**1. Introduction**

In the last four decades in Chile, neoliberal policies have synchronized the educational system with the market economy [1]. This has implied, on the one hand, the introduction of new concepts and processes such as quality, efficiency, competition, and accountability [2] more typical of a business model than of an educational one [3]. On the other hand, it has led to profound changes in terms of financing, evaluation, and monitoring of these policies in schools. The main consequence was the disappearance of public education in 1982 and the mutation of the State towards a subsidiary role, delegating the responsibility for education to private or decentralized providers in exchange for a subsidy that functions as an incentive to supply and demand [2]. According to [4],

*The state acts as a market-maker in this scenario, as it produces and organizes markets for public assets, such as education. It achieves this not only through a competitive*  *funding system but also by creating policy tools that assign value to education providers through differentiating market signs, such as scores, rankings, and quality ratings, which are then linked to rewards and sanctions. These market signs are crucial for producing school hierarchies, distinction, and comparison, granting school's symbolic reputation and, therefore, a sense of competition (p. 116).*

However, this arrangement did not ensure improvement in the supply of education, nor did it improve the quality of learning for the poorest. On the contrary, the system of single-value subsidies, as designed, benefited more those with greater sociocultural advantage [1].

#### **1.1 An education policy of accountability based on results**

Despite the attempts of the post-dictatorship democratic governments to strengthen state support to education, a series of public policies that deepened the neoliberal model followed, which were finally integrated into a single system aimed at granting funding to schools whose core is managerial accountability, which is strongly associated with results in large-scale evaluations instead of processes [5].

In 2008, the SEP Law [6] was enacted, aimed at improving educational equity for the most disadvantaged groups, providing additional resources to subsidized schools according to the concentration of "priority students". This subsidy was provided after the school had signed an Equal Opportunity and Educational Excellence Agreement with the Ministry of Education and submitted a School Improvement Project (SIP) in which the school committed itself to achieve important advances in terms of curriculum, school management, school coexistence, and human resources management [6, 7].

More recently, new public institutions were created to closely regulate the best implementation of these public policies, the Agency for the Quality of Education (ACE) and the Superintendence of Education. This was intended to ensure access to quality education and equity for all [8]. The ACE is in charge of the national evaluation process and, according to its results, annually classifies schools according to the performance of 4th-grade students in the test of the Sistema Nacional de Evaluación de resultados de aprendizaje del Ministerio de Educación de Chile (SIMCE) and other complementary indicators, but with a much lower weight. In this way, schools are classified as "autonomous", "emerging" or "recovering" according to the criteria shown in **Table 1**. These demands have placed a high pressure on schools, in which eight to nine standardized tests (approximately four levels and four subjects) are applied annually [9].

The "emerging" category is applied when schools show intermediate results, which are qualified as medium or medium-low; when schools have only two SIMCE evaluations or when they are new establishments, or their student body is less than 20.

#### **1.2 Accountability with high consequences**

The classification obtained by schools has a direct impact on the funding they receive from the state. High-performing schools are classified as autonomous, receiving double the subsidy per priority child compared to schools classified as emergent. At the other extreme, "recovering" schools that show sustained low performance may have consequences such as the removal of the management team


#### *Teachers' Beliefs about Poverty: A Barrier We Must Face DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.102323*

#### **Table 1.**

*Criteria and weighting for the classification of schools according to their achievements in the SIMCE test and in the other improvement indicators committed to in their IEP.*

or be subject to definitive closure [4, 10]. These schools are monitored by the ACE through repeated inspection visits aimed at providing feedback on teaching and school management [11].

The basic principle of neoliberal ideology is that institutions do not feel that they have a secure and stable budget, because permanent quality improvement is achieved only through the promise of incentives, risks, and sanctions [4]. However, after more than a decade of its implementation, standardized assessments continue to report a great influence of socioeconomic level (hereafter SES) on learning, showing a large gap between low and high SES students [12, 13]. These results have led us to wonder about teacher subjectivity. Could there be a problem in the beliefs they hold about poverty?

## **1.3 The crucial role of beliefs**

Beliefs are "individual judgments about the truth or falsity of a proposition, a judgment that can only be inferred from a collective understanding of what human beings say, intend, and do" [14] (p. 316). Moreover, because of their affective,

evaluative, and episodic nature, they become filters through which new phenomena are interpreted [15] and expectations are developed that influence the teacher's action [16].

Teachers are not immune to the influence of stereotypical beliefs [17], as these are acquired unconsciously from the experiences and habits of their social environment, which are put into practice on an ongoing basis [18]. A relationship has been found between stereotypical beliefs and low expectations in teachers, which has led to demand changes in the initial and continuous training of teachers to influence their beliefs so that they understand that poverty is a product of gaps in access to opportunities and not of deficiencies in mentality, culture or people [19].

## **1.4 Research question**

What beliefs about poverty hold in-service teachers working in low and lowermiddle SES schools with above or below average performance on the SIMCE test of schools of the same type?
