Verdugo Thomas, Paula María Jesús; (2024) Technical-Pedagogical Assistance in the Chilean New Public Education System: A Multi-Level and Multi-Sited Ethnographically Informed Study. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Educational governance is widely used in the literature to designate changes in the organisation of educational systems worldwide (Wilkins & Olmedo, 2019), many of which aim for school improvements that promote equality of opportunity and outcomes for all students. Among these changes is the New Public Education in Chile approved in 2017, which official discourse claims to start a new period of educational governance, where collaboration replaces market logic, along with greater hierarchical control (Montecinos et al., 2020). This thesis aims to empirically explore if, and if so, how the New Public Education policy enactment affects governance relations and school improvement practices. To this end, the research adopts a remote, multi-site, multi-level, ethnographically informed qualitative methodology. The approach is multi-level because it investigates the enactment of technical-pedagogical assistance at all the levels of the New Public Education: central, intermediate and school; and multi-sited as it involves three local services across the country and primary schools in each territory. The data-gathering process involves remote observations, interviews, and documentary analysis, and analysis was undertaken through thematic coding. Findings confirm changes in the educational governance arrangements resulting from the enactment of the New Public Education, which affected school improvement practices, that differ from the official discourse and other scholarly hypotheses. These changes included a shift towards greater central bureaucracy, processes of “re-intermediation”, and attempts to mandate networking. Additionally, enacting this policy led to the emergence of governance tensions that required second-order governance arrangements and anticipated further changes. It was concluded that these governance arrangements predominantly promote a “doing things better” (Fishman & Herrenkohl, 2022) approach to school improvement, associated with narrow educational purposes and little equality of opportunity and outcome.

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