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From the beginning of Chile’s transition to democracy in 1990 until the present, the government has taken unprecedented steps to transform and improve the education system. Backed by a broad consensus regarding the education sector’s strategic importance for economic and democratic development, policy changes have aimed at the goal of providing high-quality education to all. Universal high-quality education is expected to improve abstract thinking, communication skills, teamwork, learning ability, and moral judgment and hence enable graduates to perform well in the complex world in which they will have to function. These policy changes have come about within a decentralized institutional framework in which market principles—introduced in the early
1980s in accordance with the neoliberal economic policies of the former military regime—operate in concert with state policies designed to improve quality, equity, and the curriculum.
