9/5/08

Re: [Comunidad E-ducativa] GCE/CME: Questions on Global School Report 2008

A: Comunidad E-ducativa y Debateducacion
Estimad@s amig@s:
Les adjunto abajo los intercambios (en inglés) con Lucia Fry, asesora de políticas de
la Campaña Global por la Educación (CME) en torno a mi carta dirigida a la CME sobre
los Informes Escolares 2008 enviada el 17 abril pasado. Lastimosamente no tengo
tiempo para traducir estos intercambios, para quienes no leen bien inglés.
Básicamente, ella responde a las inquietudes planteadas en mi carta y yo le contesto
diciendo que por ahora no puedo seguir el diálogo, pues requiere tiempo y
elaboración, pero que lo haré a mi regreso de Argentina y Brasil, la última semana de
este mes. Así que continuará....
Saludos,
Rosa Maria Torres
Coordinadora, Pronunciamiento Latinoamericano por una Educación para Todos
Moderadora Comunidad E-ducativa y Debateducacion
http://www.fronesis.org
http://otraeduacion.blogspot.com/

Date: Thu, 8 May 2008 19:47:06 -0700 (PDT)
From: ROSAMARIA TORRES <rmt_fronesis@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Replying to your concerned email of 17 April-on GCE 2008 Global School Report
To: "lucia@campaignforeducation.org" <lucia.fry@gmail.com>
CC: Camilla Croso <camcroso@gmail.com>, Owain James <owain@campaignforeducation.org>,
Kailash Satyarthi <kailashsatyarthi@gmail.com>, Kailash Satyarthi <kailash@globalmarch.org>

Dear Lucia Fry Policy Advisor
Global Campaign for Education

Thank you very much for your informative and honest answer to my queries on GCE's
Global School Reports 2008. I really appreciate the time and effort you have
dedicated to it.

Unfortunately, at this point I am overwhelmed with work and leaving tomorrow on a
ten-day working mission, and cannot thus dedicate the time that a similarly detailed
reply would imply from my side, in order to continue this dialogue. I will do so as
soon as I return from Argentina and Brazil.

In the meantime, let me suggest you and your GCE colleagues to visit a blog I have
recently organized as an Observatory on the Education for All (EFA) initiative, with
which I am familiar since its inception, prior to 1990, and about which I have
written extensively. In fact, one such articles was published on GCE website long
ago. Another one (drafted in English, on follow up of EFA in Latin America, "From
Dakar to Cochabamba") was commissioned in 2001 by Anne Jellema from GCE.
The blog is http://educacion-para-todos.blogspot.com/. I have tried to make it
bilingual Spanish-English, at least some of the main texts, so as to be able to reach
beyond Latin America.

Also, I have created a blog with the exchanges regarding GCE's 2008 School Reports
circulated in two virtual communities I moderate, one national (Debateducacion, in
Ecuador) and one international (Comunidad E-ducativa), both conducted in Spanish of
course. Hopefully, Camilla Crosso, CLADE coordinator and my friend for many years,
and a member of Comunidad E-ducativa, might be able to assist you if some
translations are required. These exchanges in English will also be added to the blog
so that they are not confined to you and me and a few GCE staff but to a wider
audience. The blog is http://cme-informesescolares2008.blogspot.com/

Kind regards,
Rosa Maria Torres
http://www.fronesis.org
http://otraeduacion.blogspot.com/
http://educacion-para-todos.blogspot.com/
http://cme-informesescolares2008.blogspot.com/
http://confinteavi.blogspot.com/

"lucia@campaignforeducation.org" <lucia.fry@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Rosa Maria Torres,
Thank you for your reply and acknowledgement of receiving the School Report
methodology. I'm pleased to hear that it has provided response to some of your
concerns. Since you don't say which of the issues from your first letter remain
pertinent, I'm going to take a guess at these as well as responding to your subequent email. But if I miss anything,
please don't hesitate to let me know!

1. The aim of the exercise is to evaluate countries' efforts to achieve EFA, against
a range of objectively verifiable indicators of political will and implementation
capacity. The idea of producing an index or ranking is to enable a comparative
critique and encourage competition between governments to achieve good scores. The
format and design is purposely informal and irreverant, designed to be attractive to the media
and public in a way that many academic or policy reports are not. We hope that the
development and publication of the report will contribute to the 'watch-dog' role of
civil society in monitoring government performance and that it will be a useful and
relevant tool for education coalitions to advocate towards their governments. Some 15 national
coalitions have already applied for support to do national-level launches and
dissemination exercises.
As should be apparent from the methodology, it is intended wherever possible to
reflect performance on all the EFA goals, though paucity of data presented real
problems. It would not be quite accurate to say that it is an evaluation exercise
from civil society's perception as the report drew on existing data sources to derive the indicators and
rankings. However, some of these were developed by civil society - notably Education
International, Transparency International, Right To Education Project. The idea was
to 'marry' official data and these alternative sources to provide an alternative take on the official statistics - we may
or may not have been successful in this ambition, of course.

We launched the report at the EFA High-Level Group meeting in December to provide a
critical view of the progress to compare with the rather more positive picture that
UNESCO, the World Bank and the Fast-Track Initiative put forward.

2. This is the first time that GCE has published a global School Report, but it builds strongly on past experience. Since 2004, we have
published an annual report card on 22 donors' performance against a range of
indicators using official data, mainly that reported to the OECD Development
Assistance Committee by donors themselves. These reports rank governments on a range
of indicators of aid quantity and quality, in order to test their political will to
achieve Education For All and promote accountability for commitments and promises
publicly made. In 2005, GCE worked with its regional member organization ASPBAE to
produce the first report rating developing country governments' efforts in fulfilling
the Education For All pledge. The Asia Report Card, titled 'Must do better', used
secondary data to score 14 Asian countries against five benchmarks of education access, quality and equity, which together
reflected civil society priorities for the successful achievement of EFA. The report
achieved significant media coverage and good take-up by national coalitions in the
region. It was this experience which encouraged us to try to go global with the
report in 2007.

The decision to produce a global School Report was taken by the GCE Board in their
face-to-face meeting in December 2006. The GCE Secretariat then led the process of
developing content, look and feel of the report. It was further discussed in a
meeting of regional networks in January 2007 and a series of teleconferences in the
first half of the year. CLADE played a full part in these meetings, and aired a number of
concerns particularly around the pedagogical overtones and informal tone of the
report. However, based on past experience in using this approach, the GCE Secretariat took the final decision to press ahead with the
basic formula, though with some modifications responding to the CLADE concerns.

3, 4, 5 I hope that these have been answered by your reading of the full report with
Notes on Souces and Calculations. Please let me know if you have any further concerns.

6. Sources should also be clear from the full report. You are quite right in
suggesting that the data lags behind present reality by at least 2 years and in some
cases more. We felt comfortable to live with this because it was an issue that
affected all countries reasonably equitably (and if the data was older, this
reflected their poor reporting anyway). Also, it is generally accepted that reports
such as the GMR also grapple with the same issue and still entitle themselves the
'2008 Report' even though the data is much older.

7. National coalitions were consulted on the rankings and report cards and in some
cases were asked to provide additional data where we had gaps. However, because the
challenge of data sourcing proved to be more serious than we originally anticipated,
the timeframe for doing so was seriously compressed and this is an area we would seek
to improve on in future. We have received similar concerns from two other coalitions
who are unhappy with the data that we used and would have preferred a lengthier
dialogue on what would be most appropriate. We will seek to address this issue in
developing future reports, because, as you suggest, there is little point in
developing and issuing them if country coalitions do not use them. However, we would
only ever aim to make them a complement to existing national research and not to
supplant it in any way. It is a decision of national coalitions as to how much they
want to use them.

Just a note of clarification - it has never been our intention that these reports
are a centrepiece of Global Action Week.

8. I'm not totally sure how to answer this point - I suppose the 'Teacher' is the
voice of civil society. Most of the report cards were drafted by the regional
networks (or researchers working under their supervision) and circulated to the
coalitions for comment and amendment, if that helps?

Finally just to respond to your subsequent email, I want to reassure you that we do
appreciate that there are limitations to this kind of report. It is dependent on
quantitative data (which may be incomplete or inaccurate) and does not offer the
richer insights that more qualitative, contextually-placed work does. We aim to
address some of these concerns in future iterations of the report and are keen to
learn by doing as I said in my email of 27th April.

I would also welcome further correspondence on your ideas for an alternative GMR. In
addition to the School Report, we have also been supporting coalitions in Africa and
Asia to undertake an Education Watch initiative - which looks at progress towards EFA
in more holistic and contextual manner. (Latin America was not included only because
the regional network was not yet fully formed at that stage). It might be interesting
for you to look at these reports and the methodology used.

Please don't hesitate to get in touch with me if you would like further clarification
on any of these matters, and I look forward to discussion with you in future.

With very best wishes,

Lucia Fry
Policy Advisor
Global Campaign for Education

On 29/04/2008, ROSAMARIA TORRES <rmt_fronesis@yahoo.com> wrote:

Dear Luci Fry
Global Education Campaign.

Thanks for your reply to my letter (in Spanish). Hopefully somebody translated it to
you, unless you read Spanish, which would be even better.

The document circulated by Camilla Crosso of CLADE at few days ago
http://www.campaignforeducation.org/schoolreport/2008_reports/Spanish-Indicators.pdf
provided light into some of the questions posed in my letter regarding the objectives, sources and methodology used in the preparation of
these 2008 School Reports. However, many other questions remain unanswered and new
ones emerge after looking at the data, indicators and rankings attributed to
countries. Also, my letter did not address the issue of indicators and rakings
provided to "donor countries", which I found later.

The "2008 Report Cards" do not reflect the educational situation of countries, not
only because the statistics used to build the indicators are old (often 3, 4 or more
years old) but also because they are not reliable, they are incomplete, many of them
are highly subjective and they do not capture contexts, qualities and dynamics in
each country. It is basically about numbers, no content, no pedagogy, no learning, no
purpose for learning. Also, they see education as a "sector", without connection to
political, economic, cultural and broad social issues which contribute to "education
policy" and actually shape it (e.g. 'political will' in education is related to
political will in all other supporting policies and actual living and learning
conditions of people).

It remains unclear what was the role of national organizations in the decision,
preparation and validation process of these reports. They could and should have had
an active role in correcting disinformation, obsolete data and evident biases and in
providing contextualized and updated feedback. We see however, at this point, that
some Latin American organizations are trying to take distance from this exercise,
either claiming they knew and know nothing about the sources and methodology used
by GCE (e.g. it is the case in Ecuador, where the Ministry of Education prepared a
protest note to GCE which you must have received and with whose data and arguments I
coincide to a great extent) or saying that these School Reports are not in any way
related to the Global Action Week and that they respond to "other GCE activities".
Under these circumstances, I wonder whether the exercise can achieve the intended
goal of influencing politicians, decision makers and policies in a positive way, or
whether they have created additional conflict and resistance, and additional
disinformation to the population. Also, this way of doing things and country profiles
ignores and devalues national research and evaluation efforts many of us are doing in
our countries and regions, precisely to go beyond the simplistic statistics and often
analyses and interpretations of hollow national and international reports.

Anyhow, as you suggest, I will wait until you return from your holidays on May 5.
Until then, I will inform about these exchanges in the virtual communities I moderate
nationally and internationally, because my letter was circulated widely and they
are waiting for an answer from GCE.

Copy goes also to Kailash, with whom we met and toured in Spain last year, and shared
a panel in Madrid. My son and I also interviewed him in video in his hotel. I look
forward to receiving his news ad comments regarding this GCE exercise.

P.S. Over the past few months I have been proposing to elaborate an Alternative EFA
Monitoring Report, in order precisely to go beyond some of the shortcomings and
narrow visions of such reports, including the EFA Development Index (which includes
onlye four of the six EFA goals, and measures quality as "survival to grade 5"), and
the illusion that we are "half way", when EFA started in reality in 1990, not in
Dakar in 2000, where we came only to evaluate one whole decade of EFA efforts.

If GCE is interested in discussing such ideas, let me know. Maybe we can find ways
to start a dialogue on this. I will be preparing a brief proposal to be presented at
the PAGL-Policy Action Group on Learning retreat in Canada in August this year (I am
a PAGL member). The group in interested in discussing alternative EFA follow up.

Kind regards,
Rosa Maria Torres
Coordinator, Latin American Statement for Education for All
http://www.fronesis.org/prolat.htm

"lucia@campaignforeducation.org" <lucia.fry@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Rosa Maria,

Thanks very much for the email you sent last week. First please accept my apologies
for the late reply. A combination of Global Action Week and a trip to Japan have
made me rather behind with my correspondence, I'm afraid.

I wanted to write briefly today to acknowledge your concerns, and let you know that
we very much welcome constructive feedback on our reports. However, regrettably I am
not in a position to give a detailed response on the specifics as I have just
returned from a work trip and am heading straight off on holiday now. I will work
through each of the issues raised on my return and give you a proper full response
then. This will be after the 5th May.

As you're probably aware, this is the first time we've attempted a global report,
and it was done very much in the spirit of learning-by-doing, so we hope to be able
to draw on your comments to improve any such output in future.

Best wishes and looking forward to further correspondence with you,
Lucia
--
Lucia Fry
Policy Advisor
Global Campaign for Education
+44 207 561 7561 x 7294
www.campaignforeducation.org/joinup

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