Education and El Salvador’s Strategy (2)

While these recommendations may seem either like boring commonplaces or 
frustratingly vague—there  are three reasons why this report avoids specific 
recommendations to emphasize processes.  
First, the existing reforms that are underway  are “state of the art” and need to be 
given time to have an impact and it would be a mistake to overload implementation 
capacity with a series of new proposals.  
Second, the ability to generate and maintain systemic and substantial progress in the 
quality of education nearly everywhere in Latin America has been stymied by three key 
limitations:  (a) lack of a clear social consensus on performance standards for schools 
around which a viable, durable, political coalition to press for quality improvements can 
be built,  (b) the lack of system of learning assessment linked to  those standards which 
allow monitoring of progress causing difficulty in distinguishing valuable initiatives from
passing fads,  and (c) conflicting relationships between key actors in the system—
particularly teachers and their unions and “technocrats.”  This combination challenges the 
launching and sustaining of reforms that significantly improve classroom practice---many 
reforms either never reach the classroom or there is a continuous stream of new 
“reforms” which are not given sufficient time and effort to bear fruit.  
Third, an increasing number of scholars  and practitioners working on education 
believe that an exclusive emphasis on the  proximate determinants of learning detracts 
from an  institutional  perspective (World Development  Report, 2004).  Nearly every 
educational expert emphasizes this or that particular proximate determinant of learning—
time on task, learning aids,  smaller class sizes, this or that improved pedagogical 
technique—and “recommendations” are an associated project or program to improve that 
feature.  Alternatively some argue that a  simple institutional change like introducing 
“choice” or school vouchers will solve all ills.  Neither of these views have panned out
particularly well in raising quality Latin America, which lags alarmingly behind that of 
the OECD (see below).  

The alternative is an institutional arrangement of school autonomy with management
for performance and accountability.  This is  the path that El Salvador is on, and should 
remain on.  In this approach high quality schooling is the result of individuals within the 
system acting on their information—quality is not a single program or feature and cannot 
be imposed from the top.  While performance can be measured and school teachers and 
administrators can act to improve performance there is no single programmatic magic 
bullet (or set of magic bullets).     
While the temptation of every new government is to launch a new, high profile, 
reform effort in education of one type or another, the time is not propitious for dramatic 
changes of any type.  The challenge will be to stick to the basic efforts in continued 
expansion in enrollments, implementation of  the current efforts to improve quality, and 
sustaining the system of learning assessment that both can assess overall progress and be
used to evaluate interventions.  The aforementioned priorities can form the basis for 
initiating a process for creating the foundations for the next round of reforms. 


Second, how does the overall educational strategy fit with the overall growth strategy 
recommended in this report of continued  integration into the world economy plus 
accelerated efforts to promote innovation? 
Within this topic there are three main messages. 
• Schooling will not constitute an immediate constraint on economic growth—nor
will the expansion in schooling necessarily translate into increased growth
without the implementation of a growth strategy. 
• The returns to schooling are increasing the most at the highest levels.  Economic
changes are leading to higher returns for those with tertiary education.  In a world 
in which the production of ideas and innovations is increasingly important 
because of “skill intensive” changes in production, El Salvador will need ensure 
that those leaving secondary and entering tertiary are both increasing in numbers 
and carrying a substantive skill-set attained though high quality education. 
• The strategy for education, training, and innovation needs to be more closely 
aligned with the growth strategy.  This is not to say that the education system
should extend responsibility to vocational training nor that basic schooling 
should be “job skills” focused.  However, the education system should respond in 
a way that increases the link between the dynamic economic needs of the 
economy and the system of education.