A quality certification system for school management: lessons learned from the experience of Chile Foundation (2002-2010)

Chile Foundation has developed an innovative initiative in order to certify the quality of management in hundreds of Chilean schools. This conference summarizes the lessons learned in this process. Among them the following should be emphasized: the creation of a "quality model" has enabled to have a reference point for improvement; the proposal of an "improvement cycle" has opened practical modes of work; political and technical conditions to reach a national scale have been generated; certification processes had an impact on demonstrable advances in academic results; new information on the most deficient areas of school management has become available for the school system. Among others, the main challenges are to support schools for them to perform the whole improvement cycle.