The quality of education is poor in Latin American countries as indicated by the high repetition rates and the low scores obtained for reading tests on international achievement studies. This is especially so for the rural and marginal-urban schools. Numerous attempts have been made to improve the quality but most of them have failed when going to scale. The typical school with teachers instructing average pupils faces a variety of problems which create barriers to the provision of the high-quality education required for economic and social development. Thus a new type of school and a new teaching model is required. An extensive review of evaluation reports on educational experiments and 20 years of visiting schools in most Latin American countries suggests that the Escuela Nueva (the ‘New School’) is one of the most promising prototypes capable of adapting in other countries of the region. Its rationale is to blend conceptually sound and valid educational theory with a set of operational learning models and present it in a ‘kit’ form which can be assembled so as to deliver active instruction. The ‘glue’ holding these techniques together is found in the demonstration schools and in the self-formative textbooks. Since its inception as a pilot project 15 years ago, the Escuela Nueva ‘kit’ is now being successfully used in about half of the 40,000 Colombian rural schools. This book analyzes the operation of the programme, sending both encouraging messages and warnings to planners looking for alternative strategies to raise educational quality.
