The educational system in Mexico has made great efforts to improve its quality over the past decades. Two main lines of work have been defined. The first step has been to ensure that the term “education of quality” to work as the axis of the educative policies. The second has been to instrument the diverse evaluation systems. In spite of these, there is no solid evidence that the systematic evaluation exercises have contributed to improve the quality on education.
This lack of relation between the systematic evaluation and the improvement of quality obliges to analyze technical and methodological aspects of the quality assessment. The article revises two main ideas: 1) the notion that the concept of quality of education requires a process of negotiation; and 2) that the educative centers constitute the axis of analysis to develop a system for quality assesment. Based on these two aspects, six experiences on the construction of indicators and tools to assess “educative quality” at educative centers in México, are been presented.
These experiences have in common: a) that they arise from a wide-ranging discussion of numerous participants of the educative sector and from civic organizations on the subject of quality on education; and b) include a reflection on the world that we would like to live as articulation departure linking indicators, tools and evaluation procedures.