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Red Pen Blue PenThe impact of internationally-financededucation reform on classroom ractice in Ecuador

Gordon Whitman



Red Pen Blue PenThe impact of internationally-financed education reform on classroom practice in Ecuador

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Abstract: Between 1990 and 2004 the World Bank and the Inter-American DevelopmentBank loaned Ecuador approximately $160 million to finance initiatives to improve thequality of basic education through the development of decentralized school networks. Thisresearch assesses the impact of these externally financed projects on classroom instructionand student learning in urban and rural areas in the country. It also identifies lessons formore systemic education reform in Ecuador. The study concludes that while one of theprojects helped establish an important new national curriculum, on the whole the effortsfailed to significantly improve classroom instruction, which continues to be dominated by dictation and other teacher-centered practices. The study also finds that the decision tooperate the projects outside the Ministry of Education sharply reduced the value of theseinvestments in producing long-term institutional change within the education sector.

Gordon WhitmanFLACSO-EcuadorComisión Fulbright del [email protected]

© Gordon Whitman, 2004




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CONTENTS

Introduction▪ Copying ▪ Efforts to improve education in Ecuador▪ Research question▪ Research method▪ What we know about reforming education systems▪ How this study is organized

Student Learning▪ Classroom visits▪ Student work ▪ Quantitative assessments of education quality ▪ Relationship between curricular reform and classroom practice▪ Instructional vision in school network projects▪ Official project documents▪ Sources of innovation

Teacher Learning▪ Professional development events▪ School networks as learning communities▪ How the World Bank and IDB conceived of schools networks and professional development▪ From supervision to coaching ▪ Teacher Lessons

System Learning▪ The system seen from the school▪ School networks as seen from Ministry of Education▪ Institutional change▪ System Lessons

Conclusion and Recommendations

Appendix

Bibliography




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Acknowledgements

This research was funded through a fellowship from the Fulbright Commission. Academicand institutional support was provided by FLACSO-Ecuador. At FLASCO Betty Espinosa,Carlos Arcos and Alison Vásconez offered invaluable assistance in the design and executionof the research. FLACSO masters students who participated in my course on institutionaland system change taught me much about Ecuador and its public systems. Thanks also to Alex Terán for his help with data and technology. Julia Paley taught me how to be anethnographer. Susana Cabeza de Vaca, director of the Ecuador Fulbright Commission was agreat source of support. Many people in Ecuador helped me understand the educationsystem (a list of persons interviewed is in the appendix). The Ecuadorian Ministry of Education, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank generously providedaccess to data, archival information and schools. At the Ministry of Education, Victor Hugo

Viñueza in the Subsecretaria and Diego Burbano in the Division of Statistics were especially helpful, as was Germán Parra in the Unidad Coordinadora de Proyectos MEC-BID.Ultimately this research was made possible by the willingness of school directors, teachersand students to welcome me into their schools and classrooms.




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▪INTRODUCTION

Copying

A boy in Guayaquil sits at a desk copying words written on a blackboard. A girl in Cangahuacopies a paragraph from a scrap of newspaper into her notebook. A group of children inQuito trade blue and red pens as they copy questions (red) into their notebooks and look upanswers (blue) they find in their workbooks. Despite a fifteen years effort to improve basiceducation, copying persists as a widespread instructional practice in Ecuador. Across thecountry talented educators are teaching young people to write their own essays and solvecomplex math problems, but these experiences are infrequent and unevenly distributed.

Efforts to improve education in Ecuador

Beginning in the early 1990’s Ecuador borrowed approximately $160 million from the WorldBank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to improve the quality of basiceducation in the country. The funds were used to support three separate projects(EB/PRODEC-1992-99, PROMECEB-1992-98 and REDES AMIGAS-1998-2004) thatfocused on the poorest children in the education system, those in rural and so-calledmarginal urban neighborhoods. The primary strategy of all three projects was to reorganizeschools into semi-autonomous school networks and to then invest money in improving physical infrastructure of schools, providing didactic material and training teachers. Fundsfrom the international loans were also used to develop a (now defunct) national testing system, improve teacher training and develop a new curriculum.

The focus on improving quality followed two decades in which literacy rates and theproportion of children attending basic education increased dramatically in Ecuador, drivenby public investment flowing from the discovery of large oil resources. By the late 1980’s,however, oil revenues and government spending had declined and the World Bank, andIDB, as well as local officials, identified the quality and efficiency of social systems in thecountry as the primary priority for public policy (World Bank 1990, Klees, 2002, 16).Decentralization of the education system through the creation of school networks was seenas a way to turn attention from coverage to quality. The development of these schoolnetworks represented the largest effort to improve public education in the country during the past fifteen years (Paladines, 2002).

Nearly fifteen years later it is possible to point to a list of changes that flowed from the $160million in loan funds (new schools, new classrooms, books and materials provided toschools, training sessions, a new basic education curriculum, etc…) but there is littleevidence that student learning has increased significantly as a result. Each of the threeprojects began without collecting baseline data on student achievement at targeted schoolsor at control schools. Thus even though the central goal of the projects was to improveeducation quality, by design or poor planning it is virtually impossible to determine whether




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students in the targeted schools learned more than that peers in other schools. Nonetheless,national level data evidenced a significant deterioration in student skills between 1996 and2000, exactly the time when one would have expected that investments in quality improvement during the 1990s would have begun to bear fruit.

Nor does it appear that the World Bank and IDB financed projects produced significantinstitutional change within the education sector. Although the projects were explicitly framed as investments in building the capacity of the Ministry of Education there is a widespread perception in Ecuador that they have left light footprints on the educationsystem. All three projects were managed by separate entities outside the existing Ministry of Education, experienced high levels of management instability and were then passed over tothe Ministry when project funding ended. This has resulted in a common belief within theeducation system that these type of initiatives (school networks, national testing system,etc…) end when the external loan funds run out. Rather than being a model applieduniversally to all schools, which was the original goal in 1990, school networks remain one of

the most controversial education issues in Ecuador and serve a fraction of students in basiceducation.

Research Question

This study investigates how these three internationally-financed education reform projectsinfluenced (a) teaching and learning in classrooms, (b) teacher professional development and(c) dynamics within the Ministry of Education. It seeks to identify potential lessons formore comprehensive education reform in Ecuador, at a time when the national Congress isdebating a new education law, and for World Bank and IDB lending strategy, at a time whenboth banks are planning a third phase of education reform loan projects for Ecuador.

Research Method

The research for this study was based in part on schools visits and classroom observations intwenty-five schools that were part of school networks established by the three projects, andon interviews with school directors, teachers and parents in those schools. Interviews werealso conducted with bank staff and officials involved in the design and implementation of the programs, administrators in the Ministry of Education, union leaders, local electedofficials and educators involved in basic education reform in Ecuador (see appendix for listof these interviews). This ethnographic data was combined with an analysis of the initialloan documents and project proposals for each project as well as interim and finalevaluations. The Ministry of Education generously provided data on student enrollment,desertion and repetition as well as results from a national test of student skills (APRENDO)administered in a sample of schools in 1996, 1997, 1998 and 2000.

The research design compared three distinct projects that shared common goals andstrategies but operated at different points in time, in different areas, under differentmanagement. The fact that two projects (EB/PRODEC and PROMECEB) ended fiveyears ago provided the opportunity to investigate their longer term impact, an explicitobjective of all three project. Because Redes Amigas was ending during the year that the




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study was conducted, the timing of the research made it possible to compare similar projectsat different points in their life cycle.

I conducted the research for this study from January through June 2004 while in Ecuador ona Fulbright Scholarship. In addition to financial support from the Fulbright Commission, I was an associated professor at FLACSO-Ecuador, where I taught classes on organizationalchange and education reform. Temple University provided me with a leave of absence topursue this research. My own expertise is in urban school reform in the United States andpart of the underlying structure of the investigation is a comparative analysis of reformefforts in Ecuador in light of an important body of recent research on efforts to improvepublic schools serving low-income children in the United States. The research also drawsupon education research literature from Ecuador and other parts of Latin America.

What we know about reforming education systems

The starting point for this research is that quality in education is solely a question of studentlearning. While this may seem obvious, education quality if often either conflated with a setof factors (especially physical school conditions) that are important but not directly related tolearning or confused with economics-inspired measurements of efficiency (i.e. años requerido por alumno para culminar la primaria ) that cannot account for changes in student knowledge orskill. The only way to assess whether projects such as EB/PRODEC, PROMEB or Redes Amigas improved education quality is to see if there has been an improvement in whatstudents know or can do as a result. While it is difficult, but not impossible, to designinstruments to measure student learning across large numbers of schools, it is not hard to walk into a classroom and assess the quality of intellectual work taking place among students. Improving this work is the beginning and end of any quality improvement effort

(Núñez Prieto, 1998; Newmann, Lopez, and Bryk, 1998).

What students learn in school is a function of many factors inside and outside of school, butthe condition over which education policy has the greatest influence is the interactionbetween teachers and students in classrooms, and more specifically the skills and knowledgethat teachers bring to this interaction. Students exposed to highly effective teachers overlong periods of time learn far more than those exposed to mediocre teaching. Improving education quality necessarily means improving the quality of teaching that studentsexperience in their classrooms (Elmore & Burney, 1997; Ferguson, R. 1991).

Research suggests that to improve teaching and learning, those designing and leading reformefforts need to begin with a very clear vision of what they want to see occur withinclassrooms. They then need to create opportunities for teachers to continuously improvetheir teaching practice and substantive knowledge. Schools and perhaps also networks of schools need to be learning organizations in which teachers regularly analyze data abouttheir students and get support and instruction to teach more effectively in their classrooms.Investment in teacher professionally development can have a determinative influence onstudent learning, but only if the teacher learning is directly tied to what they do insideclassrooms. The most effective professional development takes place inside classrooms, notin isolated workshops held away from schools (Campos, 1998; Núñez Prieto, 1998).




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We also know that the idea of a learning organization needs to apply not just to schools ornetworks of schools, but also to school systems as a whole. The primary function of aschool system is to improve the effectiveness of teachers. While systems may need toengage in other activities to keep schools going, there is growing appreciation that the singleactivity that has the most direct impact on improving student learning is their investment indeveloping the knowledge and skills of teachers. Like students, teachers, schools and schoolnetworks, education systems need to develop the capacity to analyze data on student andteacher learning and continually learn to be more effective in developing teacher skills.

How this study is organized

The structure of this study is organized around the three necessary tasks of any schoolreform effort: improving (a) student learning; (b) teacher learning; and (c) system learning. The first part analyzes classroom practice in schools that were targeted for quality

improvement in relation to the instructional goals of the three reform projects. The secondpart focuses on efforts to improve teacher professional development. The third part deals with the complex organizational and political dynamics that characterized the relationshipbetween the reform projects and the Ministry of Education. The conclusion summarizes themain findings of the research in a series of recommendations.




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▪ STUDENT LEARNING

Successful efforts to improve education begin with a good diagnosis of what is happening inside classrooms and a clear vision of how teaching practice needs to change. Research andexperience suggest that there are many factors within school systems that can be altered without necessarily having an impact on student learning. Improving the physical conditionof classrooms, providing teachers with training opportunities, increasing funding for booksand materials, creating opportunities for local decision-making and a host of other strategiescan each play an important role in improving schooling, but in and of them selves have nodirect connection to what a young person learns in school. These secondary strategies needto be anchored in a primary plan that revolves around improving the pedagogical interaction

between students and teachers (Samaniego, 2002; Elmore, 2002; Machala, 2000).

This section assesses the impact that school network projects in Ecuador have had onteaching and learning in classrooms. The section reviews some of the patterns that are visible in classrooms in schools that participated in the projects, as well as the available dataon student skills. It looks at how the three projects each sought to influence what they conceived of as education quality and the results they produced, based on their ownevaluations and interviews with teachers and school directors. Finally the section looks atsources of pedagogical innovation outside the externally financed reform projects.

Classroom visits

The twenty-five schools and approximately 75 classrooms I visited from March to May 2004provided a very small window into teaching and learning in Ecuador. These were visits tourban and rural schools that were participating or had participated at some point in one of the three school network projects. They included what are known as Hispanic schools (themain type of school in the country) as well as bilingual Spanish-Quechua schools, andschools in several different parts of the country (see appendix for list). The schools werechosen to obtain some level of diversity of experience, but they were not necessarily representative of school networks or schools across the country. Nonetheless, they provided an opportunity to see some of the dynamics taking place within classrooms and tounderstand some of the ways in which school directors, teachers, parents, and in some cases,students talk about what happens within classrooms.

I typically visited the “plantel central” the main administrative school within the network andthen three to five other schools. In visiting a school I would first interview the schooldirector (principal) about their experience directing the school, how they saw their role andspent their time, what efforts were taking place to improve instruction, what their experiencehad been with the school network project and their ideas for improving instruction. I wouldthen interview teachers, either individually or in groups, focusing on how their teaching practice had changed, what was being done in the school to improve education and what




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their view of the reform project had been. Some times I was able to interview parentsduring a school visit. I asked almost everyone I interviewed what they would do to improveeducation if they were Minister of Education.Most of the time during school visits was spent inside classrooms. In visiting a classroommy primary goal was to see authentic student work. While it can be instructive to observehow a teacher is interacting with students, the work product that students produce (essays,projects, drawings, posters, solutions to math problems, etc.) is by far the best evidence of what is happening within a classroom. So typically I would observe the whole class for sometime and then sit with students to watch what they were doing and how they were interacting with one another (Gilmore, 1983). Some times my presence in a classroom would stop theactivity taking place, but often it was possible to be in the classroom, observing and talking to students, without disrupting the flow of interaction. During the classroom visits I wasable to look at hundreds of student notebooks and this was one of the most instructivesources of information about teaching practice (Newmann, Lopez, and Bryk, 1998).

Student work

With some important exceptions, in the classrooms I visited it was often difficult to findstudent work. Only two or three classrooms had any student work on the walls. When Iasked teachers why, they generally said because it would be distracting, or that thereclassroom was used by another teacher in the afternoon (it was common for one schoolbuilding to be used by a morning and an afternoon school). Students almost always had aset of notebooks on their desks and these were primarily filled with material dictated by theteacher or copied from some other source. While I often saw drawings by students, it wasrare to find text written by students in their language and communication notebooks oranything but pages of equations they had solved in mathematic notebooks.

While I saw a range of instructional strategies taking place in classrooms, by far the mostcommon was students copying information provided by a teacher. Copying had severaldifferent variations. Often in social studies or science classes the teacher would be at a greenchalk board or a newer white board writing sentences that students were copying into theirnotebooks. While the teacher might have one color marker or chalk students generally seemed to know to put headings in red and supporting material in blue. Other times theteacher would be dictating orally.




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.Red and blue pens appear ubiquitous (see boy in right hand corner), along with lined notebooks into which students copied questions and answers. Here, students in Guayaquil are listening to a story and then answering questions found in their text books.

It was also common to see students copying written text from a text book, a newspaper or ascrap of paper, into their notebooks. What was most surprising was how old students were who were engaged in this activity. One example was an eighth grade classroom I visited in aschool in Quito. I had been talking to a computer teacher about the school when anotherteacher came up to us and began to complain about the physical infrastructure; she explainedthat the point of the CEMs (the initials for school networks under EB/PRODEC) was togive students practical skills that they could use the labor market. That is why they added 8,9 and 10th grade to the school. “But they never completed the promises, never provided workshops ( talleres ) for the students.” She also explained that the students who stay at theschool are the ones with the most problems; “they have trouble getting into high school( colegios) so they stay at the school.”

She then asked me if I wanted to see her classroom. I followed her up the stairs. Sheexplained that she taught 8th grade and on the way showed me the walls that had not beenpainted since EB/PRODEC, but that the parents just helped paint in a “minga ”. We enteredher classroom and there were about 15 students sitting at different tables, with two studentsper table. About four or five had metal plates with rice and lentils. I saw only one student with an open notebook doing work. She was at a table with another girl. I went over to thetable, knelt down, and asked what she was doing. She showed me a small square (about two




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inches by three inches) with text. The text was about bank accounts, but it was hard tounderstand it because it had been cut in a way that it began and ended in the middle of sentences. The student said she was copying what was on the square into her notebook. Iasked if I could look at other pages and she showed me page after page (perhaps 20) thathad a small square of text taped to the top right hand corner and in blue pen, the text copiedinto the notebook. In red were corrections made by the teacher, for example a missing quotation mark or comma. One of the pieces of text was about Alan Greenspan.

I asked the student why she was doing this. She said so that it could be corrected. I askedagain, thinking that she did not understand me, and she said again so that the teacher couldcorrect my work. At that point the teacher came over to the desk. I asked the teacher why the student was copying the text into her notebook. The teacher answered that she wasdoing this to improve her hand writing ( ortografia ) and to learn vocabulary. “This activity helps the students learn to begin writing.” I asked if they did any writing of their own essaysor stories ( ensayos o cuentos ). She said not yet, but then said yes, because they read things in

their work book and then have to respond to questions. Then the teacher asked me, is thatOK? I responded that I was surprised that students in 8th grade were not writing their ownessays at this age instead of copying from texts. The teacher said, remember what I told youbefore, with these students I need to start from square one. They are not ready and theseexercises prepare them, with this many are learning how to write their letters correctly, whichmany do not know how to do. They are also learning vocabulary that they can use.

Then she moved toward the door and made a motion to me that I thought at first meantthat someone was at the door and I should wait and she would be back. But then Iunderstood that she wanted me to come to the door. There, away from the student, sheexplained to me that “these children come from families that do not support the school

( familias que no dan respaldo a la escuela ), parents who do not correct homework ( deberes ) ormake sure that they get done, so we have to do homework at the school. Also the Ministry of Education does not give us the resources we need, the financial support.”

The work that the student was engaged in and the ways in which she and her teacherexplained its purpose illustrated a lack of connection between classroom work and thenational curriculum. The basic education curriculum, developed in 1996 in part by theEB/PRODEC project, was designed to shift the focus of teaching in each grade fromcontent knowledge and memorization to intellectual skills. It defines the skills that students were expected to acquire in each grade level. Yet the teacher who had assigned the copying activity (many times apparently) was not able to align the activity with these externally agreedupon expectations of what skills a student at this grade level should be learning. Nor wasthe student able to explain why she was doing the activity, other than having it corrected by the teacher. Students come to school with very different skill and knowledge levels, but if teachers and students do not have clarity about where they are going, it is highly unlikely thatthey will be able to move through a rigorous curriculum.

The teacher’s explanation of why this was the best that could be accomplished under thecircumstances, also highlighted the ways in which external factors serve as rationalizationsfor ineffective teaching. While it may have been that some or most of the parents of the




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young people in this class did not help them with their homework, this did explain why theteacher had chosen to teach in the way she did.

When I later shared this story with the teacher who was acting as my guide, he said that it was not correct to have students copying at that age and not writing their own text. He saidthat they start writing their own texts at 5 th and 6th grade. He searched for some student work, but then said that students had taken it home. They write and then I correct it andgive it back. He also showed me a work book that had questions following stories thatrequired students to write responses. He said that in the next trimester he was going to havestudents start their own notebooks with their own writing.

The strongest teaching I observed tended to involve teachers who able to place the particularactivity that students were working on into a sequence of lessons that led to studentslearning a new of skills. For example I visited a fifth grade classroom in a rural schoolparticipating in Redes Amigas. The students were organized with their desks formed into a

big table. They were working in pairs of three. Each pair was given a text book and theteacher had different students read through a story. The teacher then asked the students (asa group) questions about the characters. She had them list out the characters on pieces of paper and then call them out. She showed them how while many people were mentioned inthe story, only three spoke. She was dynamic and as the students shouted out answers shechallenged them. She then had them pick which of the three speaking characters they weregoing to be and said that they would be acting the story out and that later in the week ornext week they would also have costumes. Each child had to stand up when the character was called. The classroom dynamic was notable because not only were the students and theteacher engaged in an animated dialogue, but they were learning a set of skills forinterpreting a text.

The teacher later explained that she has always been trying to improve her teaching, that theteacher training ( capacitación ) from Redes Amigas has been somewhat helpful, but that they withdrew from the network because of the teacher salaries ( partidas ) being transferred to thenetwork and the resulting difficulty they faced in transferring to other schools. She said thatonly recently have then begun to come back to the network. Her teaching was different than what I saw in the rest of the school. The other three classrooms I visited had studentscutting out pictures of computers, students watching the video A Bugs Life on AV equipmentpurchased with IDB funds and a teacher dictating a lesson on farming.

Even in instructional practice not based strictly on dictation, I often saw a lot of copying anda clear disjuncture between the activities students were engaged in and the skills andknowledge they were expected to acquire as a result. I saw this dynamic in a lesson that ateacher delivered to his fourth grade students in a school in Quito which had participatedyears earlier in EB/PRODEC. The teacher had asked if I would come to his classroom.Before he called his students back from physical education to deliver the lesson we spentsome time talking together and with a small group of students who had stayed in theclassroom.




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When I first came into the classroom I noticed a stack of papers spread out on a studentdesk. They were essays about personal hygiene, which I learned on my last visit, was atheme of a special program being implemented at this school by an outside agency. I tried toengage the teacher in these essays, asking him what they were, what will happen to them, buthe wanted to show me the text book he was using. He said he tries to use a different textbook each year to see which is better. These are soft covered books that have all four majorsubjects in them (math, language, science and social students) in separate sections. To my question again of what will happen to the essays, he said that he will grade ( calificar ) them andthen put them in the students’ files. More students began to come back into the classroom;I asked one of them which was her essay and she picked up one and read it. Another boy picked out his essay and slowly, with some mistakes, read it. Afterwards another boy says“Eduardo knows how to think” ( Eduardo sabe pensar ). Eduardo said that his essay had badhandwriting. Some essays filled 2/3rds of the page, others are two lines. Teacher says thatstudents have different skills. I am not sure how typical these essays are, but this interactionreinforced for me the sense that creative student work, such as writing essays, is something

that lies outside the general practice in this classroom.

The teacher then told the students “come back, we’re going to have a lesson.” Although it isnot entirely clear, I believed he was bringing them back for a lesson for my benefit. Theteacher stood over his desk and went through the text book; he found a language lesson andbegan to read it to himself. At one point he asked me how many children are in classroomsin the US. I told him that is varies, but that in Philadelphia in a classroom like his, 4th grade,the number would be capped at 33 by the contract with the union. He said he has 42students, which is too many.

Once the children are back in the room, sitting at double desks that face each other along

both sides of a classroom shaped like a rectangle, the teacher said we have a visitor who ishere to see how we learn so make sure you behave. He asks the students to open theirbooks. Not all the children had books and he did some rearranging asking some students toshare their books. In one case a student kept the book in front of him (it seems to be his)and another student looked on. The teacher began reading a short story from the book. Ilooked at the work book of one of the students and it said that the purpose of the exercise isto learn the que and gui sounds (but the teacher does not explain this). He asked: how is thisstory? lindo isn’t it.? Let’s read it again. The teacher read with a few students reading along out loud in very soft voices. “Now continue Jose” and he asks different students to read. What is the title the teacher calls out? Where did he live? What did he dream of? Theteacher seemed relatively engaged and energetic at this point and the students were more orless following, although the same students were calling out answers. The teacher repeatedcorrect answers. Once he asked a specific person by name, who is the principal character?He told students that they are reading about gui and gue sounds and then handed out blank pieces of paper and told them to put their name of the paper.

The teacher then went to the whiteboard (next to the chalk green board) and wrote fivequestions: 1. What is the title of the lectura ; 2. What personajes participate in the story; [at thispoint he went back to his desk to look at the text book-which was identical to what thestudents had]; 3. What is the name of the frog; [again back to look at the book] 4. Como lo




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dio(?) [at this point a student raised his hand and asked, what is that word, the teacherresponded cual] and then continued to write the rest of the question Guillermo labienvenido [I noticed that this is the same question from the book]; 5. Write the words inthe story that have the gui and gue sounds. [This question is also from the book]. At thatpoint a student went up to the teacher and said that he has a red pen and not a blue one; theteacher asked who can lend him one. The teacher admonished him and then went over to astudent who he says is on the wrong page and with his hand that has a marker in it, hit theboy on the head, the hit did not seem very hard and the boy did not react, except to turn thepage of the book. Later the teacher said to the class, when a student gets up to go to thebathroom and takes a bar of soup with him, we’re learning about hygiene but all of you arebeing dirty.

At this point I had joined a table of four children as they began to write down the questionsand put answers in. One student at my table wrote all the questions in red with spaces inbetween before writing the answers. The teacher was in the back of the room in the center

with his arms crossed, not saying anything. There is a lot of student interaction at my tableand at other tables. Much of the interaction at my table is about pens, with students passing different colors between them. Also sometimes students from other tables would come overlooking for a particular color pen. Some interaction was also about the questionsthemselves, with students asking each other the answers. There was a boy to my left whoasked me if I know who the main characters are; I said no (honestly). He then asked me touse my pen. I give him my black pen and ask him for his blue pen. At this point my notesgo back and forth in blue and black every couple of lines. More conversation about how the writing is. One student at my table, a boy, showed another girl and me how he has left spacefor the answers as he has written the questions. To me the students seem to be spending a lot of time writing the questions correctly on their

papers. If the lesson started about 9:00 and ended about 9:45, I would estimate that a good10-15 minutes was spent at my table writing out the questions correctly. I look at one child’scompleted questions, which total 15 words for the five questions. The sixth question theteacher announces is for homework [not sure how this works, since in the end the studentshand their papers into me]. Later I ask the teacher, don’t you need to correct these, he saysno, they will have more work later. One student comes up to the teacher with a paper, theteacher points out some mistakes, such as the need to put the first letter of the name of acharacter in capitals, which he reminds the whole class. Then another student asks aquestion of the teacher (not clear what) but the teacher ignores the student and walks to theback of the room.

At my table a student explained to me that you can write the question with either red orblue. You could also write both the question and the answer in the same color, but later you would get confused. The teacher opened a dictionary and started to call out words thatbegin with gue. Most of the students at my table were still working on answering the fivequestions. The teacher asked who will finish first and the students began to hand in theirpapers to him. I ask a student at my table what she learned, she says nothing. I ask anotherstudent, who had explained the color pens to me, and he says to put answers in blue andquestions in red, so as not to confuse them, but I already knew that. Another student says




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gue and gui words and another points to the page and says everything there. A student saysthat he is going to go wash the plates for lunch.

The papers themselves show a mix of creativity and challenge. Many students were able toanswer all the questions correctly (top left) or at least several of the questions (top right),others only succeeded in writing down the questions (bottom left); and one paper has theanswers written in multiple colors with gue and gui in yellow (bottom right).

While reading a story and answering questions about it is a typical fourth grade activity, whatinterested me was the nature of the interaction between the students and particularly theamount of time and energy focused on the mechanics of copying the questions and finding the answers in the text. As with the student who was copying the small piece of text into hernotebook, the purpose of the activity and its place within the curriculum seemed to beunclear to both the teacher and the students. Nor was the sequence of learning evident asidefrom following different activities in the work book.

Later a parent came in to the classroom and copied his son’s homework assignment into a

notebook before taking him home. I asked the parent what he thought should be improvedat the school. He said more time spent on activities, studying, and less time in recess; morepuzzles and games ( rompe cabezas ) and more didactic materials.




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Many classrooms I observed had no books or educational materials. Here the teacher has a small white board on towhich he has written a math problem. The students are preparing to go home for the day.

One of the (few) virtues of dictation is that it provides students with information that they might not know. Yet as teachers dictated, I often saw them miss opportunities to engagestudents in critical thinking about the subjects being taught. For example, I observed a

teacher deliver a science lesson about microscopes to a crowded classroom in a rural schoolnorth of Quito. The students were in rows facing the teacher. The teacher had hung aposter of a microscope in the front of the class and was having the students copy the namesof the parts of the microscope into their notebooks. As he told them what to write in theirnotebooks he also made comments and asked them questions.

At one point the teacher told the students that a type of microscope was not even inEcuador and was probably only in developed countries. A student asked if that meantChina. He said no, the United States or Germany. Another student then asked, “why don’t we invent anything?” The teacher replied, “You have to be better observers, for example, we step on ants all the time, but don’t observe them. I asked the older children whether

there were more vertebrates or invertebrates in the world?” At that point a student calledout more invertebrates. The teacher went on “well the older students say vertebratesbecause they are only thinking of cows and sheep, and not observing their world.” Theteacher then returned to describing microscope parts. This was a dynamic teacher withengaged students, but the real learning seemed to be an aside, an interruption to the lessonbeing delivered.




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Quantitative assessments of education quality

The nature of classroom interaction between teachers and students that I observed may helpto explain why students in Ecuador have shown weak problem solving and conceptual skillsin national tests. One of the initiatives financed by the World Bank as part of theEB/PRODEC project was a national system for measuring education quality, called APRENDO. The APRENDO system was designed not as a way to measure the impact of the EB/PRODEC project, but to evaluate quality in schools across the country. The APRENDO examinations were given to students in a national sample of schools in 1996,1997 and 2000 (and then abandoned).

In addition in 1998 an examination was applied to a sample of students in urban schoolnetworks financed by the World Bank (but not those in the parallel rural networks projectfinanced by IDB). Because no baseline data was collected for the EB/PRODEC schools,there is no way to know what progress was made within these schools from 1992 to 1998.

Nor is it possible to compare students in school network schools with similar students inschools that were not part of the project, since no control data was collected. Nonetheless,the results provide a snap shot of student skills as the project was coming to an end.

Table 1: PORCENTAJE DE ALUMNOS QUE DOMINAN LAS DESTREZAS DE7° LENGUAJE Y COMUNICACION

Redes CEM del EB/PRODEC - APRENDO 1998

DESTREZAS Inicio Advance Dominio

1.1 Identificar elementos explícitos del texto: personajes,objetos, características, tiempo, escenarios y datos.

28,93 14,82 56,25

1.2 Distinguir las principales acciones y acontecimientos que

arman el texto y el orden en que suceden.

28,62 15,78 55,59

2.1 Comparar dos elementos del texto para encontrarsemejanzas y diferencias.

61,56 21,42 17,02

2.2 Clasificar elementos mediante un criterio dado en el texto opropuesto por el evaluador.

49,89 31,04 19,07

2.3 Distinguir causa-efecto. 30,24 27,88 41,88

2.4 Diferenciar los hechos y las opiniones que contiene el texto. 52,22 26,14 21,64

2.5 Establecer las relaciones pronominales que contiene el texto. 31,48 30,72 37,79

3.1 Inferir el tema o la idea principal que plantea el texto. 44,10 28,71 27,19

3.2 Inferir el significado de palabras y oraciones a partir del

contexto.

41,40 28,08 30,52

3.3 Derivar conclusiones a partir del texto. 37,22 30,39 32,39




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Table 2PORCENTAJE DE ALUMNOS QUE DOMINAN LAS DESTREZAS DE7° MATEMATICA

Redes CEM del EB/PRODEC - APRENDO 1998

DESTREZAS Ini cio Advance Dominio

1.1 Establecer la relación de igualdad y de orden en parejas oconjuntos de números.

76,55 18,13 5,33

1.2 Establecer relaciones de divisibilidad entre enterospositivos.

60,55 24,73 14,71

1.3 Completar una sucesión. 50,45 23,06 26,49

2.1 Resolver ejercicios sobre proporcionalidad. 62,25 21,08 16,67

2.2 Resolver problemas sobre proporcionalidad. 63,51 24,69 11,80

2.3 Resolver ejercicios y problemas sobre porcentajes. 72,53 20,73 6,74

3.1 Resolver adiciones, sustracciones, multiplicaciones odivisiones.

78,90 15,76 5,35

3.2 Resolver problemas que requieren las operacionesfundamentales o su combinación.

74,44 19,80 5,76

3.3 Estimar el resultado de ejercicios y problemas con lasoperaciones fundamentales.

76,20 18,41 5,39

4.1 Resolver problemas sobre el perímetro o el área deparalelogramos.

80,20 15,65 4,15

4.2 Resolver problemas sobre área o volumen deparalelepípedos.

79,68 15,87 4,46

Source: Ministerio de Educación y Cultura, Resultados Nacionales de la Aplicación de las Pruebas

APENDO 1998, Redes CEM del EB/PRODEC, 1999.

The interpretation offered of these results was that:

Que el alumnado de los CEM se concentra mayoritariamente en el nivel inicialde aprendizaje de las destrezas… [y] que las destrezas más alcanzadas revelanque el aprendizaje estudiantil se concentra en el nivel básicamente operatorio,mientras que el aprendizaje menos consolidado y extendido es el relacionadocon la resolución de problemas. (APRENDO 1998, 63)

At a national level it is possible to compare student learning between 1996 and 2000. These

results suggest that if anything the quality of education in Ecuador deteriorated during thistime period. As the chart 1 and 2 below show, the percent of seventh grade studentsproficient in key language and communications and mathematical skills declined in almostevery area between 1996 and 2000.




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Table 3: PORCENTAJE DE ALUMNOS QUE DOMINAN LAS DESTREZAS DE7° LENGUAJE Y COMUNICACION - NIVEL NACIONAL - APRENDO 1996 Y 2000

DESTREZAS 1996 2000 Cambio

1.1 Identificar elementos explícitos del texto: personajes,objetos, características, tiempo, escenarios y datos.

54,83 43,09 -11,74

1.2 Distinguir las principales acciones y acontecimientos quearman el texto y el orden en que suceden.

42,64 34,73 -7,91

2.1 Comparar dos elementos del texto para encontrarsemejanzas y diferencias.

46,62 36,86 -9,76

2.2 Clasificar elementos mediante un criterio dado en el texto opropuesto por el evaluador.

38,16 28,99 -9,17

2.3 Distinguir causa-efecto. 50,25 40,45 -9,8

2.4 Diferenciar los hechos y las opiniones que contiene el texto. 18,75 14,15 -4,6

2.5 Establecer las relaciones pronominales que contiene el texto. 66,08 54,96 -11,12

3.1 Inferir el tema o la idea principal que plantea el texto. 32,98 25,46 -7,52

3.2 Inferir el significado de palabras y oraciones a partir delcontexto.

50,97 41,03 -9,94

3.3 Derivar conclusiones a partir del texto. 44,74 32,87 -11,87

Total de alumnos 13,937 17,799

Table 4: PORCENTAJE DE ALUMNOS QUE DOMINAN LAS DESTREZAS DE7° MATEMATICA - NIVEL NACIONAL - APRENDO 1996 Y 2000

DESTREZAS 1996 2000 Cambio

1.1 Establecer la relación de igualdad y de orden en parejas o

conjuntos de números.

9,81 7,86 -1,95

1.2 Establecer relaciones de divisibilidad entre enteros positivos. 49,66 40,65 -9,01

1.3 Completar una sucesión. 46,55 42,33 -4,22

2.1 Resolver ejercicios sobre proporcionalidad. 25,08 24,89 -0,19

2.2 Resolver problemas sobre proporcionalidad. 18,92 13,15 -5,77

2.3 Resolver ejercicios y problemas sobre porcentajes. 9,25 7,69 -1,56

3.1 Resolver adiciones, sustracciones, multiplicaciones odivisiones.

24,73 14,52 -10,21

3.2 Resolver problemas que requieren las operaciones

fundamentales o su combinación. 10,27 6,54 -3,73

3.3 Estimar el resultado de ejercicios y problemas con lasoperaciones fundamentales.

8,08 4,56 -3,52

4.1 Resolver problemas sobre el perímetro o el área deparalelogramos.

3,59 2,18 -1,41

4.2 Resolver problemas sobre área o volumen deparalelepípedos.

4,67 3,64 -1,03

Total de alumnos 14,104 17,811




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The results of the 2000 examinations are particularly disheartening because they come at endof a decade in which more than $100 million was invested to improve basic education in thecountry. They raise the question of why resources and apparently good ideas did not seemto translate into improvements in student learning.

Relationship between curricular reform and classroom practice

Interviews with teachers about what they do in there classrooms suggest that the obstacle toimproving education may not be the unwillingness of teachers to consider changing how they teach, but the difficulty in translating good ideas about pedagogy into practice (Campos1998). Despite the amount of dictation taking place in schools, with few exceptions teachersI interviewed expressed overwhelming support and admiration for the 1996 curricularreform, sometimes referring to it as the consensus curricular reform, and for the changes itcalled for in teaching practice. One group of teachers did complain that high schools ( colegios )continued to evaluate students for admission based on knowledge rather than skills, which

made it difficult for students in schools which had adopted the curriculum reform. But eventhese teachers were not questioning the virtue of the shift to skills.1

Teachers also described their teaching as having changed over the last decade as a result of curricular reform. “Before the teacher was the last word, now we are guides for students,” was a common sentiment expressed by teachers when asked how their practice had changed.“There is more of a horizontal relationship with students, and this is a cultural changedealing with technology and other things,” said a teacher in a school in Quito. I asked, “How has teaching changed?” She replied, “We teach a more limited subject matter, more focus onskills ( distrezas ) which are valued more.” “What type of skills?” “Knowing, thinking, writing,and critical thinking; whereas before the focus was on memorization.”

These comments by teachers suggest that the challenge of shifting to instructional practicethat engages students as active learners is less a question of will than capacity. I tried to visitclassrooms of teachers who I had interviewed and was often struck by the contradictionbetween their discourse and their practice. Desks may have been organized into groups butstudents continued to engage in activities that left them as passive learners, consuming material provided by the teacher. The 1996 curricular reform provides a valuable new modelfor classroom practice. Interviews with teachers and classroom observation suggest that thecritical challenge is to help teachers translate new concepts of teaching into their everyday classroom practice.

Susana Araujo, who led the design of the original school network projects and managedEB/PRODEC from 1992 to 1996 agreed that the curricular reform was one of the majoraccomplishments of the project, but that it was not applied sufficiently and that there waslittle follow through to help teachers apply it in their classroom. Nonetheless she believedthat one of the important contributions of the curricular reform was that it led teachers torealize that they were not equipped to teach in new ways. Since teachers also understood

1 Eight years after the Basic Education Curricular Reform no corresponding curriculum developed forsecondary education in Ecuador.




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that the Ministry of Education was not preparing them, many have sought higher education,and this, she said,explains the increase in the number of teachers with university degrees.

Table 4: Porcentaje de Profesores con el Mínimo Título Exigido

Tipoe de Red 1993-94 2001-02 Cambio

PROMOCEB 61,88 82,34 20,46

PROMOCEB/Redes Amiga 58,56 76,08 17,53

EB/PRODEC 58,99 71,00 12,01

Redes Amigas 58,59 68,48 9,89

TODOS LOS REDES 59,85 74,31 14,45

NIVEL DE PAIS n/a n/a n/a

Fuente: Ministerio de Educación y Cultura.

The potential of the 1996 curricular reform was also evident in an interview with ErnestoCastillo, President of the Union Nacional de Educadores (U.N.E.). As with the teachers Iinterviewed, he expressed unequivocal support for the importance of the 1996 reform. Theproblem was that it was left “truncada” with large numbers of schools not providing primeraño basica and language not be taught in early grades. He also agreed that “la instrucción esmuy repetitivo, muy memorista…nos consideramos alejado de la realidad de los estudiantes;dicta a los niños y los niños no se investiga; no hay pensamientos críticos.” Given theamount of conflict that has characterized the education system in recent years, the degree of consensus around what is arguably the most important question – what young people shouldlearn in school – would seem to represent an valuable piece of common ground for futurereform efforts.

Instructional vision in school network projects

Teachers and school directors expressed a variety of opinions about the influence of thethree school network projects on teaching and learning. The most common patterndescribed high expectations at the beginning of the project, especially when there wasmoney, then a lack of follow through which resulted in people being more disillusioned inthe end. Comments by teachers and school directors as well as the official evaluations of thethree projects suggest that pedagogical change was one of a number of priorities and inpractice not always the central focus of these initiatives.

The most positive comments referred to the curricular reform and teacher circles associated

with EB/PRODEC in urban schools. The teacher quoted earlier saying that her teaching practice became more horizontal looked back positively on her initial involvement in theschool network. She said that the focus of the CEM project was positive in the beginning,that it helped develop a good infrastructure, that the physical space improved, although noequipment was provided, and that “it involved a new form education ( didactica y pedagogía ).”She pointed to teacher professional development ( capacitación ), teacher study circles ( círculos de estudios ) and the new curricular reform as valuable. According to her:




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At the beginning it was more or less good, but they started it and then neverevaluated the program; they never looked at whether the impact was positive. There was energy at the beginning but it died out, trailed off.

This school was the Centro Matrice , the central school that generally received the lion’s shareof attention and resources under EB/PRODEC. A second teacher added:

Some people did not want to support the network because it involved more work, without any more pay. Not just more work, but also more pressure onteachers. We were subjected to a new model, experimented on and this wasimposed on us. They filled us with new work.

She said that being a Centro Matrice meant that teachers had much more work, since they were a pilot school. She was not sure if the other schools had as much pressure, because themain school had all of the authorities, which resulted in more pressure. “But,” she said,

“when the money ran out the capacitación (and the teacher circles) really stopped.”

It was common for teachers in interviews to connect their mixed feelings about the impactof the projects on pedagogy to the fact that they were not consulted in the design in the firstplace. An interesting example came from another urban school that had participated inEB/PRODEC. A teacher who had been at the school for fifteen years said:

The aulas were not placed in the right direction, so that sun would enter. As aresult there is very little light and the rooms are cold. Should have beenoccidental/oriental. But there were no consultations with teachers. There wasno pedagogical input ( consejo pedagógica ).

He went on to say:

In terms of education there have been many irregularities in this CEM. Therehas not been a policy of reaching goals ( No habia politica de llegar a una meta ). Weare spontaneous, empirical, without planning ( Estamos espontáneos, empir, sin una planificación .) And even though there is a plan we don’t complete the plan ( Buenohay un plan pero no cumplen el plan ). In the beginning there was great optimism. We formed groups of teachers to work together. But then there was a time of chaos. The prior director is currently in an administrative process (proceso dejucio). The director [of the school and the network] is improving things now ( mejorando las ambientes ). But what we are doing has nothing to do with theschool network.

Teachers in schools that were part of school networks under all three projects often arguedthat those who directed the projects were much more interested in physical constructionthan “technical-pedagogical” matters. One director of a school participating in Redes Amigas said she appreciated the resources provided, but that “officials from BID and theUCP (Unidad Coordinador de Proyectos-which manages the project) only visited to seephysical construction ( obras), never to visit classrooms and that they have no interest in the




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pedagogical.” A staff person at a non-governmental organization that works with schoolsthat are part of school network projects commented that “we have taken our greatesteducators and made them builders of classrooms.”

While dynamics in each school and network vary greatly, there is clearly a common theme of teachers and pedagogy not being at the center of the projects. Improving teaching andlearning might be a goal, but in practice it was one of a number of tasks to be accomplished.Indeed, when asked about any of the three programs, most people talked first about physicalinfrastructure.

Official Project Documents

Loan Proposals

The original proposals and loan documents for each of the three projects define the primary

purpose the loan to be improving the quality of basic education. Yet none describe whatquality education is or what they want to see occur inside classrooms as a result of the loan. The documents also make no effort to analytically connect the changes they propose inadministration, training events and investments in physical infrastructure and materials toteaching and learning within classrooms.

The closest that any of the project proposals come to describing classroom practice areseveral statements in the 1991 EB/PRODEC Staff Appraisal Report (effectively a projectproposal). Under the title of Low Quality of Basic Education the report notes:

In the area of educational inputs, one of the most serious problems is acute

scarcity of textbooks in the public schools. Reflecting this, teaching followshighly inefficient patterns: teachers dictate material or copy it one theblackboard, children copy the text into notebooks and use these in place of textbooks. Teachers make very poor use of classroom time and receive no in-service training in how to use time effectively to improve learning. (World Bank,1991, 7) [emphasis added]

While these comments raise a critical pedagogical issue they represent the only analysis of what happens inside classrooms in the 42 page report. Nor does the report describe in any significant detail how the quality improvement program would influence teaching practice. The closest connection it draws between investments to instruction is the following teacherprofessional development proposal:

In-service teacher training would be provided to teachers in all schools in eachurban network, on the basis of curricula already developed under the IDBproject, emphasizing improved use of time in classrooms, better utilization of textbooks and teaching materials and other quality-enhancing methods andinformation. (World Bank, 1991, 18)




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Unfortunately the proposal for the rural PROMECEB project provides no additionalinformation about the content of the IDB-developed curriculum or what “other quality-enhancing methods and information” entail.

Nor does the original proposal for the Redes Amigas project contain a description of thekind of instructional change it seeks to accomplish in order to improve school quality. TheRedes Amigas design emphasizes the role of local communities (school directors, teachers,parents and community members) in “tanto el diagnóstico de las necesidades educativas locales como el diseño de los proyectos mismos .” (BID, 1999, 3) The project description mentions “mejoramiento pedagógico” but do not define what it means.

The lack of clear statements about pedagogy is particularly surprising given the apparentconsensus within Ecuador in the 1990’s about how teaching and learning needed to change. The 1996 curriculum reform and the content of the APRENDO exam both demonstrate aclear vision of what students should be learning in order to improve education quality. Yet

neither this perspective which focused on shifting from memorization to the acquisition of problem solving skills nor any other substantive view about pedagogy was part of the officialproposals of any of the projects. While this does not necessarily mean that those whodesigned the projects did not have a pedagogical vision or strategy, it does suggest thatparticular instructional change was not central to the loan projects agreed to by the Ministry and the banks.

The silence on pedagogy appears to be related to how the project proposals described theproblems facing the education system. The analysis of need in the loan documents speak of increases in school enrollment that are not accompanied by improvements in educationquality, of management systems that are overly bureaucratic and do not provide adequate

supervision of teachers and of teachers who are poorly trained. They also refer to quality interms of the internal efficiency of the school system, for example, the number of years onaverage a student needs to be in basic education to complete all seven grades. But no wheredo they directly address what occurs within classrooms. The failure to bring the discussionof quality into the classroom is a recurrent failure in education reform in Ecuador andelsewhere. In this case it seems to have left reform strategies at a level of abstraction thatseverely limited their ability to influence student learning.

It is not surprising then that to a greater or lesser extent the official evaluations of each of the three projects reach similar conclusions about the place of instructional change withinthe initiatives.

EB/PRODEC Implementation Completion Report

The Implementation Completion Report (ICR) evaluation of EB//PRODEC by the WorldBank rates the Bank’s own performance in designing the project and the Ministry of Education’s performance in implementing the project, both as unsatisfactory. The finalreport explains how the project, which began in 1992, was restructured in 1997 to focusmore attention on education quality improvements vs. construction. The authors of theassessment argue that the school networks ultimately resulted in important innovations such




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as teacher study circles and training for teachers in the new curriculum reform. Howeverthey conclude that the project was too complex and that its many activities were notsufficiently linked to achieving the desired result of improving education quality. They alsocriticize both the World Bank and the Ministry of Education for failing to design andimplement a system for measuring the impact of the project on student learning.

As was the case with all three projects, the evaluation report for EB/PRODEC described animbalance between physical construction and quality-improvement activities:

[R]apid disbursement under Part A of the Project led to very favorable ratings,but missions overlooked the growing disparity in the pace of implementation of infrastructure and the quality-related activities. Thus, it was not until 1996 withthe change of project management and new task management in the Bank, thatfirm action was initiated on the part of the Bank to refocus the Borrower'sattention on the ultimate objectives of the project, culminating in the Project

restructuring in 1997. (ICR, 2000, 19)

The mid-term review resulted in a “stepping up the non-infrastructure quality-improvementactivities” in 1997. (6)

The ICR evaluation concluded that while EB/PRODEC accomplished a list of importantthings and had an impact on the quality of education, it was designed with too many objectives.

First, the Project design was overly complex and ambitious for the constraintsrecognized in the country at that time. The project objectives related to areas as

diverse as special education; pre-school; primary education; adult education, vocational training and small enterprise support; teacher training; educationalassessment; didactic materials; and living standards measurement surveys…Suchcomplexity should have been avoided especially in view of the weak implementation capacity that were recognized at the time. (18)

To avoid similar problems in the future the report recommended that there be a closerconnection between the activities pursued and the ultimate purpose of the loan (improving the quality of basic education).

In addition, appropriate measurable indicators that clarify the linkages betweenthe objectives and the interventions to be undertaken between project outputs

and the achievement of desired results-are important both to implementationitself and to maintain focus on the desired results. Linked to this point is theimportance of designing and providing financing and terms of reference forperiodic monitoring of outputs and evaluation of outcomes or impacts; legalrequirements for evaluations are, by themselves, of limited usefulness withoutproviding the means and guidance to carry them out, especially in a complexproject. (21)




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Both the World Bank evaluation and the comments to it by the Ecuadorian Ministry of Education also recognize that the project was designed and implemented in a way that madeit impossible to know for certain what impact it had on the schools and students targeted forassistance.

Beginning with the Mid-Term Review, Bank supervision missions repeatedly urged that the Government undertake a full evaluation of the model, as well asof the various innovations and inputs provided under the project. Regrettably,this was not carried out. (11)

APRENDO has administered evaluation tests and questionnaires to bothproject target areas and non-project areas (i.e. those with Redes and those withconventional school structures). However, despite repeated urging by Bank supervision missions, there does not appear to be any baseline established by which to compare these groups. (13)

The comments at the end of the World Bank report by the Ecuadorian government are quitelimited. However the concur on the inability to determine the impact of the project on thequality and efficiency of basic education.

Resulta difícil determinar con exactitud cual ha sido el impacto del Proyecto encuanto a la reducción de las tasas de repitencia y deserción, que fueron losobjetivos principales en la parte "A" del Proyecto, ya que no se ha realizado unaevaluación técnica, que nos proporcione datos exactos. (24)

The question about the balance between obras and pedagogy in EB/PRODEC is a matter of

significant debate. Whereas, the World Bank evaluation argues that until 1997 constructionoutstripped teacher training and instructional improvements, Susana Araujo, the manager of the project from 1992-96 argues that the reverse was true; that, there was a great deal of training for teachers and school directors up until the time that she resigned in 1996, andthat after that the project dedicated itself to building classrooms. She blamed this in part onthe World Bank focus on spending down dollars (“a veces en estos proyectos se predominael mentalidad bancaria y no les importa la calidad”). Whichever of the two perspectives wasmore accurate, it is clear from the evaluations of all three projects that there was a built-intension between construction and instructional change.

PROMECEB Final Report

The final report on the IDB financed PROMECEB project also questions the impact thatthe project had on education quality, criticizing its orientation to physical construction andarguing that it lacked a pedagogical proposal.

El programa se ha caracterizado por su discontinuidad y cambios de rumbo, loque afecta su eficiencia y eficacia. Nace con una clara orientación educativapero rápidamente sus inversiones se concentran en infraestructura y obras civilesdescuidando los componentes de formación de profesores y distribución de




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recursos de aprendizaje y equipamiento para el mejoramiento de las prácticaspedagógicas. (PROMECEB 1998, 175)

Although the original project documents identified the need to improve curriculum, teachertraining and the efficiency of the education system, and the project was named “Programa deMejoramiento de la Calidad de la Educación del Sector Rural” the final evaluation concludedthat “el Programa anduvo sin conducción estratégica, ni propuesta pedagógica.”(PROMECEB 1998, 179). The evaluation recommended the need for an intensive focus onclassroom practice:

Se require un intensive y persistente proceso de sostenimiento del cambiopedagógico, en función de procesos y resultados que enfaticen la importancia de variables que inclinan en actividades y prácaticas de la sala de clases.(PROMECEB 1998, 180)

The report also reiterates that it is difficult to assess the impact of the project based on itsstated goal of improving education quality, and provides no direct or indirect evidence of theinfluence of the activities financed by IDB on student learning.

Redes Amigas Interim Evaluation

BID financed Redes Amigas as a follow up to PROMECEB and made a number of changesin this second phase. Perhaps the most significant modification was to deliver a significantamount of money directly to the school networks. This may explain why the issue of didactic materials is not a problem identified in the evaluation of Redes Amigas.Nonetheless, Redes Amigas appears to have had a similar failure to put its central focus on

pedagogy and student learning.

The interim evaluation of the Redes Amigas presented orally at a conference in Quito inMarch 2004 reported, based primarily on interviews with school staff, that there has been a“privileging of the acquisition of things” and “se tiende a ejecutar más rápidamente loscomponentes de dotación de infraestructura y equipamiento didáctica y mas lento lacapacitación y desarrollo comunitaria.” The report went on to recommend “la formación y ejecución de un modelo pedagógico y una institucionalización de una instrucción apropiadapara la educación rural.”2 [It should be noted that while this was officially an interim report,it came in the final year of the Project.]

2 The interim evaluation compared student performance at a sample of Redes Amigas schools with a sample of non-participating schools, but it provided no baseline data, making any firm conclusions about impact suspect. The snap-shot data, which was presented orally, suggested that students in Redes Amigas schools slightly out-performed their peers in non-participating schools in some areas, that schools that had participated in bothPROMECEB and Redes Amigas showed the best results and that the length of time that a school hadparticipated in Redes Amigas actually had a negative correlation with test results.




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Sources of Innovation

Almost all of the innovative teaching and learning I observed had roots outside the projectsby the World Bank and IDB. Indeed one of the most striking things about these schools was the creativity of teachers, parents, school directors and community leaders in seeking outsupport for improving their schools outside official channels.

One notable example of what sometimes is referred to as “auto-gestion ” was a school in ruralarea north of Quito. The school was part of a network which was originally financed by IDB as part of the PROMECEB project, but which did not continue on to participate inRedes Amigas. Although the network no longer received IDB funding it continued to bestaffed with a network director and a sub-director, paid for by the Ministry of Education. The school I visited was located right outside a small village on a wide open piece of landnext to a church, and also next to the main road that went from the Pan American highway

up into the town where the school network was based. I arrived on my own to the schooland the director of the school was away, so a parent and group of teachers greeted me andthen we all sat down to talk in one of the classrooms.

The teachers, all of whom were young, explained that on paper the school was uni-docente ,meaning it had just one teacher assigned to it and paid for by the Ministry of Education.Despite this, parents and community leaders had managed to create a complete school witheight teachers and seven classrooms. They had done this through financial contributionsfrom parents, obtaining projects through non-governmental organizations and bringing student teachers to the school. This required raising money both for teacher salaries and forthe cost of building classrooms to expand the school. The teachers said that one of the

reasons they needed to build more classrooms was that students from outside thecommunity wanted to come to the school.




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The school also had a computer room with five new computers obtained from the provincial government.Students were working in pairs of three or four at each computer on language games.

One classroom I visited was small, with a teacher and fifteen students at wooden desks.Students were working on a graphing mathematics problem that the teacher had placed onthe board. Some students worked alone and others in groups of two or three and then took

their answers to the teacher to be reviewed. The teacher moved between the studentschecking on their work. Toward the end of the lesson the teacher went to the board and walked the students through the problem and a second similar problem.

This was one of the few classrooms I visited where student work, relief maps of Ecuador, was on the wall. It was also evident from the interactions between the teacher and thestudent that both were engaged in serious intellectual work. The teacher was literally amidstthe students, working with them and had his desk in the middle of the classroom, althoughhe also went to the front of the classroom to summarize and extend the lesson.




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The teacher is having one student explain her solution to the graphing problem, as two other students look on.

The third classroom I visited had second grade students writing sentences that expressedpast, present and future. On the board were boxes for ayer , hoy and mañana next to which theteacher was putting sentences written by the students (see photo below).




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The teachers explained that what was happening at the school depended on the will of parents and teachers, that older teachers might do their own thing, but that they broughtnew perspectives to teaching. They said their goal was to prepare the children to besuccessful at schools in bigger cities and that the believed that the “standards” of theeducation they were receiving was as good as in these cities.

When I asked them about the school network, the newer teachers said they knew nothing about it. One teacher said that it involved sports teams from different schools in the area.Several teachers knew that their school director went to meetings at the network, but they did not know what other schools were involved and were clear that it had nothing to do withtheir school. The teachers agreed that the idea of a network was good, but that it had tofunction with communication and information.

This school may not have been typical but it highlighted the contradictions in efforts to

improve basic education. The school network, originally financed by IDB, continued tofunction in name and staffing, but despite its close proximity, it had almost no connection tothe school. Neither the school network staff nor the Ministry of Education, which providedjust one teacher for a school of more than 100 students, and little or no supervision,functioned as a source support around pedagogy or resources.

Instead it was teachers and parents who were making the school. Most interesting was theability of a group of young teachers to innovate in their classroom practice, focusing onpersonalizing instruction for students and engaging them in concrete lessons with the goal of preparing them for success in high schools outside the community. Moreover the teacherand parent I talked to at this school were describing what might be described as a virtuous

cycle of innovation. Building new classrooms and providing what was perceived by thecommunity as good education, was attracting students to the school from outside thecommunity. Rather than rejecting this change, the teachers and parents seemed to be using the energy to move the school forward.

In her book the Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs describes how economies and societiesinnovate. She writes:

la gente que dirige las actividades del Gobierno en todo el mundo, tiende abuscar soluciones rápidas a los problemas; es decir, soluciones capaces de seraplicadas en su totalidad en el instante en que se adoptan. Los individuos quetrabajan en el Gobierno…no parecen dedicar sus mentes a resolver un problemaparticular, a menudo aparentemente pequeño, en lugar determinado. Y sinembargo, es así como pueden empezar las innovaciones de todo tipo.” (Jacobs,1971, 230)

Similarly, when I asked a teacher what he would do if he were the minister of education, hesaid, you mean what innovations would I bring about, well first I would go out to schoolsand visit classrooms and see what the reality is, what the problems are; I would do a study and then based on what I learned, I would get to work solving problems.




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One of the best examples of autonomous innovation in education is the movement forBilingual education in Ecuador. Bilingual Quechua-Spanish education has its roots in the work of indigenous community organizations, church groups and non-governmentalagencies dating back to the 1960’s and 1970’s. It was not until 1988 when the DirecciónNacional de Educación Indígena Intercultural Bilingüe-DINEIB was created within theMinistry of Education, that many of the Centros Educativos created by the community weretransferred to the public system, as state-financed bilingual schools. The central role of pedagogy in the history of bilingual education is evident from secondary material on thesystem and from conversations with teachers and school directors, even as they acknowledgethe challenges involved in implementing a new model of instruction.

According to people I talked to in the Ministry of Education, the Dirección Nacional deEducación Indígena Intercultural Bilingüe has embraced the school network concept andencouraged all bilingual schools to participate in Redes Amigas. In the province of

Cotopaxi, where bilingual education in Ecuador has its roots, there are seven schoolnetworks participating in school networks. These networks encompass 92 schools andalmost 6,500 students. The bilingual schools are not the only public schools in the area; in anumber of cases there are Hispanic schools across the street or down the road from bilingualones. However, the only schools in Redes Amigas in Cotopaxi are those that are part of thebilingual system.3 The network I visited in was made up of eight schools strung out over a wide mountainous area. One uni-docente (one teacher) school, for example, required an hour walk on steep trails to reach from the nearest school.

Students at an uni-docente school in the Cotopaxi Province play chess on sets donated to the school by a Non-governmental organization.

3 In contrast PROMOCEB established networks with a mixed of bilingual and Hispanic schools, a dynamicthat provoked controversy and confusion.




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Most of the teachers and school directors I interviewed in this bilingual school network saidthat the Redes Amigas project provided valuable resources, especially didactic material, andthat it supported their efforts to promote community participation in the schools. They described Redes Amigas as one of the only sources of funds for infrastructure and materialsand praised it as a good strategy for getting resources to where they need to be. However, asone person involved in the network said “there is not pedagogical support from UCP(Unidad Coordinador de Proyectos), most contact deals with resources.” Teachers andschool directors made it clear that they looked elsewhere for vision and support inimproving pedagogy.

As I drove with the director of the network to visit schools on the first day he explained thatthe curriculum and the teaching approach, not just the language, is meant to be distinct inbilingual multi-cultural education. The instructional method in the ideal is based on PabloFreire and an Andina approach, which in part means using the concrete tools from the

environment and the community to structure lessons. He said that:

Especially in math this [Andina] approach is to solve problems not deal withcold numbers, such as summing, which is the traditional. Students should beactive learners, not simply copying dictation.

However, in practice, this is an area where they have to focus attention, especially now thatthey are completing their strategic plan under Redes Amigas.

The reality is that teachers have had very different experiences. Those whocome out of bilingual colegios understand at least somewhat the method; those

who went to traditional Hispanic colegios tend to use a traditional teaching method, because this is what they know.

He added that of course they also use capacitación and talleres to help teachers learn new methods, but that it is often each persons own educational experience that shapes how they first approach teaching.

At one of the schools we visited I had a chance to observe a teacher who had come to theschool as a result of pressure by parents to have an inexperienced teacher replaced. Thechildren in his class were sitting in a semi circle at the front of the classroom in front of the whiteboard. There were 10 children in 3rd and 4th grade. The teacher, a youngman, with agreen hat, was in front of the circle. Each student had a notebook and most had a few pagesof newspaper on their desks.

The teacher started off the lesson by saying OK this is what we are going to do, first we aregoing to do the four operations in math and then we are going to do lectura . He led thestudents through sums of four digit numbers at the board, asking them questions, repeating,explaining operations. He had the students come up with the numbers that were being usedin the equations. He also led a call and response on the math problems, so that all thestudents responded together. Tengo 10 naranjas, voy a chupar 9, cuanto sobre, tengo 10




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naranjas, y a un vecino voy a dar 6, cuanto sobren. The children were engaged. Then hesaid “ok you be the teachers and I will be the student. We’re going to all work equally.” Hehad the first student in the circle go to the board; the student wrote out a problem and thenbegan to solve it with help from the teacher and the other students. Three students went tothe board, and each time the teacher went and sat in their seat.

A student stands in front of the class and reads from a newspaper in this classroom equipped with supplies through the IDB-funded Redes Amigas project.

Several important things were taking place in this classroom. First the teacher explained tothe students what they were going to learn, a small but important step in helping them

understand why they were doing what they were doing. Second, hehad the students create theequations that they were resolving. As with his taking the seats of students who went to the board,

he forced students to actively participate in creating the lesson. This seemed to contribute to theirengagement in the class. Andthird, he used concepts close tothe students’ experiences, naranjasand vecinos, to bring basic mathproblems alive, putting into




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practice the conceptual framework that the director of the school had explained to me as wedrove to the school.

Moreover this teacher was working at the school because parents had pressured for a moreexperienced teacher to be brought to their community. In meeting with a group of parentsand with a community leader, a man in his late 20’s who described himself as a community promoter, it was clear that there was a lot of organization in the local area and that education was a main focus. In our discussion I would ask a question and then the parents would stepaside and discuss it together in Quechua for several minutes and then report back, with oneof the parents or the community leader acting as translator.

When I asked how education had changed in the community, they described how they hadstarted a “colegio semi-presencial ” (meaning it meets only on Sundays) in the community twelveyears ago. [Today there are 110 students and it takes 6 years to graduate; they have about 12-15 graduates each year; and the colegio is totally auto-finanaciado por la comunidad y estudiantes .] “In

the beginning people rejected the colegio; but now that they have had 12 years of experience with it people’s ideas have changed.” The community leader said that “antes decimos que la tierra era la herencia, pero ahora decimos que la educación es la herencia .” He later told me that he wascurrently a student in the colegio.

The parents explained that to study young people generally have to migrate. Mostly it is theboys who leave. Their dream is to have a colegio presencial in the community. They said thatthey wanted their children to go to colegio and university. There was agreement that in thecommunity ideas about education had changed a lot, that people wanted a better educationfor their children, but also that the school and the part-time colegio were not preparing students for what they needed. This was a contradiction, a problem and the parents said that

is what they are working to improve. I asked if it was just them who had these ideas andthey said they were widespread in the community. They told me the story of asking for amore skilled teacher, that sometimes teachers come to the community and do not want to work; they leave right away or before the time that school ends. So the whole community asked for a new teacher to be sent to help prepare the children better.




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Parents and community leader discuss a question I asked about what needed to be done to improve education in their community.

During the two days I spent in this school network I observed a mix of student-centeredinstruction and more traditional dictation and memorization. I shared what I had seen witha supervisor in the Direccion Bilingüe who spends a lot of time in the schools in this

community. He said that his personal analysis was that there was a “sistema única ” that wasdeeply rooted, that to create change they had to create a bilingual intercultural system that was separate, but that the way of thinking and pedagogy repeats itself because teachersrepeat what they have experienced. So even though the approach of bilingual education isdifferent, in practice teachers, even in their system, go back to the traditional. It is very hardto change education because it is hard to break the traditional views in the mind of teachers.

Despite the difficulty in making a different model of instruction more universal it waspromising to see that teachers, school directors and others were directly focused on solving problems related to pedagogy. Like the young teachers in the uni-docente school in thenetwork north of Quito, I heard clarity of purpose that is essential for instructional

improvement. While IDB funds were still providing concrete support for the work of theschools in Cotopaxi, in both cases the school network project was distant from the corepedagogical challenge of preparing young people for higher learning.




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The director of the school works with one table of second grade students in a multi-grade classroom. He is using cards to help the students identify and sum numbers.

From one perspective the story of the bilingual network describes the kind of process thatRedes Amigas has sought to promote. Rather than dictating a pedagogical approach, theIDB project was providing resources for the community to develop its own educational

vision and strategy. Yet no one in the network who I talked to was asking to be left alone.Indeed there was agreement that not only was pedagogy was the central problem but thatimproving the quality of teaching was exactly the area in which schools needed external help. Yet despite its stated goals of improving quality, Redes Amigas was not viewed as apedagogical resource.

One of the lessons of school reform is that teachers need to work together as a professionalcommunity to develop curriculum and instructional practices and build effective schools.Good teaching cannot be mandated or handed down pre-packaged. The school network concept is especially valuable in rural areas because it provides an opportunity for teachers inone and two-room schools to be part of a broader professional community. What is needed

from the projects that finance these networks is less that they dictate a curriculum orapproach to teaching than that they be a source of vision and support for transforming teaching practice. As the next part of this paper argues the key challenge is changing ourconception of schools (and school networks) as places where adults as well as children arebeing challenged to learn complex skills. Ultimately this requires mix of local autonomy andhigh quality external support.




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▪ TEACHER LEARNING

Of all of the factors that influence student learning the most important one over whichpublic policy has some control, is the quality of teaching students receive. Researchcomparing investments in reducing class size and other strategies for improving education,suggests the money spent improving the knowledge and skills of teachers may produce thegreatest return (Greenwald, Hedges & Laine 1996).

Of course not all efforts to improve teaching are successful. There is an increasing understanding that professional development needs to be rich in subject-matter content(teachers need to know well what they are teaching to teach it well), continuous andclassroom-based (Núñez Prieto, 1998; Campos, 1998; Elmore & Burney, 1998). One-timetraining events in teaching strategies not connected to classroom-based learning are likely to

have little value. Instead education policy needs to support teachers in creating strong professional communities in which their own continuous learning is a norm. If teachers arenot engaged themselves in challenging intellectual work around their teaching, it is highly unlikely that they will ask for similar work from students (Elmore, 2002; Fullan, 2000).

This section looks at the impact of school network projects on teacher learning, how theprojects envisioned promoting teacher development and what teachers and school directorssay needs to be done to improve the teacher training system. It discusses what seems to be aconsensus in favor of school networks as a way to create professional learning among teachers as well as widespread agreement about the need for new ways of thinking aboutprofessional development.

Professional development events

Teachers generally described professional development as either events that happenoccasionally or as the courses they take to move up the salary scale. They also said thatalmost no one visits their classrooms or works directly with them on improving theirteaching. Although collaboration between teachers at a classroom level is valued it appearsto be largely ad hoc. Nonetheless, as with the 1996 curricular reform, teachers’ comments as well as their practice suggest an interest in a different model of professional development.

At a school in Quito I was able to participate in two days of professional development thatreflected many of the contradictions described by teachers. The meetings, which focused onevaluation, took place in the central school of an urban school network; however, only teachers from this school participated in the training. Teachers were clear that the schoolhad little connection to other schools in the network. And the director of the network (who was also the director of the school) told me that her work was focused on the central school,although she had plans to begin working with the other schools.

During the two days, teachers managed their own work together, with minimal involvementfrom the school director and no outside presenters or facilitators. On the first day, school




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ended at 11:00am and teachers gathered in groups of four or five by grade. Each groupprepared to present part of a text on new concepts of evaluation. The group I was part of was responsible for defining evaluation and distinguishing between medición and assessment. At one point one of the teachers drew a picture of a child with an arrow pointing to the headas assessment and the heart as medición . She also drew a tree with branches illustrating thedifferent elements of evaluation. She said to me that pictures were a better way to learn,more active and creative, but not common. The rest of the teachers worked on a piece of newsprint that listed the elements of evaluation and a definition:

Evaluación es un proceso integral y científico para obtener conocimientos,habilidades, destrezas, hábitos de estudio…no es una etapa fija ni final.

The dynamic between the teachers, who ranged in experience from a woman who hadtaught for three years to a older man who had retired after teaching for forty years and wasnow back in the classroom, was warm and friendly. It looked as if they had a lot of

experience working together, liked being together. One of the teachers said to me that study groups were common and that they often collaborated.

Substantively, the discussion about evaluation in the small group and particularly the struggleover the difference between assessment and medición took place without any commonstandards on what students were expected to learn in each grade. Nor was there any data onstudent learning either in the small group or in the large group presentation on the following day. This gave the discussion an abstract quality. The teachers seemed to agree thatevaluation involved an ongoing process, yet they were not clear on what they were evaluating or whether it was common across their classes in the same grade.

The following day, in a room with 25 teachers sitting in chairs lined up along three walls, ateacher from each grade presented on a different part of the text they had read. Thepresentations covered the difference between formal and informal evaluation, a flow chart of the steps that make up evaluation and how different pedagogical perspectives (cognitivoconstructivista, social cognitivo, tradicional, etc…) define evaluation. There was virtually nodiscussion after each presentation, although the teachers clapped for the tree that the young teacher in my group had drawn. Even when a teacher put up newsprint that asked questionsit was followed by a second piece of paper that answered the questions.

The school director came in and out at different times. At one point a well-dressed womancame entered and the director introduced her as the supervisor for the area. The supervisorsaid that people should continue what they were doing, that she was “solamente aqui como amiga de Antonia [school director].” Then the director stood up for the first time and began talking about the purposes of evaluation and the legal obligations on teachers to follow thecurriculum. I noticed that when the supervisor was first introduced the room became quietand I asked the teacher sitting next to me if she noticed anything change in the room. Shesaid that there was tension, that the supervisor is seen as someone who is there to “calificar ”but with the purpose of putting people down.




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After the presentations were completed a teacher asked the director if she could give them abook or a tool for evaluation. The director said that this year they were learning whatevaluation was and then the next school year the Ministry of Education was going to put in anew evaluation system. The supervisor responded that all change cannot happen at once,that the old traditional way was to evaluate students with tests, that now work had to becentered in the child, that it is now quality not quantity and that teacher attitudes needed tochange, even if there were no additional books or resources.

Another teacher said this is very beautiful what we have done, but very traditional. “How many pieces of newsprint have we used?” he asked. He criticized his colleagues for failing touse debate and for failing to talk about what they use in their classrooms to evaluatestudents. Instead, he said, we talked about evaluation as something that comes from another world. The school orthodontist then gave a long discourse on the need for self-evaluation. The session ended without a discussion of next steps.

The teacher who sharply criticized the workshop was saying that the method teachers usedto educate themselves contradicted their pedagogical vision. He was describing a lack of connection between the conceptual discussion of evaluation and what teachers do on a day-to-day basis in their classrooms. This problem was exacerbated by the lack of a conversationabout on what students should know and be able to do and an absence of any data onstudent achievement, both of which made it difficult to discuss evaluation in a concrete way. The only discussion of teachers coordinating their practice was a comment by a teacher thatthe faculty had agreed that grades would be rounded up in calculating final marks.

The workshop also highlighted dynamics related to instructional leadership and supervision.It was evident that the teachers in this school had experience working collectively. This may

have been due in part to the fact that they did not have a school director the prior year. Therole of their current director, especially as an instructional leader, appeared to be unclear. Was her primary job to support all of the schools in the network or just the central school? Was she a bridge to the Ministry of Education who sought out information or resources? Was she expected to lead teachers in rethinking how they evaluated their students? The way she participated in the evaluation workshop raised these questions without clearly answering them.

While the history and dynamics of this school were unique, it was common in other schoolsas well to hear confusion among teachers about the role the school director and the schoolnetwork director. Some networks have both a director, responsible for administration, and asub-director responsible for pedagogy. In other cases there is just a director. In almost allcases, the director of the network is the director of the central school. The director of aRedes Amigas network explained that a school director would not want to give up his schoolposition to become a network director, because that job only last for three years (renewable)and had no other next career step. Some sub-directors described their role as visiting classrooms to work with teachers; others as limited to providing materials and organizing professional development activities. Nor did I hear a consensus on the role of schooldirectors; some teachers described their directors as involved in supporting teachers, whileothers saw the classroom as being the responsibility of each teacher.




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The professional development workshop at the school in Quito also provided a glimpse intothe relationships between teachers and supervisors. It seemed to confirm the comments by teachers that supervisors were absent from classrooms but also feared by teachers.Supervisors are the link between the Ministry of Education and the schools. That thissupervisor needed to be introduced to the teachers and that she then needed to explain thatshe was only there as a friend of the school director reinforced the distance between theministry and the school. It was clear that this was not a supervisor who had spent muchtime at this school, let alone its classrooms.

While teachers who I interviewed at this school and others did not universally say they wanted people to come into their classrooms to help them with their teaching, this was acommon theme. Teachers often said that professional development activities lacked follow through and did not provide them with tools they could use in their classrooms.

A school director in a bilingual school in the Cotopaxi Province works with students in each classroom in the school once a trimester to assess their progress and the effectiveness of his teachers. He describes this as a

strategy he developed to help teachers improve their teaching.

School networks as learning communities

Not only did teachers often talk about wanting a different kind of professional development,but they pointed to school networks as a way for teachers to share knowledge to improvetheir teaching. Thus while almost all teachers, as well as school directors, I interviewed




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harshly criticized the implementation of the school network projects and the lack of follow through, they did not challenge the concept of school networks.

Some teachers I spoke to pointed to the early years of the school networks as having provided opportunities for teachers to share knowledge. As one teacher in a network inQuito said, “the most valuable part of the CEM was integration of the schools that are partof the network and the capacitación de maestros basada en la misma experiencia de loscompañeros.” Another teacher said that capacitación helped bring the curricular reform tothe school.

An example of the potential that people see in networks to function as learning communitiesis the experience with teacher circles (círculos de estudios) which brought teachers fromdifferent schools in the network together to learn from one another. While teacher circles were not part of the original loan proposal for EB/PRODEC, like the curricular reform,they came to be seen by teachers and school directors as well as people involved in the

implementation of EB/PRODEC as one of the most important components of the project:

The director of an urban school network in Guayaquil told me that one of the values of the school network has been the círculos de estudio, but then whenasked, said that it has been at least two years since any have met in her network.

Marta Grijalva, a member of the EB/PRODEC technical team and a professorof Mathematics at the Catholic University in Quito, describes the teacher circlesas one of the three important contributions (along with the curricular reformand the APRENDO assessment system). Yet she too acknowledges that few function in 2004.

Ernesto Castillo, the president of the Union Nacional de Educadores (U.N.E.)taught in a satellite school that was part of an EB/PRODEC school network inGuayaquil. He describes how the union denounced “los altos sueldos de losconsultores” that managed the project, but also says that help did come in “lapreparacion de maestro, y que los círculos de estudio reunieron, pero solamentecuando había dinero, y después, nada.”

These comments about teachers circles are good examples of a broader consensus I heardthat school networks could play an important role helping teachers share knowledge andlearn together to improve their practice.

The interest in school networks as vehicles to create learning communities parallels anapparent agreement among key actors in the education system on the need to decentralizeinstructional planning at the school and community level. The U.N.E. offered what seemedto be the clearest model for balancing national and local (community-level) decision-making,a framework where 30% of the curriculum would be defined at the national level, 50% at thelocal community level and 20% at the level of the institution. While there may bedifferences on the relative contribution of different levels, the U.N.E. framework paralleled




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comments by individual teachers and school directors about the need for local decision-making about curriculum and instruction.

There also seemed to be agreement that parents should play a role in decision-making around education, since they and the community know what their children need. This isstrongly supported by the Constitución of Ecuador which provides that:

El sistema nacional de educación incluirá programas de enseñanza conforme a ladiversidad del país; incorporará en su gestión estrategias de descentralización y desconcentración administrativas, financieras y pedagógicas. Los padres defamilia, la comunidad, los maestros y los educandos participarán en los procesoseducativos. Art. 68.

The vision of local educational development presented in the constitution resonates not only with many teachers and school directors, but also with those involved in advancing bilingual

education and with the views of progressive educators in Ecuador (Torres, 2001). Giventhis, it is remarkable that almost fifteen years after the World Bank and IDB projects werelaunched school networks are among the most controversial ideas in Ecuadorian educationand professional development continues to function primarily as isolated events.

How the World Bank and IDB conceived of schools networks and professionaldevelopment

Part of the controversy over school networks derives from conflicting perspectives on theirpurpose. Whereas teachers generally explained the networks in their ideal as a horizontalmeans of sharing information and resources across schools, the bank project documents

present them primarily as a vertical tool for delivering resources and professionaldevelopment more efficiently to a set of schools.

Schools networks are neither unique to Ecuador nor an invention of the banks. Latin America countries, including Argentina, Peru, Columbia and Chile, have organized schoolsinto decentralized núcleos over the past three decades in order to reverse the highly centralized nature of their education systems and the address the isolation of rural schools(Castro, 2002, 335; Delannoy, 2000; Laverde & Paolucci, 2000; Prada 1998, 39). Thesestrategies are often referred to as nuclearizatión of education. In Ecuador, the effort toconnect educational and community development in defined geographic area has itsstrongest roots in the movement for bilingual education in the Sierra, where the connectionsbetween schools and communities are the strongest. Interestingly, the name used todescribe school networks in EB/PRODEC and PROMECEB, Centros Educativos Matrices (CEM), is taken from a term used to link rural schools together under Ecuadorian PresidentEloy Alfaro at the end of the 19 th century.

While the idea of school networks clearly predate the World Bank and IDB projects, thebanks along with the Ecuadorian Ministry of Education embraced the idea as the central toolfor improving the quality of basic education. However they appear to have brought asomewhat different meaning to the idea of a school network, with a particular emphasis on




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their value for delivering things. For example, the World Bank proposal for EB/PRODECdefines school networks as:

[A] decentralized network for school management that will deliver these services(textbooks and other education materials, in-service teacher training, pre-schooland special education programs for needy children and the enhancement of physical facilities). (World Bank, 1991, v)

Similarly, the PROMECEB proposal identifies six objectives for Centros EducativosMatrices, including “incrementar la supervisión técnica de las escuelas ” and “modernizer gestión administrativa de los establecimientos ” but none related to the horizontal potential of the schoolnetworks as a vehicle for sharing knowledge between schools and teachers.

Moreover, the decision to establish one central school that would receive extra resources andbe a model for the rest of the network undermined the potential for collaboration between

schools. As the final evaluation of EB/PRODEC notes, the presence of a favored schooloften created conflict within networks (World Bank, 2000, 5). A central school contradictedthe idea of a group of schools functioning as a learning community. In my interviews withteachers it was common to hear very different perspectives on the network among teachersin different schools, with teachers in the central school often complaining that their director was pulled away from his or her school responsibilities, and teachers in the satellite schoolssaying that they did not get the same information or resources as the central school.

The evaluation of PROMECEB similarly highlights how the project design impededinteraction between schools and teachers. The report describes confusion among participants about whether the purpose of the school network was to “centralizer la

capacitación de los maestros” or create an “instancia de comunicación y traspaso de información .” The authors explain that:

En realidad la estrategia utilizado hasta ahora por el PROMECEB al generar losCEMs se asocial más a la idea de escuelas en torno a un plantel central que al deuna red integrada y que funciona en forma horizontal. De esta manera, en losprofesores de las distintas escuelas no está siempre presente la coordinaciónentre ellos, por sobre la relación con el plantel central, esto a pesar de que lasdistancias entre las escuelas es muchas veces menor entre ellas que con el plantelcentral. (Fernández, 1998, 177)

Based on the tensions created by having central schools and satellite schools, Redes Amigaseliminated this distinction between schools. Although one school would be designated anadministrative center, in design at least, this school would not receive any special privilegesor be seen as a model for the other schools. This was one element of a broader tendency inRedes Amigas to place greater emphasis on local school autonomy.

Nonetheless, the Redes Amigas project documents share with those of EB/PRODEC andPROMECEB a conception of professional development as something that is delivered toteachers from outside the school, rather than coming out of shared knowledge and learning.




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Indeed all of the projects describe capacitacion in terms of either “meses hombre de asesoríay capacitacion” (BID, 1999, 1), the number teachers to be trained or the number of hoursthat teachers will participate in training. And they almost always describe external personsand entities, usually consultants, as the primary agents of teacher learning.

Teacher circles, the professional development practice that teachers as well as those whomanaged the EB/PRODEC project point to as having the most value were not part of theoriginal World Bank project proposal. Nor were they adopted in the Redes Amigasproposal. The development of teacher circles outside the official proposals and the failureto adopt this strategy in subsequent projects is an example of the contradiction between localconceptions of school networks as learning communities and the external view, predominant within the banks, of networks as management tools.

Loan-funded projects are under intense pressure to spend down funds on specificmeasurable activities. Without a goal defined by changes in student learning, the number of

teachers trained or hours of training provided or classrooms built serves as a poor butapparently necessary indicator of success. With professional development, this pressure toshow an increase in inputs appears to have ultimately reinforced a conception of professional development as the delivery of information to teachers.

Nor do the projects appear to have resolved the central problem of who is responsible for working with teachers in their classrooms to help them improve their teaching.EB/PRODEC supported the decentralization of the supervision system, an importantachievement, but did not fundamentally change the role of the supervisor in Ecuadorianeducation. This failure is evident in comparing the proposal for PROMECEB with the finalreport on the project. The project proposal identified supervision, both at the Ministry of

Education and school level, as a critical issue:

Fundamentalmente, la acción supervisora se restringe a los aspectosadministrativos sin alcanzar jamás los procesos pedagógicos para los cuales noestán preparados. Algo semejante sucede con los directores de las escuelasprimarias, de los cuales un 67% poseen tan solo título de secundaria. (BID1990, 15)

Eight years later the final report on PROMECEB identifies the same problem using similarif sharper language.

La supervisión pedagógica, tanto a nivel del Programa como del sistema es unafunción que requiere de una profunda revisión. La forma en que ella se estáejerciendo dista mucho de acercarse a ser el apoyo calificado y puente entre lasredes y la Unidad Ejecutora y/o las Direcciones Provinciales. Los supervisoresestán muy desprestigiados en lo social (asociados algunos de ellos a corrupción y abuso de poder), y sin ninguna legitimación a nivel pedagógico, ya que estánprácticamente ausentes de ese plano. Una excepción la constituyen lossupervisores bilingües de la Sierra ecuatoriana. (Fernández, 1998, 176)




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The report does not detail what it means by “tanto a nivel del Program” but it seems tosuggest that if anything the project replicated the ambiguity about who works with teachersin their classrooms.

From supervision to coaching

In one case in my own research I walked into a classroom and found a supervisor modeling instructional practice for a classroom teacher. This was, as the excerpt above from thePROMECEB evaluation notes, in a bilingual school in the Sierra. The supervisor wassomeone who spent most of her time walking between rural schools in the province.

When I first came to the school I saw a male teacher and a female teacher both working inthe same classroom. The female teacher was organizing the classroom, which had about 25students organized in groups of tables of different sizes. Each student had a large piece of construction paper in front of them; the teacher, who I later learned was a supervisor with

the Dirección Bilingüe, was at a white board drawing a box on the board; as she drew on theboard she talked to the students, mostly about moral lessons. When I came in she had herback to the students and was telling them that people are small because they do not eat well when they are young; people say this person is short because her parents were short, but it isnot asi….Every person has the right to meat every once in a while; parents should buy theirchildren meat instead of spending money on trago. After markers were handed out; she saidthere are enough for everyone; then gave a lesson about solidarity; in the community weshare, si or no; but the person who borrows something should make sure they take care of it,right?

I talked to a student who has drawn a near perfect picture of a cow on his paper even as the

teacher is in the middle of drawing the square on the board; no other students have drawnanything from what I could see. I asked him why a cow; he said he has a cow. Theassignment was to draw your family. Later, as we are driving to another school, thesupervisor asked what you call it when a child does not know the colors of things; sheexplained that there was a child who was drawing the animals in all the wrong colors. I saidcreative; and then told the story of the boy who had drawn the cow. It was the same boy.Later he drew his whole family around the cow; but the cow was most loved, she said. Thesupervisor explained that this is the first assignment of a longer project that focuses oncommunication. It begins with teachers understanding better what is important to theirstudents and how communication takes place in their homes.

She told me that of thirty supervisors in her office there are two who go out and visitschools on a regular basis. They are punished for this, she says, because the attitude is thatyou should remain at your desk. Her story and work illustrated the complexity of creating new learning environments for teachers. On one hand the work of these two bilingualeducators in this community seemed to be closely linked to the innovative practice thatcould be seen within classrooms. Yet even within the bilingual system, she described this work as an anomaly.




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The next day I interviewed the other person she mentioned who spends a lot of time visiting schools in the area. He said that for him Redes Amigas was important in bringing materialsand in providing money directly to the community, which helps support participation, also ininfrastructure. “But there is a but. This was all done with the same mentality, withoutchanging the pedagogy, so teachers get new materials, but they do not use them or do notuse them differently, so it is still the teacher a the board with a marker.” He described thenetwork project as being a change in authority in the manejo de recursos , but not in técnico- pedagógica dentro el aula . “ Nunca autoridades visitan las escuelas .” From his perspective there needsto be more help for teachers in learning to use materials in practice; “mas obreros acompañandolos maestros en la practica; y capacitación en al aula, no masificado.” And the system of supervisorsdoes not work. They just do fiscalización and not even that.

Lessons

Two primary lessons about teacher learning arise from the school network projects. First,school networks need to be seen as tools for sharing knowledge and resources acrossschools in a community. Particularly in rural areas, with large numbers of uni-docente schools,the networks have the potential for creating learning communities that involve not only teachers but also parents and other community members. Without intensive and collective work by adults to improve their own knowledge and their teaching practice in the classroom,it is unlikely that students will learn what they need to in order to succeed in a rapidly changing country and world. Ecuador is fortunate to have a strong tradition of collaborativeeffort to draw on to help meet this task.

The second important lesson is that the system of supervisors within the Ministry of

Education needs to be redesigned around a team of highly skilled Ecuadorian educators whose mission it is to go out into classrooms and work with teachers. This work needs toinvolve both pedagogy and increasing the subject matter knowledge of teachers, but aboveall it needs to be rooted in the reality of what is currently taking place within classroomsacross the country (Calvo Pontón et al. 2002). The next section looks at the role of theMinistry of Education in reforming basic education, and an obvious starting point is theneed for a new mission that revolves around the promotion of teacher learning.




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▪ SYSTEM LEARNING

The main responsibility of those parts of an education system that do not have direct contact with students on a day-to-day basis is to support the professional development of teachers.Effective schools systems come to see improving the skills and knowledge of teachers not asa function assigned to a particular department (for example an office called Capacitación deDocentes in one of the Ministry of Education buildings in Quito), but as the essentialmission of the system (Elmore & Burney, 1997).

It is not possible to transform an education system in one stroke. The key is for the Ministry of Education to develop the capacity to learn from its own experience and from bestpractices in other places so that it can gradually improve how it operates and restructure itsmission (Senge, 1990). It is especially important for those in the system to continuously

analyze data on the skills and knowledge of both teachers and students and then have theopportunity to act on that analysis to improve how they support teachers and students. Thegreatest flaw in efforts to reform basic education in Ecuador over the last fifteen years may ultimately be that the externally funded projects were designed in a way that made itextraordinarily difficult for the central Ministry of Education to learn from their experience.

This section analyzes the impact that the World Bank and IDB projects have had on theMinistry of Education, and in particular on its understanding of its role and its capacity tosupport the development of teachers and schools. Each of the three projects explicitly sought to create institutional change within the Ecuador education system that would livebeyond the five to seven year loan period. Yet all were designed in a way that made it highly

unlikely that they would strengthen the existing education system. The section looks at why and what lessons can be drawn for future efforts to redesign the Ministry of Education.

The system seen from the school

Five years ago the original school network projects funded by the World Bank and IDBended. A total of 45 of the 96 school networks involved in PROMECEB went on toparticipate in Redes Amigas, while the remainder, along with 36 urban networks created by the EB/PRODEC project were left in a kind of institutional limbo. These networkscontinued in name and still receive staffing for directors and in some cases sub-directors, butthey operate without clear supervision or support from the Ministry of Education.

Teachers and school directors in networks that no longer received external funding told me aremarkably consistent story about their experience during and after the projects. During theproject period they described the core activity of the school network project as having beeninvestment in the infrastructure of the central school. In describing this work, people almostalways said that it was of poor quality and over-priced and that there was much corruptioninvolved. A director of a school in Guayaquil took me to an area behind her school to seepiles of broken desks that she said were provided with World Bank funds but were of suchpoor quality they had to be thrown away. Teachers were constantly showing me problems




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with EB/PRODEC construction, such as ceilings that were falling in and floors that werecoming apart.

Desks heaped in piles behind a school in Guayaquil. Teachers and administrators said that there were purchased with funds from the World Bank EB/PRODEC loan, but were of such poor quality that they had to be thrown away after several years.

A related theme was the failure of the projects to follow through on promises. Teachers inurban school networks told me that their schools were promised workshops that would helpprepare students for manual trades. The physical classrooms were built for these workshops, people said, but the equipment was never provided. School directors alsocomplained to me that the Ecuadorian government did not meet its financial communitiesduring or after the projects to provide extra resources to schools in the networks. Forexample, one director said that during the project the Ministry of Education was supposedto designate her school as an experimental school, but this was not done, so the school didnot receive any extra resources.

When funding ended, according to network directors I spoke with, each network faced thequestion of whether it would continue to function on its own devices. The director of anetwork in Quito said that she believed that of the eight original networks in the city, three were still functioning more or less as they were intended and continued to meet together. Inher network, which was functioning, she said that there was a lot of unhappiness when thefunds ended. Many teachers and schools did not want to continue. When I asked twoteachers later why their school continued to be part of the network, they said that they donot know; that it did not make sense to them; but that I should ask the director. It was clear




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from talking to teachers and network directors that while they were allowed to continue toexist there was little support from the Ministry for their work as a network.

A first grade classroom in a school in Guayaquil that participated in the World Bank-financed EB/PRODEC school network project.

In 2004, the networks participating in Redes Amigas were apparently being transferred back

to the Ministry of Education. It is possible that their experience will be different from thenetworks that participated in EB/PRODEC and PROMECEB. Staff at the projectcoordinating unit administering Redes Amigas described intensive efforts to prepareprovincial staff to administer the school Redes Amigas school networks.

Yet comments by teachers and directors at schools in Redes Amigas suggest that theseschools may face a similar set of challenges as earlier projects. Teachers often told me thatthey were discriminated against because they were in Redes Amigas, that staff in theprovincial offices would deny them help on transferring to another school or dealing withpaper work problems because they were part of a school network. The ambivalence of theexisting bureaucracy to the Redes Amigas project raised questions about whether theprovincial officers would embrace the networks once IDB funding ended.

I also heard a great deal of confusion at a school level about what would happen once theproject ended. The director of one school complained to me about the lack of informationand communication. “We do not know what happens when the program ends; since noinformation is provided; I tell my teachers what is happening next week and next month; butI do not get this information from the network,” he said. Comments like these seemed tobelie the notion that there was a clear plan in place to insure that networks would continueto function.




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School networks as seen from Ministry of Education

The view of school networks within the Ministry of Education is apparent in opinions andactions that might best be described using the psychological language of passive-aggressive. When I began my research it was not clear to me whether the CEMs, the school networksfunded as part of EB/PRODEC and PROMECEB, still existed. Staff within the Ministry of Education had different opinions on this question but no one could point me to theoffice or department responsible for the management of school networks. Nor couldanyone in the Ministry of Education provide a complete list of schools and school networksthat were created by the three projects.

Ministry staff complained about the high salaries and generous expense accounts given toconsultants who administered the school network projects. They said that the banks ignoredthe talent within the Ministry and that any staff from the ministry who went to work for the

projects would never return because public sector salaries were so low compared to what thebanks’ paid. At a conference on Redes Amigas I had an opportunity to have lunch with agroup of mid-level Ministry of Education functionaries. The official discussion at theconference focused on the accomplishments of the initiative, but the lunch tableconversation reflected extreme cynicism about the value of externally-funded projects. Oneperson described projects like Redes Amigas as used cars, only given over the Ministry oncethey are worn out and no longer have any value.

These and other comments suggest that there is virtually no ownership of the schoolnetwork projects within the Ministry. It is common wisdom that work is done when fundsare flowing, that there is a rush to spend down money at the end of projects and that

nothing happens after the money is gone. And there appears to an acceptance that thebanks will continue to lend money even though there is no follow through.

Institutional Change

The cynicism with which different actors within the Ecuadorian education system view theexternally financed efforts to improve basic education appears to be closely tied to how theprojects were managed.

In 1990 the World Bank, IDB and the Ecuador government set out to fundamentally changethe public education system in the country. They decided to invest most heavily in creating aset of model of rural and marginal urban school networks as a first step toward making thesenetworks as universal strategy. The World Bank proposal said that “total enrollment in theschools to be included in the project would be 345,0004 or an estimated 75% of urban publicenrollment in low-income areas” and that “ultimately the concept will be extended to allparts of the country.” (World Bank, 1990, 65)

4 EB/PRODEC CEMS ended up serving about half this number of students.




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The EB/PRODEC and PROMECEB proposal documents strongly criticize the leadershipand management skills of the Ecuadorian Ministry of Education and define as a primary goalstrengthening the capacity of the Ministry to operate the education system. The World Bank proposal sought to “strengthen decision-making and management of public institutionsinvolved in the delivery of basic education.” (World Bank, 1991, v) The 1990 IDB proposalidentified the critical need for “mecanismos e instrumentos capaces de acelerar los procesos administrativos y dinamizar funciones básicas tales como las de planeamiento, supervisión, comunicación y toma de decisiones .” (IDB, 1990, 15) Based on this analysis, the projects included nationalcomponents designed to improve teacher training (PROMECEB), to create a nationalstudent assessment system (EB/PRODEC) and to improve planning, budgeting and publicpolicy development within the Ministry.

Yet despite the goal of “ fortalecimiento institucional ” there was a strategic decision made by those who designed EB/PRODEC, PROMECEB and Redes Amigas to create separatemanagement entities for each project outside of the existing Ministry of Education

organizational structure. According to Ecuadorians involved in project design, this was arequirement of the banks. These parallel management units were designed to be jointly controlled by the Ministry of Education and the bank that financed the project. Thus, whileEB/PRODEC and PROMECEB were launched at roughly the same time, with the samegoals and strategies, each project had a separate organization responsible for itsimplementation. And according to participants, these organizations competed not only withthe existing bureaucratic structure of the Ministry, but also with each other.

The rationale for creating parallel structures under the joint control of the banks andMinistry is no where directly explained in the loan proposals. The most obvious conclusionis that neither the World Bank nor IDB trusted the Ministry of Education to successfully

carry out these complex reform projects, or to necessarily spend funds appropriately. Yetthe consequence of the decision not to operate the projects directly out the Ministry of Education appears to have been that the projects weakened, rather than strengthened theinstitutional capacity of the existing education system. The strategy of financing a parallelstructure might have had merit if the goal had been for that structure to ultimately replacethe existing system, but these were time-limited projects, designed in a way that their work would be transferred back to the Ministry of Education once project funding ended.

The final evaluations of EB/PRODEC and PROMECEB make clear the problems createdby the way in which these two projects were managed. In its evaluation of its own projectthe World Bank gives itself an unsatisfactory rating for project design based on “[e]xcessively complex institutional design and inadequate provision for overcoming the weak institutionalcapacity of implementing agencies. The evaluation goes on to say:

Weaknesses were to be overcome by establishment of independent projectimplementation units (PIUs). In the event, three separate PIUs were set up (onefor each of the major components/activities). At various points during implementation, one or more of the PIUs was viewed by the corresponding ministerial authority as providing technical support for policy decisions; at other




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times, the PIUs were viewed as parallel to, and even competitive with theministry. (World Bank, 1999, 8) [Emphasis added].

Although the authors of the evaluation express hope that the strategies undertaken as part of the EB/PRODEC project would be continued by the Ministry of Education, they alsoimplicitly acknowledge how the use of parallel management units creates a rush at the end of the project to transfer responsibility to the Ministry.

The Ministry of Education decided to continue with the Redes CEM model andto expand its application. The unique nature of the Redes required a specialliaison capacity within the MEC, which would provide an institutional anchorafter project completion. Efforts to create an effective liaison in the MEC beganin the last year of implementation, though it was not fully established beforeproject completion. (World Bank, 1999, 11) [Emphasis added]

The final evaluation of PROMECEB is typically more direct about the conflicts created by the project. The report says that despite the potential of the strategy, the original design didnot consider the conflicts that such a proposal was likely to create. The authors describe oneelement of this conflict more specifically:

Una situación de conflicto que PROMECEB heredo desde su origen provienede su constitución como entidad ejecutora autónoma de MEC, desplazando alos actores tradicionales. La dependencia burocrática que tradicionalmente (hatenido) a su cargo al administración y gestión de la educación rural…se sintióexcluida, marginada y relegada al desempeño de funciones de segundo categoría.(IDB, 1998, 87)

The tension between the Ministry of Education and the project management units derivesfrom a set of factors, including that project staff paid out of IDB and World Bank loanfunds often earn many times more than Ministry employees and have access to expenseaccounts and much greater administrative resources. The creation of a well-funded parallelstructure also creates the appearance, and at times, the reality that education policy andmanagement is being driven by the banks rather than the Ecuadorian government. The finalPROMECEB report describes an example of the power struggle between lender andborrower that characterized the project.

Los entrevistados coincidieron en que hasta 1995 gran parte de las dificultadesdel PROMECEB estuvieron asociados con la presencia de uno de lossectorialistas del BID quien manejaba de manera directa e indiscriminada launidad ejecutiva…el señor se creía que estaba en un hacienda…mandabadirectamente a la gente de la unidad.” (IDB, 1998, 84).

Even short of the degree of direct intervention by IDB described in the PROMECEBevaluation, the management of the school network projects outside the existing Ministry of Education structure reinforces the belief that policy initiative rests with the banks not withthe government. Because these projects represented the most important reform strategies




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over the last fifteen years it is possible to conclude that despite their official goals of building policy capacity, their ultimate result was to undermine the Ministry’s role in reforming theeducation system.

While the World Bank did not fund a second school network project, IDB did, and ratherthan design the follow up project to be operated more closely within the Ministry, Redes Amigas abandoned the institutional reform goals that were central to both of the earlierschool network projects. Unlike EB/PRODEC and PROMECEB, Redes Amigas had nonational reform component, but instead focused exclusively on the approximately 20% of rural students targeted for assistance under the project. And to a much greater extent thanthe first two projects, it operates independently of the Ministry of Education. The lessonlearned from the problems implementing the earlier school network projects seem to havebeen that the best hope for success was to take a set of schools and operate them as much aspossible outside the existing structure of the education system.Redes Amigas is often criticized by teachers and the teacher’s union as either privatization or

a strategy with a hidden agenda of privatization. Since schools in the networks created by Redes Amigas continue to be public schools, funded with money from the Ministry of Finance, the privatization argument may not be entirely fair (particularly since the entiresystem is characterized by a degree of privatization in the amount of money that parents arerequired to pay to cover the salaries of teachers at their schools). But the criticism of Redes Amigas does reflect what seems to be a genuine sense that the project has broken off a set of schools for a special initiative without a clear strategy for moving the entire system forward.

Redes Amigas has been referred to as the primary education reform strategy underway inEcuador (there is a large logo of Redes Amigas right next to the name Ministry of Educationand Culture on the ministry’s headquarters). Yet the lack of a plan for translating its

experience into a broader policy appears to contribute to a sense of drift in education policy and a narrowing of the horizon of what is possible.

The absence of a broader strategy is evident in the lack of clarity about what will happen tothe school networks that are not part of Redes Amigas. These networks encompass as many as 300,000 students (see chart 1). Yet current efforts to transfer the Redes Amigas networks,do not address the status of existing networks currently administered by the Ministry. As theRedes Amigas project comes to a close there are three distinct groups of school networksand no overall strategy for how they relate to one another or to the rest of the educationsystem. Not only do these networks have little or no contact with each other, but they appear to be competing for attention from the Ministry.




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Chart 1: Distribution of students in basic education by type of school network

Area 1992-1999 1999-2004

Rural Redes Escolares51 networks, 1,000 schools, 70,000students)

PROMECEB96 networks, 1,940 schools133,655 students

Redes Amigas185 networks, 2,224 schools136,019 sudents

Rural Schools

Approximately 620,00 rural studentsoutside school networks Approximately 550,000 rural students

outside school networks

EB/PRODEC36 networks, 700 Schools Approx. 200,000 students

Urban Redes Escolares36 networks, 700 Schools Approx. 200,000 students

Urban Schools Approximately 600,000 urban students outside school networks

The tension between different types of school networks was illustrated for me sitting in the

office of a rural school network not part of Redes Amigas. I told the director that I couldnot come back to the school the following week because I was attending a conference onRedes Amigas at the Swiss Hotel in Quito. He asked if he could attend; I said I could callthe Unidad Coordinadora de Proyectos (which manages Redes Amigas) inquire. Then, using his phone, I called a staff member who told me no, that they (people in the CEMs) havebeen our biggest opponents. This interaction drove home how difficult it is for differentparts of the education system to learn from the experience of each project when thoseprojects are each independently managed.




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The fractured nature of the education system in 2004 runs much deeper than confusion overthe future of school networks. Almost fifteen years after the first projects were launched tostrengthen the basic education system, public investment in education as a percentage of thetotal economy is down sharply, teachers salaries are at poverty levels, there is virtually noannual investment in books, materials and school infrastructure, enrollment in privateeducation has increased significantly and tensions between the Ministry of Education and theUNE are extremely high. In December the UNE and the Ministry reached an agreementthat ended a forty-day national teacher’s strike.

While much of the conflict between the Ministry and the UNE has been over salaries andlevels of investment in education, the school network projects have been a key point of tension. The third paragraph of the agreement that ended the 2003 strike states that “[e]l Ministerio de Educación realizará una auditoria integral a los Proyectos y Programas Educativos con financiamiento externo, particularmente el denominado Redes Amigas, precautelando la vigencia de los

derechos de los docentes.” The school network projects are not the sole cause of conflict withinthe education system, but it would be hard to argue that they have contributed to greaterconsensus among key actors on how to proceed with improving education.

Redes Amigas in particular appears to have had the most polarizing effect. The union hasunsuccessfully challenged the project in court and been a vocal critic at both a national andlocal level. Officials from the UCP and IDB involved in Redes Amigas point to the union asan obstacle to reform and argue that once teachers have an experience with the project they come to support it and reject the union’s positions. Nonetheless it is clear that the strategy is to implement reform over or around union opposition, rather than find a way to work based on consensus. While this strategy may work in a defined set of schools it is unlikely to

provide an answer for moving the system forward, particularly if the primary focus isupgrading teacher knowledge and skills.

The question of the role of the union in education reform is a complex one. The union hasinstructional reform as a major part of its public strategy. Yet many people involved in theeducation system say that the union is the primary obstacle to change. Others say it is usedas a scapegoat for by political leaders who are unwilling to invest resources and politicalcapital in the public education system. Many of the teachers I asked about the union saidthat while they might differ with its politics (alignment with a left-wing political party) or itsstrategy, they viewed it as their best defense to protect their rights.

In my interview with the president of the union I was struck by the amount of negotiationand collaboration apparently taking place between the union and the ministry, despite thepublic perception that the two were at war. The union president had just come from ameeting at the ministry and showed me a packet given to him by the Minister of Educationof national initiatives, such as holding a third national forum on education in July, 2004. Theunion was supporting many of these projects, and the union president told me that he hadgood relationships with all four of the education ministers who had occupied the positionover the past year.




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Yet when I asked about the World Bank mission that was in Ecuador that week, he said thathe knew nothing about it. He claimed that “they never tell us about external projects, nevereven tell us they are considering them, just do them in secret and then tell us when they areready for us to be guinea pigs.” His comments and those of teachers who said that they were not consulted in the development of the school network projects, raise the question of whether the ways in which the externally financed projects are designed and implementedmay be aggravating tensions between the union and the Ministry of Education. Given thepower of the national teachers union it is difficult to imagine obtaining input from teachers without engaging the union and without far greater transparency in the design andmanagement of external projects.

System Lessons

The decision to design loan projects without significant teacher

involvement and manage themthrough parallel entities has clearly reduced their value to the Ecuadorianeducation system. The designcontributed to a vicious cycle in whichthe initiatives and strategies employedby the projects were rejected by theeducation system and abandoned onceloan funds ended. This dynamics issimilar to processes that Peter Sengeidentifies in the corporate

environment, in which a pilot initiativeproduces a cycle of rejection in therest of the organization (Senge 1990). The cycle is diagramed in figure 1. Those working inside the initiativebelieve that they are creating a modelfor the rest of the system, and cannotunderstand why they are not viewed in positive ways. Yet despite what may be goodintentions, the special treatment received by the initiative and its isolation generateresentment and anger and impede communication. The dynamic is especially problematic inprojects like EB/PRODEC, PROMECEB and Redes Amigas because these tensions make it virtually impossible for those in the system to learn from the experience of the pilot effort.

There were clearly serious management failures in all three school network projects. Eachone had to be restructured and experienced instability in leadership at different points intime. For example, just in 2003 the unit managing Redes Amigas had five different executivedirectors. They also operated at a time during which Ecuador experienced high levels of political instability. Nonetheless, many of the problems in the management of the projects were predictable dynamics associated with reforming public institutions (Girishankar, 2001,4). Conditions such as the instability within public sector agencies, the tendency of

Inversion deRecursos en

Escuelas

Proyecto deReforma financiado

desde afuera

Rechazo yOposición

Proyecto

Sistema

Figure 1: Vicious Circle




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politicians to use education systems as a source of jobs and contracts and the long cycle needto produce change in classroom practice are intrinsic parts of school reform, not as oneperson I spoke to suggested, tragic culture flaws.

The World Bank and IDB proposal documents recognize many of the risks associated with amajor effort to improve the quality of basic education. Yet rather than move toward thosedangers, as Senge suggests organizations need to do if they want to create a learning culture,the projects were designed to bypass two of the most important problems facing the system,the weakness of the Ministry and lack of consensus on reform between the Ministry and theunion. This might not have been a problem had the goal been to replace the existing structure of the Ministry with a new model created and tested in the school network projects. But this was never the goal and inevitably the loan-funded projects come to an end without having had much influence on the regular structure left to manage the schools.

Research on organizational dynamics suggests that a better strategy would have been to

directly invest in the Ministry of Education and to have treated the union as a necessary partner. While this may have slowed down some aspects of the project, in the longer term itprobably would have helped build the capacity of the Ministry. By designing the projects asthey did, the World Bank and IDB along with their Ecuadorian partners, shifted policy initiative from the Ministry to the parallel management units. Whether intentionally or notthis dynamic reinforces for many observers the perception that the ultimate goal of the loanprojects is to weaken or dismantle the public system rather than strengthen it. Reversing the vicious cycle that seems to be undermining the public education system requires rethinking both how external projects are designed and how the Ministry of Education defines itsmission. The section that follows makes a series of concrete recommendations based on theexperience of the school network projects.




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Conclusions and Recommendations

[1] Future initiatives to improve the quality of education should have at their center astrong instructional vision that includes ending dictation as an instructional practice.Efforts to improve instruction need to be based on a careful analysis of what is currently taking place within classrooms and must provide a credible strategy for changing interactionsbetween teachers and students. The focus on pedagogy cannot be one of a set of goals butneeds to be the objective around which all other actions revolve. The 1996 consensuscurricular reform provides a powerful starting point for changing instructional practicesacross the country; the key is to exploit the contradiction between widespread support forthis curriculum and the reality of rote instruction in classrooms.

[2] The current system of supervisors within the Ministry of Education should beredesigned. The role of supervisor as it is currently structured provides virtually no value in

improving instruction. Supervisors should be replaced by a corps of talented Ecuadorianeducators whose job is to go out into classrooms and work with teachers to increase theirknowledge about what they are teaching and their skills in teaching young people in an activeand engaging way. These master teachers should both observe and provide feedback androle play effective teaching. They would be a key element to bringing curricular reform tothe classroom.

[3] The Ministry of Education needs a new mission. Although this will not changeovernight, the Ministry needs to come to see that its primary purpose is to increase the skillsand knowledge of teachers. Practical steps toward this goal would include a thoroughanalysis of the strengths and weaknesses of teaching in different types of schools and areas

of the country and a revision of the current activities that the Ministry is involved in topromote professional development. Changing the supervision system would be animportant component to restructuring the mission of the Ministry.

[4] The Ecuadorian state needs to make a far greater financial investment in publiceducation as a necessary precondition for improving school quality. Without doubling or even tripling teacher salaries it is unlikely that the quality of teaching can be increased tothe extent necessary to meet the development needs of the country. This does not meanthat other reforms should be put on hold until more money is invested or that money wouldin-and-of-itself translate into greater student learning. However, it is essential to have afrank policy and political discussion about what can be asked of teachers in changing theirpractice when salaries leave most teachers living in poverty and require many to work two orthree jobs to support their families. There also clearly needs to be a financial commitment topurchasing books and didactic materials.

[5] School networks should be a policy or eliminated as a strategy. After nearly fifteenyears there is no reason why school networks should exist in just of fraction of schools, nor why there should be three different types of networks operating independently of oneanother. If school networks have value, which most persons I interviewed believed, then




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there should be a policy that all schools are organized into networks and these networksshould be supported by the Ministry of Education.

[6] Decentralization can only work if it is accompanied by an accountability system. This means that there needs to be basic agreement on what young people are expected tolearn to know and do in each grade in every part of the country. There is room for localinnovation and definition of curriculum, but without a standard against which to hold localactors accountable it makes no sense to decentralize authority. Accountability clearly needsto apply to students, teachers, administrators, political leaders and to the banks. 5 A logicalconcrete step would be to resuscitate the APRENDO examination and look for ways that itcould be applied more universally within schools to give teachers ongoing feedback on theirefforts to improve teaching.

[7] Reconsider future loan projects. There is a strong argument that the education systemin Ecuador does not need additional loan projects from the World Bank and IDB, that at

this point in time it would be better to design and finance reform locally. The experience with all three projects over the last fifteen years has left a major credibility gap. It is not clearthat new projects, even if designed more effectively, would have the support needed fromkey actors, especially teachers and Ministry officials. If the political realities do lead towardnew externally financed projects then it is essential that two criteria be met: (a) that there bea public process to identify the goals and strategies so that key actors, including the teachersunion sign off on any new projects; and (b) that investment be directly in the Ministry, not inseparate management units.

[8] The question of secondary education needs to be addressed. There should be aclear policy on whether young people are expected to finish secondary education. If school

networks continue to be an important organizational strategy, then the connection betweencolegios and these networks needs to be clearly defined.

[9] Escaping from the vicious cycle that characterizes the education system requiresthe active participation of new social actors in the education system. There are aseveral actors who could transform the politics of education. They include:

• Parents, who are organized well at the school level, but have no organizational voice inthe national arena.

• Local governments, which have experienced significant development as the nationalgovernment has struggles over the past decade, have little or no education agenda(municipalities may not have the capacity to manage schools, but they have politicalinfluence and some resources that could be applied to the education system).

• The indigenous movement, which is sometimes written off as only interested in bilingualeducation, but has a pedagogical vision that could help transform the entire system.

• The private sector, which has a great deal at stake in the quality of education, but has notmade an assessment that investment in education supports its economic interests.

5 Given how the World Bank rated its own performance on EB/PRODEC why should Ecuador continue topay back the full value of the loan?




61

[10] Abandon the distinction between pedagogy and public policy. For those whoboth study and influene education policy it is critical to see pedagogy as the central object of policy. Educational policy need to be rooted in classroom practice if it is to have any realinfluence on student learning.




62

Appendix

List of Formal Interviews

Marta Grijalva, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador Victor Hugo Viñueza, Ministerio de Educación y CulturaGermán Parra Alvarracin, Unidad Coordinadora de Proyectos MEC-BID Juan Pablo Bustamante, UNICEF-EcuadorBaudouin Duquesne, Banco Interamericano de DesarrolloErnesto Castillo, Union Nacional de EducadoresSusana Araujo, Ministerio de Educación y CulturaMarcia Gilbert de Babra, Consejo Municipal de GuayaquilRoberto Arauco, Dirección BilingüeSeven school network directors* Twenty-three school directors*

Teachers at school network schools*Parents at school network schools*

School Network Visits*

Quito CEM-EB/PRODECQuito CEM-EB/PRODECGuayaquil CEM-EB/PRODECPichincha-CEM-PROMECEBPichincha-Redes AmigasPichincha-Redes Amigas

Cotopaxi-Redes Amigas (Bilingüe)

* Names and exact locations not listed to protect confidentiality.




63

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