I Told You the Education System is Bad....

The following is an article a fellow volunteer sent to us from The Economist..... Education in Peru When teacher is a dunce Mar 29th 2007 LIMA From The Economist print edition A long-overdue attempt to raise the quality of schooling JUST for a change this month, when Peru's schoolchildren trooped miserably back to their classrooms after the summer holiday, they were not faced with a teachers' strike. Instead, the leaders of SUTEP, as the teachers' union is called, meekly offered to work with the education ministry to improve the quality of teaching. That marks an important victory for the centrist government of Alan García—one that may be noticed across a region whose educational standards lag those of many Asian countries. Peru has done relatively well at getting children into school: over 90% complete primary and two-thirds secondary schooling, a better record than in richer Argentina and Mexico. The problem is that Peruvians do not learn much in the classroom. When it entered a 43-country international test in 2000, Peru came bottom of the class, well behind even the other Latin American participants. There are several reasons for that. Alberto Fujimori, the country's president of 1990-2000, built lots of schools but gave no thought to education. Today, four-fifths of schools are in poor repair, obliging the government to promise to spend $100m this year fixing them. Education spending is rising, but at 3.3% of GDP this year it remains below the regional average. Alejandro Toledo, Mr García's predecessor, doubled teachers' salaries (to an average of $350 a month) but did not tie that to higher standards. In December, the education ministry announced that all teachers would have to take a proficiency exam. SUTEP's leaders, most of whom belong to radical Marxist parties, have long rejected teacher evaluation. They got hold of a copy of the exam and posted it on their website. That was "the most serious mistake" in SUTEP' s history, in the view of José Chang, the education minister. "They lost what little confidence the public still had in the union." The ministry rewrote the exam and required the country's 250,000 teachers to sit it in January. Four out of five of them did, in defiance of the union's boycott. Almost half of those who sat the exam were unable to solve elementary maths questions and a third failed a reading comprehension test. The government has gone on to limit SUTEP's perks. It says it will no longer deduct union dues from teachers' pay cheques and has ordered 300 union leaders to return to the classroom or lose their salaries. It is also launching a pilot plan to decentralise the education system, giving control to local government. These moves are long overdue. By dint of them, Mr Chang, a former university rector, has become Mr García's most popular minister. Still, it is one thing to expose the teachers' limitations. More must be done to provide Peru's children with the teaching they deserve.