Thursday 15 December 2016

A small act of national suicide in Peru

FOR most of this century, Peru’s economy has shone: income per person has doubled in the past dozen years. But education failed to keep up. In 2012 Peru ranked last among the 65 countries that took part in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which tests the reading, maths and science proficiency of 15-year-olds.

Fortunately, Peru then found an outstanding education minister. Jaime Saavedra, an economist whose mother was a teacher, spent ten years at the World Bank, rising to be vice-president for poverty reduction. Appointed three years ago to the education portfolio, he was the only minister to keep his job when Pedro Pablo Kuczynski replaced Ollanta Humala as Peru’s president in July. He has generalised a previous pilot plan to link teachers’ pay to performance, overhauled teacher training and school management and begun a crash programme of repairing dilapidated school buildings. He has also championed a law passed in 2014, which for the first time subjected universities to minimum standards for probity and educational outcomes.  

Mr Saavedra’s stewardship has brought results. Performance in...Continue reading

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