**5. Conclusions and recommendations**

First, we can conclude that teachers have a common narrative about the vulnerable school. This means that the themes, traits and the effect that these variables have been transmitted almost unalterably from one group of teachers to another. We interpret this as a defensive response to the pressures of the neoliberal system that imposes classification categories that no school wants to be in and highly visible negative consequences that threaten the psychological and professional integrity of teachers. The struggle to survive in this scenario leads them to rescue small achievements or to distort information by shifting the responsibility for low results to students and their families.

The teachers' justification is that the degraded environments surrounding the schools are determining the type of families that bring their children to school and that their nefarious behavior would be affecting their children's willingness to learn. These discourses are further associated with feelings of pity towards the children and of disgust and contempt towards the families. In this study we see that teachers are only at a second level with respect to becoming aware of asymmetries, looking for causes of failure outside the school's responsibility, on which they feel they cannot act directly. We must support schools to move to the levels of integrative criticism and liberating criticism so that they can empower themselves by creating adequate solutions to the challenges they face and the ideals they can set for themselves as a community.

Before concluding, we would like to reflect on the title we used to begin this chapter: are teachers' beliefs the barrier to be considered in the face of the low results obtained by the poorest children? In our analysis, not only did we find a shared narrative without variations from school to school, but we were also able to verify the same narratives in other studies at the national level, all of which were carried out a few years after the implementation of these policies and continue to be reproduced to this day. This story is a barrier, indeed, but it is a way of showing the resistance of teachers to falling into disrepute.

Neoliberal policies in education are based on mistrust, as they postulate that only through incentives and threats will school and teachers mobilize to improve their quality. This causes teachers in schools with high rates of priority students to face stressful working conditions, such as intensified bureaucratic and meaningless tasks, super vigilance, and the obligation to cover the entire curriculum, in addition to preparing children for testing, which leads them to ultimately reduce opportunities for those who need it most.

We believe that there is an urgent need to transform accountability policies towards a notion that encourages school communities to engage in thoughtful and complex dialogs about school challenges and opportunities and ways to improve. Teachers should engage in ethical discussions about the daily practice of schools and promote both professional development and the actualization of democratic principles [23]. This is not only because their purposes and assumptions are not being achieved, but also because they impede the achievement of greater social justice. Intelligent accountability should be based on principles such as trust, dialog, school and teacher autonomy, equitable participation, high expectations, respect for diversity, contextualization, creation, and strengthening of school communities with their own identity, all of them as means for all actors to be mutually responsible for education [24].

#### **Acknowledgements**

We thank the Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico (FONDECYT) of the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo de Chile (ANID) for funding research project No. 1120550 and we also thank IntechOpen for funding a large part of this publication.
