Educational standardization in Chile: Tensions and consequences for teachers’ work

Abstract

This paper proposes a general framework for analyzing curricular and evaluation policy in Chile, increasingly standardized in the last quarter century, and shows the contradictory nature between curriculum, evaluation and teaching. It exhibits how curricular design, and prescriptive teachers’ work policies and learning evaluation, constitute an obstacle for an active, flexible, contextualized and autonomous teaching practice. For that purpose, there is a brief description of the key ways the Chilean educational system has been commoditized and privatized, and a focus on the characteristics of pedagogical management, curriculum, and notions of learning as they appear in standardization policies, the underlying tensions within them, as well as their implications in teachers’ work.

Keywords: curricular policy, teaching, standardization, evaluation policies.