From the Ministry of Education they reported that the project that will modify the The Simce evaluation will be sent to Congress in March 2023. They also stressed that they are not seeking to eliminate the system, but to “perfect it.”
The Mineduc project that seeks to modify the Measurement System test of the Quality of Education (Simce), regarding the categorization and ordering of schools, will be submitted to Congress during March 2023.
The next two weeks , students of 4th grade and 2nd gradethey will have to take the Simce Language and Mathematics tests.
The results of these tests will represent the first snapshot of the school system. This, after 2 years without face-to-face classes or standardized measurements.
The foregoing, regarding the not very encouraging data left by the Comprehensive Learning Diagnosis test, which is voluntarily applied by the Quality Agency to establishments.
Specifically, they are not good. According to the Minister of Education, Marco Antonio Ávila, “they are predictors of the results that the Simce will yield in the month of April or May” of next year.
In this sense, the Secretary of State maintained that “what is being done with covering the prioritized curriculum is a contribution. But probably, this is going to mean a lag (in apprenticeships) that will be recovered in more than one government.”
Simce’s bill
As for the bill that will modify the Simce and that Minister Ávila had promised last October for “a few more weeks”, it ended up running until March of next year, according to the Secretary of State himself.
“As a Government, and from the Ministry, we want to strengthen and continue to promote large-scale evaluations, which is the name technically given to tests like this” ;, Ávila pointed out.
In addition, he explained that “ the issue is to reorient the use of information that this test grants, especially with some modifications, regulations, legal”.
Likewise, the minister specified that “a project will enter in March of next year, which modifies the safety system, the quality. And especially, the categorization and rearrangement of schools”.
< h2>“We know the results are going to be negative”
The executive director of Choose Educar, Joaquín Walker, stated that it is important to have information on learning. This, since the educational crisis due to the pandemic was so great that it is necessary to dimension it and a Simce without consequences is a good sign.
“We know that the results will be negative. But we also know that there will be no consequences, and rather this will be information that guides public policy in order to give even more priority to something so relevant”, explained Walker.
On the other hand, the Minister of Education added that the important thing is to broaden the concept of what is meant by quality. It is not only linked to the Simce but there are also other indicators.
In this context, Ávila pointed out that when the National Council of Education was asked to suspension of the tests for this year, was in response to the high level of stress that there was in the teachers.
This, in addition to the urgency of starting the school system, but not to forget about that model, but to improve it and make regulatory changes.