Leveraging the Private Sector for Results in education

Local corporations and businesses supporting education reform

through philantropic strategies

Case study: MEXICO

David CalderónMarch 31, 2010

Independent, pluralistic citizen initiative committed to steer justice and prosperity for all Mexicans by achieving quality public education.

Agenda setting.Definition of the terms in the public debate.Confluence for the best decision outcomes.

Promote a change in civic culture, contributing to reach consensus and summoning all Mexicans to share the responsibility over the urgent improvement needed in the national education system, by offering tools for citizen involvement.

MP proposes, supports and evaluates national educational public policies in the key of the fundamental right of all children to quality education.

Observation on implementation and results of actual policies (vgr. Enlace Assessment, National Tenure Contest for Teachers).

Questioning and modification of actual policies (vgr. SBM Proyecto Escuelas de Calidad).

Proposal of new policies (vgr. Jornadas de Transparencia, Compulsory and universal certification for teachers).

Specific strategies

Public Forum DemandConsejo Ciudadano Autónomo por la Educación, network of 148 organizations.

Independent report on the state of national education

Local activation, media presence, public discussion in the web.

Model TestingConsidering the implications of the PEC basic model, MP expressed its

concerns about six aspects in the classical PEC approach:• A bias that favours already solid schools (long established, functional urban

schools) and widens the gaps with additional investment for the best performers.• A tendency to set goals and indicators focused on the material improvement of the

school, and not specifically in educational performance of the students.• A lack of orientation to invest specifically in capacity building processes for

teachers and parents.• A trend to envision the school isolated in the zona escolar (school district), and

thus alienated from the supervisor and the opportunities of networking.• A calculation of the economic transfers in a per school and not per student

basis.• An absence of the equity concerns not only between schools but also inside them,

without an strategy to identify and address the condition of at-risk students.

Model Testing, PEC FIDEIn order to meet these challenges, MP designed a complementing version, FIDE

(Fortalecimiento e Inversión Directa a las Escuelas) in which:• Instead of self selection, there is an invitation to the most impoverished schools,

typically also with the worst educational outcomes.• Instead of multiple, vague and process indicators as evaluation, the joint effort is

focused –mainly, not only- in permanence and learning indicators.• Instead of non recognition, a mandatory minimum proportion of funds is applied to

parents and teachers training.• Instead of detachment, the whole process of increased autonomy is rooted at the

scale of the district and the services from supervision support are aligned to meet the needs of school based management.

• With slight adjustments for each state, the funding considers a per student calculus, promoting the vision that “per student” must set an ideal of a “for each student” investment.

• Instead of invisibility, specific criteria and investment are established for minimizing educational risk in each community.

PEC FIDE

Evaluation• Important betterments: infrastructure and learning conditions, participation and

collective thinking, supervision support, good practice exchange, modest drop-out reduction, significative increase in standarized tests scores.

• Limitations: Bad timing for information and fund dispersion, high pressure to expend, overloading principals and supervisors, ill decision making from parents,rules quite prescriptive colliding with the main inspiration towards school autonomy.

• In the impoverished condition of the selected schools, it is not so clear how to balance intervention and freedom.

• PEC FIDE is an example of a PPP scheme which impacts positively in quality education; with about 400,000 USD, during its first year of implementation, it has reached 57,760 students, 332 schools, and 3,652 teachers in six states. Central and local authorities, NGOs, as well as principals, teachers, students, parents and local educational authorities work together in order to reverse left-behind and drop-out rates, in addition to consider real inclusion in the frame of school management for quality.

Some preliminary lessons Without a strong foundation in expert knowledge of public policy, most

philantropic endeavors are, at best, mitigations. In typical “charter approach” -public funding / private operation- the

projects tend to remain isolated even if exemplary cases. Some kind of Public-Private Partnerships are still to be developed, outside

the box: public questioning + shared designing + no direct private funding + follow up and evaluation with strong non-state presence.

In the PEC FIDE case, we find that the private partner gains a wide outreach, as designer of the intervention, but lacks of any significant control in implementation; the public partner gains in free consulting and legitimacy, but its rules are ill prepared for flexible and innovative model testing. Nevertheless, it is a new way to share strengths from both worlds.