Governance factors and educational achievment.

The general objective of this project is to improve the current understanding of the effects of institutional arrangements and governance on basic education.

To reach this goal, the comparison between Chile and Uruguay is extremely relevant because (i) both have been traditionally considered»educationally advanced countries» in the Latin American context and (ii) they used to have similar institutional set-ups in the past and since the 1970s they have followed divergent paths in terms of public service delivery in basic education.

The research will consider five main governance factors: (i) political and special interests, (ii) financing, (iii) incentives, (iv) accountability, (v) decentralization.

The study will be based on a mixed-methods approach as both quantitative and qualitative techniques will be applied. School quality and equity will be measured with secondary statistical data, specially students’ results in PISA 2003, 2006 and 2009. PISA is an extremely rich source since it provides comparable data among all participant countries about important aspects of educational arrangements and student learning outcomes (organizational characteristics and management of schools, school climate, school autonomy, accountability to parents, school funding sources, school practices, head leadership, assessment practices, teacher evaluation or parent involvement). On this basis, in a second stage of the analysis, the research will proceed to a deeper consideration of the relationship between institutional set-ups and educational results through primary data that will be collected using structured interviews to decision makers, politicians, leader unions, school heads and teachers.