Through its quality assurance laws, Chile’s National Agency for Quality of Education (Agencia de Calidad de la Educación) is responsible for guiding and evaluating the country’s state schools and promoting a process of continuous improvement in public education. To this end, the Agency visits schools and analyses the work they do using various quality assurance instruments. This article uses qualitative methodology and a comprehensive-interpretative approach to examine how school directors have responded to the Agency. The results indicate that school directors do not consider the Agency to have recognised those aspects of school management that are conditioned by the social vulnerability of the communities schools serve, and that its evaluation criteria remain excessively standardised. The article concludes that, in order to substantially improve the Chilean education system, the government needs to show a greater level of commitment and the Agency needs to work more closely with the schools that make up the public education system.