Head of the Inspecting Division, Superintendence of Education (Quality Assurance of the Chilean educational system), Santiago, Chile
Mauricio A. Farias Arenas is the head of the Inspecting Division at the Superintendence of Education, an institutional part of the Quality Assurance of the Chilean education system. In this role, he is working to increase the accountability of schools and to strengthen the implementation of law, with the aim of assuring basic learning conditions in schools and promoting improvement mechanisms that could increase the quality and equity of the Chilean educational system. Previously, Mauricio served as advisor to the vice minister of Education in Chile and worked in the non-profit sector, where he was the principal of a childcare program and a day care program for people with disabilities. He was a researcher focused on higher education at Fundación Chile and also headed the Department of Research and Development at the Ministry of Education in Chile, where he was responsible for research, managing funds, gathering national databases, producing statistics, and managing school subsidies. Mauricio holds a B.A. in industrial engineering and an M.Sc. in applied economics from the University of Chile, as well as a Ph.D. in international comparative education from Stanford University, USA. His research focused on different aspects of educational inequality in Latin American countries. Mauricio is a Fellow of Untapped Talent: Can better testing and data accelerate creativity in learning and societies?, in 2015.