Making Education Work: Latin American Ideas and Asian Results

This book compares the superlative performance of Asia's conventional systems with the poor performance of Latin America's schools, despite higher spending by the latter. The book showcases a variety of educational innovations developed to respond to Latin America's poor educational performance. While Latin America and Asia remain worlds apart in terms of education policy and results, both must strike a balance between educational performance and innovation that can be adapted quickly and creatively to the demands of the global economy. Making Education Work compares the superlative educational performance of Asia''s conventional systems-as measured in enrollment rates, internal efficiency and achievement tests-with Latin America, where poor quality, illiteracy and high dropout and repeater rates persist, despite disproportionately higher spending on education. Asia''s enviable achievements, however, have offered little incentive to reform education systems based more on rote learning than on developing creative and critical thinking. In contrast, Latin America''s shortcomings have unleashed an array of educational innovations showcased in this book, including social mobilization techniques, approaches to popular education and literacy, the use of television for mass education, creative testing applications, management tools borrowed from economics, and new models of rural education.;Aunque América Latina y Asia siguen siendo mundos diferentes en cuanto a políticas educativas y resultados de la educación, ambas regiones deben encontrar, entre el desempeño educativo y la innovación, un punto de equilibrio que pueda adaptarse con rapidez y creatividad a las exigencias de la economía mundial. Cómo mejorar la educación compara el rendimiento educativo sobresaliente de sistemas convencionales de Asia -medido por los índices de matrícula, la eficiencia interna y las pruebas de rendimiento- con el de América Latina, donde persisten la mala calidad, el analfabetismo y los altos índices de deserción escolar y repetición, a pesar de que el gasto en educación es mucho mayor. Sin embargo, los logros envidiables de Asia han ofrecido escasos incentivos para reformar los sistemas educativos que se basan principalmente en el aprendizaje de memoria y no en el desarrollo del pensamiento creativo y crítico. En cambio, las deficiencias de América Latina han suscitado una amplia gama de innovaciones educativas, que se presentan en este libro y entre las que se cuentan técnicas