Education Reform Evaluation in the Dominican Republic

In 1990, the Dominican Republic embarked on a process of basic education reform with the consensus of civil society organizations and the Government of the Dominican Republic. The debates led to a comprehensive 10-year reform plan—the Plan Decenal—begun in 1992.

DevTech conducted an external evaluation of the Plan Decenal's achievements. The evaluation's main goal was to provide guidelines for a new stage of the reform process. DevTech presented an objective and critical assessment of the reforms in order to invovle all sectors of the Dominican population in the development of a second Plan Decenal. The evaluation found that while the education sector continued to suffer from under-development that there was promise in public-private partnerships in the education sector. 

The evaluation identified eight principles for educational reform:

• Principle No. 1: Education cannot be improved by trying to change everything at the same time. A feasible reform program (vis-à-vis the theoretically optimal one) should concentrate on achieving a few critical goals and advance from there in successive stages.
• Principle No. 2: Education reform with the depth the Dominican Republic needs cannot be achieved during the tenure of one government administration. In fact, the necessary changes may require the consistent effort of several administrations from different political parties. That is why a successful reform program must be non-partisan and consensus-driven, though we are strongly of the opinion that a consensus base is not enough; the reform also has to be sensible (e.g., it cannot assume the equivalent of the Earth being flat).
• Principle No. 3: Good management does not come from authority, political power, or hierarchy. Good management is an advanced skill and cannot be improvised or achieve by appointing trusted aides. Education reform is a highly complex and involved process that requires top quality managers. If they are not available, it should be imported on the same basis that technical assistance and external resources are being brought from external sources.
• Principle No. 4: Reform goals must be achievable with the resources currently available under a hard budget constraint. If those targets are below what the Dominican economy and society at large require, more resources must be made available. If the targets overshoot their possibilities, they will contribute to disorganize the effort and make it fail.
• Principle No. 5: As a corollary to Principle 1, a given improvement of a reform program cannot be implemented equally in all institutions at the same time. As the reform effort advances, there will be inequalities of implementation simply because some agents are more skillful than others, but this should not be an impediment to the advance of the reforms.
• Principle No. 6: At least some of the proposed solutions should ideally be administratively feasible in the Dominican Republic, by the Dominican state, as it exists today. It should not be necessary to assume a state that is more administratively capable than currently exists, in order to implement all of the project’s points. Some points in the project should be implementable even if there is no improvement whatever in the administrative capacity of the state.
• Principle No. 7: One should start from the final goal and reason back. The final goal is for children to have more access to schooling and to learn more. Everything else is an intermediate goal.
• Principle No. 8: Improving capacity (e.g., improving capacity of principals to manage, or teachers to teach), without creating accountability mechanisms to create incentives to use that capacity, is largely useless, unless one is willing to make the unwarrantedly romantic assumption that teachers and principals will work hard, and, above all, predictably so, just for love of the craft. However, to create accountability pressure mechanisms without also expansing the personal and institutional supply capacity, is also largely useless, since there is nothing with which to respond to the accountability pressure.

The end product of DevTech's technical assistance served as input for a strategic planning exercise that the future Minister had requested and consisted of an initial diagnosis, policies and strategies, provincial planning, and pilot project design.

The evaluation was widely cited at the time and utilized as a key input into the planning process of the government.