SUMMA-OECS KIX LAC Advisory Council Meeting: Working for the Right to Education in the Caribbean

The second meeting of the KIX Hub Advisory Council for Latin America and the Caribbean was held. Meeting of the KIX Hub Advisory Council for Latin America and the Caribbean, made up of directors and representatives of international organizations working for the development of education in the region, was held. The meeting was held for the first time in person at the University of the West Indies in Bridgetown with online participation of the rest of the teams.

During the opening, Florencio Ceballos, senior program specialist at the International Development Research Centre – IDRC -, stated that “the success of the KIX in Latin America has been its central role in generating synergies, collaboration and knowledge production jointly between organizations and, in turn, between countries, exploring the community and the feasibility of new projects”.

Ian McPherson, leader of the Global Partnership for Education – GPE -, welcomed and thanked the Advisory Council and the SUMMA and OECS teams for their commitment to the KIX project for Latin America and the Caribbean, highlighting that “the evaluation of these first years of implementation showed very positive results in terms of added value for their representatives and the 10 countries that make up the Hub. We understand that education systems are complex and even more so with the particularity of each region, and making a significant change requires clarity in objectives and purposes, a problem-solving analysis and the use of research to develop evidence-based solutions”. 

For his part, Javier Gonzalez, director of SUMMA, thanked colleagues from the participating organizations, highlighting that “what we do is changing reality but we have to keep working to achieve our ultimate goal, which is to generate real impacts. Our work has focused during these three years of the KIX LAC Center on teacher professional development, Covid-19 and public education, and now we are going to focus on the different areas related to strengthening public education in LAC”. Accompanying these words, Didacus Jules, Director of OECS, reinforced the idea that we must continue to carry out diagnostics and evaluations, and above all, work to accelerate the transformation of improvement processes for both teachers and students. 

Joel Warrican, Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, remarked on the trust and synergy achieved with SUMMA to make the teacher training program more inclusive and strengthen it, benefiting not only the teachers but also the students in the Caribbean region; and Michael Fullan, director of Global Leadership New Pedagogies for Deep Learning, referred to transparency without judgment, as this allows us to address the specifics of what is happening specifically in educational systems, because “it is necessary to have transparent data that provide specificity and precision about educational systems, but not impose prescribed solutions”.

During the meeting, the results of the KIX mid-term evaluation were presented, highlighting the relevance of the activities and the good interaction with the experts, especially in the construction of tools and capacities during and post-pandemic. The meeting also focused on the deepening of the topics of teacher professional development, early childhood education and the construction of communities around these topics, opening participation to other actors in the education sector.

Closing the meeting, Josette Altmann Borbón, FLACSO’s Secretary General for Latin America and the Caribbean, concluded that political polarization in countries and societies was evidenced by the pandemic and should continue to be a priority to promote education, “we need more hours in schools to ensure quality learning and evaluate what are the real possibilities of children to access it, thinking about how we can connect education with the real market and end the inequity between private schools compared to most public schools”.

Likewise, Sylvia Schmelkes, researcher at the Research Institute for the Development of Education at the Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México, reinforced the position on maintaining regular evaluations and balancing them with formative evaluations because “the former inform us about learning gaps and we must ask ourselves what to do with that information, because we should not judge schools, students or teachers, what we must judge is the system. The system is failing because it reproduces gaps and the evaluation allows us to see that”.

The meeting was also attended by Raúl Chacón, director of the KIX LAC Center; Alexandra Solano from GPE; Maciel Morales Aceitón and Mar Botero from KIX LAC; Sisera Simon, head of education development at OECS; Lisa Sargusingh-Terrance, education development management specialist at OECS; and Sonia Rees, information management officer at OECS.

Both IDRC and GPE representatives congratulated SUMMA and OECS for the work done with the KIX LAC program during the two years of implementation.