Abstract

Chile is in the middle of an educational reform. One of the main changes is replacing the administration of public schools from the Municipalities to a new non-existent Local Educational Authorities (LEA). However, the geographic and socio-demographic diversity of the country are a big challenge to the LEAs because their specific context such as urban accessibility, rurality, spatial segregation and employment center’s locations, which are normally invisible to educational public policy making, have to be taken into consideration. Our previous experience with the FONDEF CA13I10023 project showed us that the performance of the school system also depends on non-educational factors. The development of territorial indexes, visual analytics, explicative and predictive models are very helpful to provide a deep insight of the relationships and dynamics between territories. Therefore, this project wants to answer the question: How can we support the the decision making process for the implementation of this new public policy in education? We propose to develop a territorial intelligence platform to support the management of the new LEAs, providing objective, timely and updated information to decision makers. This platform will allow decision makers to: define service standards, diagnose the divides between the current situation and the service level desired, design actions to bridge those divides, assign resources and monitor and evaluation the implementation of those plans. Additionally, a taxonomy of LEAs plus other indexes such as human capital attraction and local accessibility will generate evidence to improve the initial territorial assignment for the LEAs. This platform will be used by the teams from the New Public Education, the Planning and budget division and the General Education of the Chilean Ministry of Education, and the personnel from the new LEAs to be created, as pilot experience to scale and replicate the process to the whole country.