SUMMA Director Named Member of Brookings Institution’s Millions Learning International Advisory Group | New York

The director of SUMMA, Javier González, was invited to join the International Advisory Group of the initiative “Millions Learning: Scaling up quality education in developing countries”, a project of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education that addresses the issue of how to scale up quality education for all children and youth, and experiences in the developing world.

The Millions Learning International Advisory Group meeting was held on September 24 in New York, in parallel with the UN General Assembly meetings.

With this meeting of the Advisory Group, the beginning of the second stage of the initiative was formalized, a phase to which SUMMA is integrated and which will be focused on the generation of evidence and recommendations on the scaling process in global education, strengthening the link between research and practice. To this end, the program will launch Real-time Scaling Labs in partnership with local institutions in several countries, through which they will work to learn, support and document in real time those ongoing initiatives focused on scaling up interventions that improve student learning. These labs are not physical spaces, but a process for the collection of this evidence.

The International Advisory Group, will provide strategic guidance that contributes to the process of implementation, adaptation and learning of these scaling labs in real time in three areas: 1) scaling in education that emerges from the experience gathered in the scaling labs; 2) process of implementation of scaling labs and research strategy and documentation; and 3) the impact and sustainability of scaling labs and strategies for disseminating key findings.

In the initial phase (2014-2016), the Brookings Centre for Universal Education undertook extensive scaling up and learning research that included 14 case studies from Brazil and Honduras, to Uganda and Zambia, Jordan and India. The study found that successful scaling up of quality learning often occurs when new approaches and ideas are allowed to develop and expand within margins and then spread to many more children and young people.

Access a summary of the Millions Learning initiative here.