SIMCE is a product of the transition from a socialist-planned economy to a more subsidiary, free market oriented one, created in the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).
In education at the primary and secondary level, the constitutional push made by Pinochet's dictatorship was installed under the rhetoric of "modernization".
The main elements of this modernization were underfunding public education, allocating funding through student vouchers, and allowing the entry of private entrepreneurs to compete with public schools for student enrollment.
In this sense, civilians opted for developing a battery of tests of academic achievement that measured the "quality" of education, and pushed the cultural shift needed to conceive the new state.
Pinochet's Minister of Education, Alfredo Prieto, stated in the early 1980s: "The lack of a test that I have referred to would leave the educational system being designed without one of the main tools to make effective, real, and functional the rest of the measures that constitute educational modernization.