National Conference on Teacher Policy in Costa Rica
Workshop that seeks to promote debate on teacher policy and showcase innovative policies.
This post is also available in: Spanish
There is growing concern in Central America and the Dominican Republic regarding the quality of education. Despite the importance of teachers for learning, the recruitment, selection, training, retention, and support of teachers in most of the countries in the region are still inadequate.
As part of a project that seeks to strengthen the support of civil society to improve teacher policies, The Inter-American Dialogue and its national partners[i] published a series of report cards in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. The project was made possible thanks to the support of the Inter-American Development Bank’s Institutional Capacity Strengthening Fund, established with contributions from the government of the People’s Republic of China.
Based on the report cards, we prepared a comprehensive report that highlights the most important trends and synthesizes the most relevant findings at the regional level, supported by examples from each country. The report also summarizes the main recommendations that came out of the national studies and proposes areas of improvement in teacher policy.
In all four countries, the national partners analyzed the state of teacher policies in nine common dimensions, grouped into three categories:
The following analysis presents a synthesis of the four country report cards, and our own evaluation of teacher policy tendencies in the region:
Beyond the priorities for reform in every one of the countries studied (available in the regional report), we believe that the state of teacher policies in the region shows many common challenges, which might also apply to countries not covered in this project. The following considerations seek to reflect on these common challenges and offer a unified perspective on how to address them.
Experience shows that many good practices fail when it comes to implementation. Hence it is especially important to emphasize the implementation details of any new policy, taking corrective measures as necessary, before the policies lose credibility due to perceived lack of impact, and to deliver concrete results.
There is no single recipe for success: each of these policies can be implemented in a variety of ways and each country will have to find the variant that works best in its particular context. Hence the importance of a broad dialogue, based on the best available information, on the state of teacher policies in each country and on how to tackle challenges.
[i] Our partners are: Centro de Investigaciones Económicas Nacionales (CIEN) in Guatemala, Fundación Ricardo Ernesto Maduro Andreu (FEREMA) in Honduras, Fundación Salvadoreña para el Desarrollo Económico (FUSADES) in El Salvador, and Acción Empresarial por la Educación (EDUCA) in the Dominican Republic.
Workshop that seeks to promote debate on teacher policy and showcase innovative policies.
PREAL reviews broad spectrum of its activities and discusses priorities for improving education policy in the coming year.
Study suggesting Chilean students were at or near the bottom on knowledge of mathematics has led to heated discussions.