Peru: The State of Teacher Policies

This post is also available in: Español 

This report (available in Spanish) from the Inter-American Dialogue and the Institute of Peruvian Studies evaluates the current state of teacher policies in Peru, a priority issue on the country’s political agenda. Over the last 15 years, the Peruvian Ministry of Education has undertaken a series of initiatives to strengthen teaching, such as revising teacher training, developing new evaluation strategies, and instating new legislation on the teaching profession that incorporates incentives for good performance. However, several challenges remain: high rates of teacher absenteeism, low salaries, and inconsistent in-service training opportunities for current teachers, among others.

To address these challenges, the report presents the following recommendations, among others.

Key Recommendations

• Optimize system planning processes: It is important to study the relationship between the supply of teachers and demand of teachers expressed through school enrollment, to reduce any deficit or over-supply of teachers in certain areas. This also means raising teacher salaries and reducing the number of teachers working on a contractual basis.
• Improve in-classroom support as a strategy for in-service training: This includes improving both the content of the in-classroom teacher support, as well as its implementation.
• Develop better strategies to attract and retain students for the teaching profession: Even with the promise of scholarships and higher salaries, improving the social status of the teaching profession requires promotional campaigns, and taking measures to prevent high entry requirements from detracting potential applicants from entering the profession.
• Improve communications about teacher evaluations: Teacher evaluations in Peru have shown high technical quality and transparency. But there is more to be done to ensure the practical aspects of the evaluations are communicated more effectively, by clearly demonstrating the relationship between evaluation guidelines and the existing teacher performance framework.

Project

The Inter-American Dialogue leads a project that seeks to strengthen civil society’s support of improving teacher policies in Latin America. The aim is to stimulate debate and help to build the necessary consensus for governments in the region to adopt effective teacher policies.

The first phase of the project (2013-2015) focused on teacher policies in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic. The second phase (2016-2018) is focused on teacher policies in Argentina, Costa Rica, Panama and Peru, and includes an analysis of lessons for Latin America from the educational system in Shanghai, China.