USAID/LAC/RSD education and human resources team : close-out report for strategic objective 598-002 -- 1996-2001

Report covers the period 1996-2002. Achievements exceeded expectations. The Partnership for Educational Revitalization in the Americas (PREAL), the major effort under SO 2, built public and private support for education reform through dozens of outreach activities, as well as through its research and publications. PREAL has been credited with producing the most comprehensive publications to date on education problems and recommendations for change. Several effective dialogue, communication, and analytical tools for promoting education policy reform among business leaders, government officials and academic leaders have been developed and are being effectively applied to create a cadre of advocates at the highest levels throughout the region. The Central American Report Card, a mechanism to document the successes and failures of education and identify areas for improvement, was developed. PREAL also published a Report Card on Education in Latin America, which for the first time provided generally available information comparing schools in the region. PREAL also identified four key education reform objectives that governments must support: (1) set standards for the education system and measure progress toward meeting them; (2) give schools and local communities more control over and responsibility for education; (3) strengthen the teaching profession by raising salaries, reforming training, and making teachers more accountable to the communities they serve; and (4) invest more money per student in pre- school, primary, and secondary education. These four objectives, as well as the concept of education report cards, became the basis of a follow-on cooperative agreement to PREAL under SO 23, and provided the goals of both the LAC and Central America and Mexico (CAM) regional programs. PREAL also established: a 24-institution network to work on education reform in 16 countries; a multinational Task Force on Education, Equity and Economic Competitiveness in Latin America and the Caribbean that released and distributed a comprehensive report in three languages; and a Central American Task Force for Educational Reform that produced a report analyzing the key problems facing schools in Central America and offering recommendations for change. The US/Brazil Partnership served as an outstanding model of inter- governmental cooperation between USAID and a number of U.S. agencies. Under the Partnership, USAID supported LTNet, a program of study tours and conferences for Brazilian educators visiting the United States, complemented by a bilingual website providing U.S. and Brazilian stakeholders access to information, educational technologies, and networking support and services. To ensure sustainability, LTNet established a partnership with GlobalEnglish.com to offer Brazilian public schools free access to GlobalEnglish's online English language resources. Under the Partnership seven successful policy dialogues were held. Led by UNESCO, the Summit of the Americas Regional Education Indicators Project (PRIE) was carried out 8/00-8/03. PRIE established a set of initial indicators for the Americas, and distributed their data to Ministries of Education (MOEs). PRIE also strengthened statistic systems in the region and encouraged the use of quality information in education decisionmaking. Despite the program's successes, education reform in the region remains a major challenge, largely due to a lack of the information and the political processes needed to stimulate public demand for reform. Also, the tests being developed to measure student learning remain new and many have serious shortcomings. To date, no country in the hemisphere has established, disseminated, and implemented comprehensive and comparable national education standards or indicators. The limited technical capacity and resources of MOEs are a further constraint. Even more critical, however, is the lack of a culture of accountability. Education providers (e.g., government officials and teachers) tend to distrust or even resist establishing standards or conducting assessments, and when such measures are imposed, governments tend to resist making their methodologies and results public.