Edutopia - February/March 2008 - (Page 36) In Chile, where education resists innovation, a small, determined charter school is going mano a mano with the status quo. BY LAILA WEIR a chilean challenge CHILE Population: 16.6 million Average years of school (adults) 7.5 Language: Spanish Required years of school: 9 hen elementary school students arrive at Colegio San Luis Beltrán, located in a poor neighborhood of Santiago, Chile, they don’t sit down at their desks and wait for the teacher to tell them what to do. Instead, they retrieve their personal folders from cubbyholes along the wall and settle down to work individually on a mat on the floor. What they study is up to them—within limits. “They have a work plan they have to complete, a plan that lasts about a month and a half,” explains the elementary school and middle school head, Carlos Olivares. The students choose what to work on at a given time, and learn using hands-on material as well as conventional schoolbooks. They also work at their own speed, though teachers keep an eye on how well they’re progressing. The teacher circulates, helping students or suggesting that a quick learner help a classmate who’s having more trouble. “When you need help, they help you,” says fourth grader Catalina with a wide smile. “They give us attention.” This individual work period lasts forty-five minutes and is the cornerstone of a personalized education program the school uses in grades P–4. In those grades, every school day begins with individual work. Afterward, before moving on to more traditional group classes for the rest of the school day, the students form a circle to share what they learned and how. This approach may seem familiar to many teachers in U.S. schools, but, combined with strong parent-involvement and family-support programs— including evening classes for parents who never finished school—it makes Luis Beltrán unique among Chilean schools. In this country, where critics and the public often cite the low quality of education, especially for the poor, localized funding for public schools and a proliferation of expensive private schools creates a vast divide between poorer and richer students’ schools. This educational inequality was a key complaint in recent years during massive student protests that rocked Santiago with marches and school takeovers, leading the government to undertake a still-ongoing reform effort. W 36 EDUTOPIA FEBRUARY/MARCH 2008
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