Although Chile is a country with significant problems of quality and fairness in its education system, since the arrival of the democratic system in 1990 public authorities have made a strong, prolonged effort to improve investment in education and to develop educational programmes focussed on enhancing the quality of education and combating social gaps and inequalities. This article describes and analyzes the last twenty years of education policies implemented to support the kinds of schools that welcome underachieving children from vulnerable sectors. The targeted programmes implemented between 1990 and 2007 included the Programme for Improving the Quality of Primary Schools in Poor Areas (P900), the Programme for Improving the Quality of Rural Education (PRural), the Intercultural Bilingual Programme, the Critical Schools Programme and the Priority Schools Programme. Analysis highlights the programmes' limitations (traceable to their failure to consider non-academic factors) and stresses the need to assimilate a pro-fairness education policy that includes positive discrimination. A study and critical analysis of current education policy, the School Grant Preference (SEP) Law, is the focus of the second part of the paper. The conclusion is that there is a need to continue implementing targeted compensatory policies and actions framed within broader strategies that take on the comprehensive formation of individuals in relation to their context, history, community and culture, policies for democratic citizenship, where systems and schools establish the patterns for and promote inclusive, supportive, tolerant, egalitarian socialization, of a sort that can make every child's and every young adult's life aspirations a reality, but which is also relevant for the acquisition of a civic education that is both lever and fulcrum for fair, egalitarian, participatory societies.