LAC Regional Education Policy Assessment
Improving the quality of basic education in developing countries is one of the overarching goals of the new USAID Education Strategy Goal 1, Improved Reading Skills for 100 Million Children in Primary Grades by 2015. In the past decade, USAID’s Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean’s Office of Regional Sustainable Development/Education and Human Resources (LAC/RSD/EHR) has promoted a variety of strategies for improving basic education that helped set the foundation for achieving this goal. Strategies have included creating a promising model for improving the teaching of literacy in the early grades of primary education (Center of Excellence for Teacher Training [CETT]), supporting the development of reading assessment tools, increasing community involvement and school management effectiveness, and decentralization. Additionally, the Bureau’s portfolio has focused on improving the quality and relevance of policy dialogue around education reform, both as a means of strengthening regional capacity to implement reforms as well as a way to build political support for improving educational quality. In particular, through the Partnership for Education Revitalization in the Americas (PREAL), the LAC Bureau has worked to create a more informed policy dialogue, among other policy advocacy activities, by reaching out to both government and non-governmental actors across the region.