dispiriting exercise in good people failing," as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students. They sat down with them on the floor to read and picked activities that should have engaged them. The classes were small. The school had rigorous academic standards and state-of-the-art curriculums and used a software program to analyze test results for each student, pinpointing which skills she still needed to work on.

La revista The New Yorker publicó el siguiente excelente artículo titulado "Class Warrior" sobre Arne Duncan, Ministro de Educación de Obama, y su determinación para reformar el sistema educacional en EEUU.  Hay lecciones que podrían ser interesantes para el nuevo ministro de educación de Chile, Joaquín Lavin.

Gregory


--------

Profiles: Class Warrior
on Jan 27, 2010 by The New Yorker (Carlo Rotella)

PROFILE of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. President Obama has allotted Duncan more than seventy billion dollars in federal economic-stimulus funds to hand out to the states--more money "by a factor of a lot," as Duncan puts it, than any Secretary of Education has had before him. The stimulus money and the close relationship Duncan, who was the C.E.O. of the Chicago Public Schools before coming to Washington with Obama, has to the President give him extraordinary leverage. Duncan has the potential to be a uniquely influential Secretary of Education. Any state that wants its full share of stimulus money needs to give the Department of Education what are known as the "four assurances": progress in raising standards; in recruiting and retaining effective teachers; in tracking students' and teachers' performance; and in turning around failing schools. Duncan has played basketball with Barack Obama for nearly two decades, and first met him through Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama's older brother, who now coaches Oregon State University's men's basketball team. In the fight over education in America today, there are, roughly speaking, two major camps: free-market reformers, who believe that competition, choice, and incentives must have greater play in education; and liberal traditionalists who rally around teachers' unions and education schools. Obama's choice of Duncan was widely received as a compromise. His appointment was a loss for the unions. Republicans approve of Duncan's commitment to market-based reforms. Duncan must contend with critics on the right who don't accept the federal government's active role in education, and ones on the left who see him as a neoliberal enforcer, exploiting Obama's Democratic bona fides to impose the free-market reform agenda on the unions. Tells about Duncan's childhood on the South Side of Chicago and the after-school program his mother ran and continues to run in North Kenwood-Oakland. After graduating from Harvard, Duncan played professional basketball in Australia before returning to Chicago. Describes Duncan's career in Chicago, leading up to him being named C.E.O. of the Chicago Public Schools in 2001. Writer discusses Duncan's tenure as C.E.O. and interviews several critics of his policies. Tells about the rules by which the stimulus finds will be awarded to states and considers the legacy of No Child Left Behind. Many people who voted for Obama are finding out that on education, as on other issues, he is more of a centrist than they ever imagined.

Ver texto completo en
http://www.cpce.cl/descargas/arne_duncan.pdf

--
--
Gregory Elacqua
          --
Sub-director
Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación
Universidad Diego Portales
56-2-676-8535
www.cpce.cl

Diane Ravitch, historiadora de educación, ex-secretaria de educación de George H. Bush e intelectual pública de la derecha influyente, se da vuelta la chaqueta.  Despúes de defender por años reformas educacionales tradicionalmente apoyadas por liberales como vouchers, charter schools y accountability, pasó, según ella, por una "crisis intelectual" y descubrió que estas reformas estaban socavando la educación pública.  Su cambio de posición la llevó a renunciar a dos directorios de dos instituciones conservadoras, entre ellos, Hoover Institution de Stanford.  El artículo adjunto comenta su cambio y las criticas de algunos de sus ex-correlignarios.

Gregory
http://www.cpce.cl/educar/

-----------------
NYTimes
March 2, 2010
Scholar's School Reform U-Turn Shakes Up Debate
By SAM DILLON

Diane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration's Education Department, is in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling.

Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education. She resigned last year from the boards of two conservative research groups.

"School reform today is like a freight train, and I'm out on the tracks saying, 'You're going the wrong way!' " Dr. Ravitch said in an interview.

Dr. Ravitch is one of the most influential education scholars of recent decades, and her turnaround has become the buzz of school policy circles.

"What's Diane up to? That's what people are asking." said Grover J. Whitehurst, who was the director of the Department of Education's research arm in the second Bush administration and is now Dr. Ravitch's colleague at the Brookings Institution.

Among the topics on which Dr. Ravitch has reversed her views is the main federal law on public schools, No Child Left Behind, which is up for a rewrite in coming weeks in Congress. She once supported it, but now says its requirements for testing in math and reading have squeezed vital subjects like history and art out of classrooms.

Dr. Ravitch's new posture has angered critics.

"She has done more than any one I can think of in America to drive home the message of accountability and charters and testing," said Arthur E. Levine, a former president of Teachers College, where Dr. Ravitch got her doctorate and began her teaching career in the 1970s. "Now for her to suddenly conclude that she's been all wrong is extraordinary -- and not very helpful."

Admirers say she is returning to her roots as an advocate for public education. She rose to prominence in the 1970s with books defending the civic value of public schools from attacks by left-wing detractors, who were calling them capitalist tools to indoctrinate working-class children.

"First she angered the Marxist historians, and later the fans of progressive education and the multiculturalists," said Jeffrey E. Mirel, a professor of education and history at the University of Michigan. "But she's always defended public schools and a robust traditional curriculum, because she believes they've been a ladder of social mobility."

Dr. Ravitch was born in Texas and graduated from Wellesley. She gained formidable influence during the Republican-dominated 1980s. In her meticulous office on the top floor of a 19th-century Brooklyn brownstone hangs a photograph of herself, seated next to Vice President Bush during a visit to the White House, directly across from President Ronald Reagan.

In 1991, Lamar Alexander, the first President Bush's secretary of education, made her an assistant secretary, a post she used to lead a federal effort to promote the creation of state and national academic standards.

Since leaving government in 1993, Dr. Ravitch has been a much-sought-after policy analyst and research scholar, quoted in hundreds of articles on American education. And she has written five books, including "Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform" (2001) and "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn" (2003), an influential examination of the censorship of school books by left- and right-wing pressure groups.

In her new book, "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," she describes the bipartisan consensus that took root in the early 1990s, with her support, and has held sway since.

"The new thinking saw the public school system as obsolete, because it is controlled by the government," she writes. "I argued that certain managerial and structural changes -- that is, choice, charters, merit pay and accountability -- would help to reform our schools."

In January 2001, Dr. Ravitch was at the White House to hear President George W. Bush outline his vision for No Child Left Behind, which Congress approved with bipartisan majorities and which became law in 2002.

"It sounded terrific," she recalled in the interview.

There were signs soon after, however, that her views were changing. She had endorsed mayoral control of New York City schools before Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg obtained it in 2002, but by 2004 she had emerged as a fierce critic. Some said she was nursing a grudge because close friends had lost jobs in the mayor's shake-up of the schools' bureaucracy.

In 2005, she said, a study she undertook of Pakistan's weak and inequitable education system, dominated by private and religious institutions, convinced her that protecting the United States' public schools was important to democracy.

She remembers another date, Nov. 30, 2006, when at a Washington conference she heard a dozen experts conclude that the No Child law was not raising student achievement.

These and other experiences left her increasingly disaffected from the choice and accountability movements. Charter schools, she concluded, were proving to be no better on average than regular schools, but in many cities were bleeding resources from the public system. Testing had become not just a way to measure student learning, but an end in itself.

"Accountability, as written into federal law, was not raising standards but dumbing down the schools," she writes. "The effort to upend American public education and replace it with something that was market-based began to feel too radical for me."

She said she began to feel estranged intellectually from close colleagues.

One she heard criticize the No Child law was Chester E. Finn Jr., a former assistant secretary of education with whom she had written a book and worked at two conservative research groups, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

They were ideological soul mates and just plain chums. Often over the last decade, they were on the phone together or exchanging e-mail messages half a dozen times a day. But although Mr. Finn had become critical of the No Child law, he remained an advocate of charter schools and school choice.

By 2008, Mr. Finn said, "there were more and more issues where the staff and everybody else on the Fordham board would say, 'Let's do A,' and Diane would say, 'Let's do B.' "

Finally, she recalled, "I told everybody at a dinner meeting at Koret that I was going to resign, and they all said, 'Come on, stay -- we need somebody to argue with us." Dr. Ravitch stayed on for a time, but left both organizations last spring.

Mr. Finn has done his own rethinking, and he said he shared many of her disappointments.

"Standards, in many places, have proven nebulous and low," he writes in a coming essay. " 'Accountability' has turned to test-cramming and bean-counting, often limited to basic reading and math skills."

But Mr. Finn has reached sharply different conclusions from Dr. Ravitch.

"Diane says, 'Let's return to the old public school system,' " he said. "I say let's blow it up."

But Dr. Ravitch is finding many supporters. She told school superintendents at a convention in Phoenix last month that the United States' educational policies were ill-conceived, compared with those in nations with the best-performing schools.

"Nations like Finland and Japan seek out the best college graduates for teaching positions, prepare them well, pay them well and treat them with respect," she said. "They make sure that all their students study the arts, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages, the sciences and other subjects. They do this because this is the way to ensure good education. We're on the wrong track."

The superintendents gave Dr. Ravitch a standing ovation.

"We totally agreed with what she had to say," said Eugene G. White, superintendent of the Indianapolis Public Schools. "We were amazed to see that she'd changed her tune."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 4, 2010

An article on Wednesday about a surprising reversal by the education historian Diane Ravitch of almost every position she once took on American schooling misstated the number of books she has either written or edited since leaving government in 1993. It is 18, not 5. (That is how many she has written.)


--
--
Gregory Elacqua
          --
Sub-director
Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación
Universidad Diego Portales
56-2-676-8535
www.cpce.cl