Los servicios educativos en el s. XXIdesempeño, eficiencia e innovación

Resumen

Education provides important individual and social benefits. Both considerations have lead governments (and policymakers alike) to undertake measures aimed to improve education systems to becomes not only efficient in terms of allocation and use of resources, but also improve equity, which encompass granting equal access to education and effectively acquiring the knowledge, skills and competences needed to enhance life opportunities and quality of life. However, no common solution exists given the social, economic and cultural differences of people. These considerations opens the questions on what determines education, their dynamic and more encouraging, what role for innovation and how can innovation improve education performance and outcomes.Our research presents a useful framework to understand and analyse the dynamics of education from a service perspective and provides evidence on how specific modes of innovation lead to improve its performance. To understand education dynamics research undertaken has investigated how school actors behaviour influence education outcomes, by analysing how parental and school staff empowerment impact education outcomes, in terms of student academic performance and school efficiency. Furthermore, an enhanced (novel) theoretical construct (Gallouj and Weinstein, 1997) is presented, aiming to better understand (and measure) education provision (and delivery) by breaking down and representing education as a set of (service and social) characteristics, and more important, it clearly grips with and reveals ways to improve its dynamics, by modelling innovation in education and (education) service innovations. Empirically we have investigated which (besides technical characteristics) education actors competencies and relations influence education outcomes but more interesting, how specific changes and/or recombination's (innovation) of specific (actors and technical) characteristics improve education outcomes. Overall results emphasise that social interactions (between actors) become determinant over academic performance of students, therefore, a way to improve education quality and equity is throughout social innovations