Education and El Salvador’s Strategy (1)

Education and El Salvador’s Strategy 

First, how can the production of universal,  high quality, education be promoted in El 
Salvador?  This is a question primarily about the internal organization of schooling 
within the education sector.  Within the first topic there are five main messages and the
text of the chapter will follow these messages. 
• Education has seen big successes.  There have been many substantial 
improvements in schooling attainment  (including the introduction of EDUCO 
schools). 
• While there are no direct comparisons of  current performance of students in El
Salvador to students internationally  if El Salvador is similar to the rest of Latin
America (and there are good reasons for believing it is) then learning achievement 
lags alarmingly behind that of the industrialized countries and other global 
competitors.  

• The MINED has launched a set of inter-related reforms aimed at increasing
schooling quality, which since they only began in 2001 are in the early stages of 
implementation.   
• Continuity in implementing the ongoing efforts to increase enrollments (including 
EDUCO) and especially continued effort in implementing the new programs to 
improve quality is essential.  Though tempting, launching a qualitatively new and 
different set of reforms of basic education is not desirable at this time.   
• Experience around the world has shown that improving quality is a very 
challenging business.  Continued progress in the quality of education is essential 
and for that it is important that the existing system of continuous evaluation—both 
of overall, system wide, progress and of innovations be maintained. 
• The new reforms--which emphasize the school as the locus of action for 
improving education—will generate experiences from which new ideas for 
improving quality will emerge.  It is essential that MINED maintain an analytical
capability to assess the impact of innovations and their potential for replication.
Systems of promoting learning must themselves be performance driven learning 
systems.  

• The next rounds of education reforms (and “fine tuning” of existing reforms)
should be solidly based on the evidence that emerges from the evaluations and 
experiments in the first  period and on an extensive period of factually and 
experientially based discussion with key stakeholders.  This is particularly true of 
the reforms needed to improve teaching as a profession.