Políticas hacia el liderazgo directivo escolar en Chile: Una mirada comparada con otros sistemas escolares de América Latina

Abstract

School leadership is a field that is becoming increasingly important to educational policies, since it has a well-known impact in terms of effectiveness and improvement, as well as in terms of alignment with the tendency to decentralize, the attainment of high levels of self-sufficiency and accountability in the school system. In the last decade, Chile introduced a series of initiatives to improve the leadership of School Principals. This article compares the Chilean situation against other seven Latin American school systems. In order to do this, we reviewed the available documentation (legal norms, statistics and studies) in several dimensions of policies that promote leadership at the Principal's level. Results indicate that Chile is relatively more advanced, since it has been able to undertake relevant measures, such as performance standards, professional recruitment, or bestowing higher powers and improving compensation. However, it still has significant difficulties to promote leadership, similar to those that other countries experience. Some of the issues have been poorly addressed, such as principals preparation, the internal and external coherence between the various policies involved is week, and there is no specialized institution in charge of this.