Background and Objectives 

Similar global school reforms are increasingly implementing everywhere in the globe. As many european countries, Chile has recently introduced a set of policy strategies to improve schools serving most disadvantaged communities. Under the assumption that they will improve the quality and equity of education, the Chilean Government implemented during 2009 and 2011, while reinforcing mix school provision, for/profit schools, and vouchers, three new key reforms to tackle underachievement in Chilean public-funded primary schools: (i) The creation of the Agency for Quality of Education (which will classify schools every year in four categories under the risk of being closed if they do not improve outcomes in the national standardised test of learning in mathematics and language –SIMCE- which measure the fulfilment of the national curriculum); (ii) The Preferential Additional Funding Plan which provide more economic resources peer student under the condition of the elaboration of an Improvement Plan where schools should set goals in terms of test outcomes (SIMCE) for a short term period (4 years); (iii) under the framework of the previous policy, schools can obtain additional funding to contract external support from organisation called ATEs, a new publicly funded market of school support. They are the political and policy answer to the student movement occurred during 2006. The principles underlying such reforms are: self-monitoring schools to improve as well as external steering-from-distance state control, test-based conditioned funding; competence between schools; school performance state control, in other words, the assumption that schools will improve via the adoption of efficient and innovative business-based organisational management.

This three-year research project is a mix method inquiry aiming at to understand how new accountability-based reforms in Chile has impacted on school practices at pedagogical, equity, and organisational level. In particular, this research project offer evidence regarding the specific mechanisms by which such policies act into schools reshaping issues like curriculum depth, students tracking, school selection, test-based decision-making, and contested dilemmas among staff and management team. Crucially, this research shows in detail how head teachers and their collaborators’ team change the educational purposes of education at local level in response to, and to meet, national policies. On the whole, the paper attempts to put into question what is really being improved and in benefit of whom.

 These are the main questions to be addressed:

• Are these policy tools producing deep and genuine school change?
• How do match these initiatives the emotional, pedagogical, social, and affective students needs in disadvantaged contexts?
• How is education being (re)conceptualised and (re)defined in the light of these policy tools?

 Conceptual Approach

 As a global pattern, by accountability school reforms, we refer to the external policy tools, which introduce a new education governance system in which state governs by distance using in parallel weak support and severe consequences and pressure: intensive testing (not assessment), compulsory standardisation (not local curriculum adaptation neither innovation), severe consequences upon schools (not trust neither building-capacity support), and competence and conditioned funding (not cooperation among schools). There is increasing international evidence that such policies has proved to fail in improving equity in education as well as expand the learning opportunities and meet the educational needs of all students from different backgrounds (Sahlberg, 2011; Ravitch, 2010; Alexander et al., 2010; Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009; Wolf & Janssens, 2007).

Conversely, this research project was attempting to ask whether such new reforms were promoting what has been identified internationally like long-term school improvement tools: internal school accountability (Elmore, 2010); capacity-building, staff collaboration, and strategic coherence; professional capital promoting and support (Fullan & Hargreaves, 2012); distributed and adaptive leadership (Day et al., 2008; Harris, 2012). 

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