EDUCATIONAL QUALITY IN VOCATIONAL HIGH SCHOOLS: THEORETICAL APPROXIMATION, RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND PROPOSAL OF INDICATORS

Chile’s long-awaited Educational Reform seeks to provide quality public education to the majority, especially to those who are at most socioeconomic risk. However, the inflection point in this reform will be the quality factor. Thus, our research seeks to answer the following questions: How can educational quality be defined, and what are the indicators that give administrators a clear indication of having obtained quality in their processes? Should these indicators be constructed and implemented only by the State and the administration?
Together with the challenge of implementing a total quality management (TQM) system in an educational organization, it is necessary to define Educational Quality in a theoretical and empirical sense. The Universidad de Santiago of Chile, as a managing institution of several vocational high schools, has started the implementation of a TQM system in one of these schools.

Methodological models for this implementation come from national and international studies and experiences, yet we hope to contribute to the current knowledge, by analysing the different approaches to the quality concept in educational organizations, with focus on secondary vocational education, and in all the end-users of the system, and holistically way the realization of quality taking into account the perception of quality from each user’s point of view (student, parent, teacher, and administrator).

We expect that our systematization can contribute to the discussion on the quality of education and the development of relevant indicators for measuring it.