Organization of American States
Inter American Agency for Cooperation and Development
PROJECT CONCEPT
1. Project Name: POLICIES AND STRATEGIES TO PREVENT SCHOOL FAILURE
2. Country submitting the project: Argentina.
3. Other participating countries:
4. Priority Area: Education
5. Execution Period: 2003-2007
6. Objectives, brief description of activities and expected results of the project:
6.a Objectives:
6.a.1. General Objectives:
Guarantee school permanence and completion using integral equity and quality criteria for
disadvantaged or vulnerable social groups enabling them to appropriate meaningful knowledge
and complete the compulsory school trajectory.
This objective is based on the goal of “guaranteeing primary education universal access for all children for
year 2010” established in the Plan of Action of the III Summit of the Americas, that among other aspects,
responds to the needs of less favored populations. Moreover, the objective is also on the consequent
commitment for "developing and implementing projects emphasizing equity and quality in education"
established at the Second Meeting of Ministers of Education of the Americas. (See Appendix 1)
6.a.2. Strategic Objective:
Guide educational policies toward prevention of school failure prevention in terms of
permanence, completion and achievements (quality and equity), under an integral perspective
and using innovative, flexible criteria that takes into consideration the specific needs of different
population groups and the heterogeneity of national and subregional contexts.
Current data on educational systems' internal performance reveals that repetition, over aged students, poor
educational achievements and temporary or definitive dropout constitute cumulative obstacles that deserve
privileged treatment by educational agencies. School failure dynamics, with different impact in countries and
subregions, make previous and present actions focusing on the expansion of coverage unproductive, and lead
to a re-configuration of current educational policies.
Considering the multiplicity of school internal and external factors affecting failure, in the late nineties
educational administrations implemented a set of policies and strategies of diverse content, nature and reach
to solve gaps in schooling and dropout problems.
The present project aims to systematize the experience accumulated in countries and build an array of
strategic possibilities to address school permanence with quality, and make it available and effective for the
region. Complementarily, it seeks to stimulate a preventive rationality of school failure in contrast to the
traditional palliative logics used for facing obstacles affecting school trajectories. The expected outcome is to
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Organization of American States
Inter American Agency for Cooperation and Development
build a strategy that is transversal to policies, classrooms and families based on the prospective capacity to
detect warning signs of beginnings of school failure.
6.a.3 Methodological Objective:
Generate a comparative approach on implemented policies and strategies to guarantee school
permanence in each one of its specific topics, and assess their pertinence and transferability to
different national education systems and their effects on the improvement of student's
trajectory.
In different countries, implementation of policies and strategies has been object of evaluation and rectification
processes, both during progress and final moments of their development. Comparative studies are scarce and
come mostly from academic and international financial institutions. Developing a comparative analysis
assessing pertinence, transferability and impact of different school retention actions surpasses national
capacities and needs to be part of a multilateral cooperation initiative.
6.a.4 Specific Objectives:
I. Generate a multilateral exchange mechanism for sharing experiences and competencies
developed around policies and strategies for school retention with quality. Allow for the
reduction of time in the design and implementation of actions, strengthen experiences in
progress and rectify difficulties based on international experience.
Central educational administrations were forced to privilege some recurrent school failure problems in order to
comply with established political objectives, the main characteristics of the population and their most important
demands. This situation allowed for the development of relevant specialization in some courses of action while
others remain underdeveloped.
The starting point of this project is that no single country can, by itself, develop national policies and strategies
to address school retention with quality taking into consideration the diversity of contexts and issues. On the
contrary, it is necessary to strengthen the mechanisms for the socialization of lessons learned together with
the implementation of initiatives that provide each national central administration with a range of proved and
evaluated strategies.
III. Evaluate windows of opportunity in policies and strategies for school retention and failure
prevention and plan for actions of multilateral cooperation, considering the region as a global
totality.
III. Focus multilateral cooperation efforts toward the training and education of human resources
facing the different sides of this issue in order to build national and subnational teams with
competencies for formulating, implementing and evaluating such actions.
To overcome the difficulties experienced by methodologies used in training programs for experts, functionaries
and individual technicians to build organizational learning, these efforts have to use alternative methodologies
directed toward educating and training national and subnational teams in decision-making and management
competencies.
IV. Raise consciousness in educational key players and the society about providing equal
opportunities for school permanence, achievements and school completion, redirect concepts
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Organization of American States
Inter American Agency for Cooperation and Development
and practices that tacitly or explicitly undervalue the consolidation of such an ideal, and avoid
the fragmentation of education opportunities in all aspects.
6.b. Description of Activities:
Considers four modules of activities that allow for the selection of policies and strategies on the prevention of
school failure that are accessible and transferable to countries in the region.
a) Module on the comparative analysis of main subregional and country factors involved in the problem
drawing from available sources of information;
b) Module on collection and systematization of hemispheric and subregional policies, strategies and
initiatives addressing the factors considered in the first module;
c) Module on comparative assessment of policies and strategies results and impacts, and outline preventive
recommendations;
d) Module on the debate and training of coordinators of the design, implementation and management of
policies and strategies for school retention (forums and internships).
Given the wide range of issues and factors associated to school failure, the project's length is four years and
takes into consideration three working criteria:
The first criterion concerns the sequential character present in the deficit of school trajectories, and finally
leads to school failure: a) repetition; b) over aged students; c) poor educational achievement, and d) partial
and definite dropout. Such progression also illustrates the growing complexity that policies and strategies need
to take into consideration to overcome these difficulties.
The second criterion addresses the critical moments in school trajectory that require higher efforts from key
educational players to guarantee successful trajectories. Thus, educational vulnerability concentrates in: a) the
first year of compulsory education; b) the first cycle of compulsory education; c) the progression of cycles and
knowledge and d) the completion of compulsory education.
The third criterion organizes the different policies and strategies contexts that need to be taken into
consideration by addressing issues of school retention and prevention of school failure1. To focus on the
decisions taken by educational authorities when implementing actions of positive discrimination, the approach
must consider: a) policies and strategies of institutional management; b) policies and strategies for teachers; c)
pedagogical policies and strategies; d) policies and strategies for accreditation of years of study and
knowledge.
The combination of these criteria allows identifying the main issues on school retention and analyzing policies
and strategies based on their specific effects on these issues. We suggest the following organizational plan:
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First year (2004): focus on issues of repetition with special emphasis on the first school year. Include
the four contexts of policies and strategies based on the four modules of activities.
Second year (2005): focus on issues of over aged students and its effects on the first school cycle.
Include the four contexts of policies and strategies based on the four modules of activities.
Even though the central taxonomy has been to emphasize the particularities of the target population (marginal and rural
population from diverse cultural and linguistic contexts, etc.) based on the criteria of this nature, it is also true that these
choices have impeded receiving and benefiting from competencies and experiences that could transcend specific
contexts for implementation. This situation is evident not only when we analyze the adapation of experiences among
countries, but also and more paradoxically when we consider the poor feedback from actions developed within a single
country.
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Organization of American States
Inter American Agency for Cooperation and Development
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Third year (2006): focus on issues of poor educational achievements and their relationship with cycle
and knowledge progression. Include the four contexts of policies and strategies based on the four
modules of activities.
Fourth year (2007): focus on issues of school completion and its relationship with school trajectory.
Include the four contexts of policies and strategies based on the four modules of activities.
Proposed distribution of roles and activities among countries and subregions:
Given the wide range of issues and measures associated with school failure, countries hold different
competencies depending on the efforts targeted toward specific issues.
The organizational structure allows for the distribution of responsibilities among countries and subregions,
following political courses and strategies as well as considering thematic areas corresponding to the project
years. For example, one country prefers to focus on systematizing and assessing pedagogical strategies over
the course of the project, and focus on coordinating or co-coordinating actions on issues of repetition during
the first year of the project (See Table 1, in the appendix)
6.c. Expected Results:
- Systematization and dissemination of policies and initiatives produced at the hemispheric and
subregional level addressing school permanence with quality. At least 15 systematized actions per year (three
for each subregión) and a minimum of 60 actions at the end of the year is recommended. The result will be a
"toolkit" including policies, strategies, measures and materials at the hemispheric level to anticipate and
address the problem of school failure.
- Establishment of a supranational mechanism to evaluate the initiatives for school failure prevention
and specialized in the analysis of transferability, flexibility, management and sustainability criteria to
ensure their applicability in different subregions, countries and localities.
- Establishment of criteria and indicators to detect situations of school failure.
- Trained national and subnational teams to formulate, manage and evaluate a diversified set of
strategies and actions to prevent school failure. The number of participants is subject to the number
of countries participating in the project.
- Develop at least four forums (one per year) to discuss policies for preventing school failure with
instances for decision-makers and experts, both for the education community and the society in
general.
7. Project Justification:
Note: this justification develops only some of the topics; the rest will be completed with the
contributions from participant countries.
The project giver priority to actions that guarantee basic education for it constitutes a recognized human, nontransferable right within the countries in the region. Equity and quality problems persist and are in most cases
worse in secondary education. The solution to these problems requires, as a necessary condition,
guaranteeing beforehand meaningful learning, permanence in school and completion of primary school for the
whole population.
Available statistical reports confirm that the population in the region, including those with low resources, enters
primary school at some moment of their lives. This is the result of a sustained effort made by national
education systems to widen the educational supply over the last decades of the XX century. Moreover, in
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Inter American Agency for Cooperation and Development
some countries the wider educational supply was recently accompanied by an extension of the years of
compulsory schooling, which resulted in a decrease of illiteracy rates in the region and some subregions.
The expansion of education supply has not implied a correlative universalization of quality education, or an
effective completion of the compulsory segment of schooling. Problems of repetition, dropout and poor
educational achievement indicate that providing equal educational opportunities in the region is still far from
being accomplished. Data from Latin America reveals that “most school-aged children enter primary school but
less than half complete it.”2
As the regional project on educational indicators (PRIE) shows, “In primary education, the gap between gross
and net enrollment rates is disturbing in all countries. It points to questions related to the efficiency and quality
of the education system. A gross rate over 100% may indicate a significant number of under-age students, but
most probably reflects over-age enrollment due to grade repetition or late entry system, given that a gross rate
higher than the net rate shows an important presence of students with eventually young age for the level but,
mainly over aged observed in high repetition or late entry. The results of the latter include grater expenditure
than would be necessary in order to provide education for the alleged target population that is the students of
the official age group. ”3
The reports show that in terms of repetition there are different subregional patterns. “While more than half of
the Caribbean countries show repetition rates lower than five percent, only six of the sixteen Latin American
countries are below that level”. Moreover, repetition rates in primary school as a whole differ from those in the
first grade. “The fact that the higher proportions of repetitions are present in the first grade of primary
education indicates that the first experience in school is a failure for an important group of students and thus
increases the possibilities of them dropping out of the system”4
Passing the fourth grade of primary school is considered the threshold of schooling to achieve a lasting level of
literacy. “Even though the majority of children have access to primary education in Latin America, it is far from
being universal. The percentage of children that don’t reach the fifth grade of primary school varies within 6
and 28”5.
Based on the specific analysis of internal effectiveness in primary education, the great disparities -not only
between countries but specially inside the national context- in children's school trajectories are strongly
associated with geographic, demographic, ethnic, gender, socioeconomic, cultural and political and
institutional factors.
Kliksberg, Bernardo: “Education Inequity in Latin America. Some strategic issues”. In "La Educacion", Nr. 132-133,
IACD-OEA.
3 Regional Educational Indicators Project: Educational Panorama of the Americas. Regional Report. Summit of the
Americas. -OREALC- Chile's Ministry of Education; Santiago, 2002.
4 Ibid.
5 UNESCO-OREALC: Educational Situation in Latin America and the Caribbean (1980-2000). Santiago de Chile,
2001.
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