August 2009 Archives

Dos artículos sobre las reformas educacionales en Ecuador y Venezuela publicados en The Economist y circulados por Patricio Navia, distinguido cientista polítco de NYU y UDP.  Incluyo su comentario sobre el tema.    Tal como sugiere Navia, Chile no hace noticia en los medios internacionales sobre sus reformas educacionales.  Probablemente esto esta relacionado con la naturaleza gradual de las reformas educacionales que se han implementado en los últimos años en Chile.  Si bien no han intentado transformar el sistema escolar chileno en poco tiempo y de forma drámatica, como en el caso venezolano, la evidencia muestra que los cambios en educación han ido en la dirección correcta.  En este sentido, no hacer noticias es una buena noticia.

Gregory


Dos notas de The Economist sobre reformas educacionales en Ecuador y
Venezuela. Con Venezuela, lo esperado.  Ideología y dogma en vez de
resultados.  En Ecuador, en cambio, The Economist celebra el hecho que
Correa se haya ido contra los poderosos sindicatos de profesores y haya
introducido mayor rendición de cuentas.  No soy fan de Correa, pero lo que
está haciendo en educación debiera ser visto con cuidado.  Correa se atrevió
a irse contra los sindicatos que tradicionalmente han estado apoyando a los
partidos de izquierda.  Correa aparece más preocupado de los niños que de
los sindicatos de profesores. Good for Ecuador.   Chile, en reforma
educacional, no hace noticia. Sad.

Pato Navia

==================


<http://www.economist.com/world/americas/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14258942>
http://www.economist.com/world/americas/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14258942

Ecuador's education reforms

Correa's curriculum

Aug 20th 2009 | QUITO
From The Economist print edition

The president seeks to improve ailing schools and universities



AS IN Venezuela, education reforms in Ecuador, promoted by its left-wing
president, Rafael Correa, have led to protests and tear-gas on the streets.
The teachers' union and the students' federation, both linked to a Maoist
opposition party, are furious at proposals to sack bad teachers and make
schools and universities account better for the $2.3 billion or so a year
the government spends on them.

Ecuador's schools are poor even by South America's generally low standards.
Although almost all of its children enroll in primary education, fewer than
two-thirds make it to secondary school. By 2015 Mr Correa, a former
economics professor re-elected for a second term in April, wants state
schools to match the quality of elite private ones like the Lycée La
Condamine in Quito, which his own children attend.

Mr Correa is going about his reforms more sensibly than his Venezuelan chum,
Hugo Chávez. Awash with oil revenues because of strong crude prices, he has,
since coming to office in January 2007, spent around $280m repairing schools
and building new ones. In impoverished places like Zumbahua, a remote
village in the Andes where Mr Correa once did voluntary work, high-tech
"schools of the millennium" have risen among the maize and potato fields.
Some of the cheapest private schools have already closed as state schools
have scrapped fees and started providing meals for pupils, says Verónica
Benavides, a senior education official.

But it is not just about spending more money. Mr Correa wants to supervise
more closely how the education budget is spent, and to improve the quality
and consistency of teaching. At present, schools have so much leeway that
comparisons between the wide variety of leaving certificates they issue are
all but meaningless. The government is seeking to impose a standard, minimum
syllabus.

Early in his first term, applicants for teaching jobs were set a voluntary
test of reading proficiency and logic. Just 4% of those taking the logic
test passed it. The government is now making tests compulsory for existing
teachers. Those who flunk them will be offered a year's training and then be
required to resit them. Those who fail a second time face the sack, as do
the large numbers of teachers who have joined a union-led boycott of the
tests.

So far the reforms seem highly popular except, unsurprisingly, among the
teachers. Edmund Gordillo, a teacher in Quito with 30 years' experience,
complains that coercion is the wrong way to go about reforming. Others
grumble at their meagre pay: a typical teacher, with almost 25 years'
experience, earns only around $650 a month. The government is promising pay
rises but, to the union's disgust, it intends to link them to performance,
not seniority.

Ecuador's universities are also having to shape up. Low-quality private ones
will be shut, while state-funded ones will have to account publicly for the
$490m a year they receive. Professorships will be opened up to foreign
academics. Mr Correa's reforms are non-negotiable, insists René Ramírez, his
planning secretary: if the unions and student groups ramp up their protests,
the government is ready to call a referendum to demonstrate that Ecuadoreans
support the president's policies.



http://www.economist.com/world/americas/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14258760

Venezuela's education "reforms"

Hugo Chávez seeks to catch them young



Aug 20th 2009 | CARACAS

From The Economist print edition

A hastily passed education law is part of the president's plan to take
control of all aspects of Venezuelan society



THE first time Hugo Chávez made a serious attempt to reshape the Venezuelan
education system, the resulting political battle contributed to the coup
that in 2002 briefly ousted him from the presidency. A new education law,
shoved through parliament on the night of August 13th after minimal debate,
already has the opposition talking of civil disobedience.



The government claims that the law will overcome centuries of exclusion, at
last giving the children of the poor equal access to education. But its
critics argue that it fails to deal with the key causes of
inequality-low-quality teaching, crumbling buildings and widespread truancy
in state schools. Whereas Mr Chávez's Ecuadorean ally, Rafael Correa, seems
sincere in his drive to raise educational standards (see next story), the
focus of the Venezuelan leader's reforms is on ensuring the intrusion of
politics at every level. Mariano Herrera, an educationalist, predicts that
the result will be greater inequality, not less.



Teaching is to be rooted in "Bolivarian doctrine", a reference to Mr
Chávez's ill-defined Bolivarian revolution-supposedly inspired by Simón
Bolívar, a leader of Latin America's 19th-century independence struggle.
Schools will come under the supervision of "communal councils",
indistinguishable in most places from cells of the ruling socialist party.
Central government will run almost everything else, including university
entrance and membership of the teaching profession.



Couched in vague terms, the law acquires coherence when seen against the
president's professed intention to establish revolutionary hegemony over
Venezuelan society. In a 2007 campaign on a referendum on constitutional
change, Mr Chávez lectured a bemused public on the writings of Antonio
Gramsci, an Italian communist who died in 1937. In essence, Gramsci said
that to eliminate the bourgeois state one must seize the institutions that
reproduce the dominant class's thought-patterns.



The three most important of these institutions, the president noted, were
the church, the education system and the mass media. Among the iniquitous
doctrines with which they poisoned the minds of the masses, he argued, were
representative democracy, the division of state powers and alternating
government.



The new education law also lets the government suspend media outlets that
affect the public's "mental health" or cause "terror" among children. It
threatens to end subsidies for church-run schools that educate the poor. And
it seeks to weaken or abolish students' and teachers' unions and to
"democratise" university authorities.



How much of Gramsci the president has actually read is unclear. What is
apparent is that the law was not framed in parliament but by a team of
ideologues in the presidential palace. Legislators suspect Cuban specialists
had a hand in it, along with radicals from the Spanish left in Mr Chávez's
close circle.



Whether or not it can be implemented as intended will become clear as
schools and universities reopen in September. Some opposition politicians
and educationalists want to gather signatures for a referendum to repeal the
law, as is allowed under the constitution. Student groups, the church, the
media, parents and teachers could together form a powerful coalition.



University rectors say the hasty way the law was passed violated both
parliamentary norms and the constitution. They were tear-gassed when they
approached parliament as it was being debated, to try to deliver a document
criticising its content. But a campaign of peaceful resistance is gathering
strength.



Since winning a referendum in February abolishing term limits (thus allowing
him to seek re-election again in 2012), Mr Chávez has stepped up the pace of
his revolution. He has taken powers and funds from mayors and governors,
clamped down on independent trade unions and broadcasters, and passed a law
which will allow the government-controlled electoral authority to
gerrymander constituency boundaries. A wilting economy and a lack of money
to spend on his ambitious welfare programmes have begun to sap Mr Chávez's
popularity, forcing him to keep casting around for fresh scapegoats.



In his weekly broadcast on August 16th he promised a stimulus package but
gave no indication of how he would pay for it. With public dissent growing,
his response has been to stifle sources of independent thinking, be they
private television channels, trade unions, the church or the schools and
universities. However, once he has achieved complete dominance over them
all, there will be no one left to blame for the country's ills but himself.







==============

Patricio Navia

* Liberal Studies Program and Center for Latin American and Caribbean
Studies New York University, 726 Broadway, Room 641, NY, NY 10003

347-834-2017 (cell) 212-995-4163 (fax) https://files.nyu.edu/pdn200/public/

* Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias Sociales (ICSO), Universidad Diego
Portales Ejército 333, Santiago, Chile. (W) 56-2-676-8141 (Cell)
56-9-235-5350



--
Gregory Elacqua
Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación
Instituto de Políticas Públicas Expansiva-UDP
Universidad Diego Portales
56-2-676-8535
56-09-6-206-5993
gregory.elacqua@udp.cl
www.cpce.cl

El artículo adjunto examina la industria de las prácticas profesionales para universitarios en EEUU.  Algunos sugieren que las prácticas favorecen a los estudiantes con padres que tienen buenas redes de contacto y recursos para contratar servicios que los ayuden a conseguir los mejores puestos.  ¿Ocurrirá lo mismo en Chile?

Gregory

August 9, 2009
Unpaid Work, but They Pay for Privilege
By GERRY SHIH

With paying jobs so hard to get in this weak market, a lot of college graduates would gladly settle for a nonpaying internship. But even then, they are competing with laid-off employees with far more experience.

So growing numbers of new graduates -- or, more often, their parents -- are paying thousands of dollars to services that help them land internships.

Call these unpaid internships that you pay for.

"It's kind of crazy," said David Gaston, director of the University of Kansas career center. "The demand for internships in the past 5, 10 years has opened up this huge market. At this point, all we can do is teach students to understand that they're paying and to ask the right questions."

Not that the parents are complaining. Andrew Topel's parents paid $8,000 this year to a service that helped their son, a junior at the University of Tampa, get a summer job as an assistant at Ford Models, a top agency in New York.

"It would've been awfully difficult" to get a job like that, said Andrew's father, Avrim Topel, "without having a friend or knowing somebody with a personal contact." Andrew completed the eight-week internship in July and was invited to return for another summer or to interview for a job after graduation.

Andrew's parents used a company called the University of Dreams, the largest and most visible player in an industry that has boomed in recent years as internship experience has become a near-necessity on any competitive entry-level résumé.

The company says it saw a spike in interest this year due to the downturn, as the number of applicants surged above 9,000, 30 percent higher than in 2008. And unlike prior years, the company says, a significant number of its clients were recent graduates, rather than the usual college juniors.

The program advertises a guaranteed internship placement, eight weeks of summer housing, five meals a week, seminars and tours around New York City for $7,999. It has a full-time staff of 45, and says it placed 1,600 student interns in 13 cities around the world this year, charging up to $9,450 for a program in London and as little as $5,499 in Costa Rica.

The money goes to the University of Dreams and the other middlemen like it. Officials at the company say they are able to wrangle hard-to-get internships for their clients because they have developed extensive working relationships with a variety of employers. They also have an aggressive staff who know who to call where. Their network of contacts, they say, is often as crucial as hard work in professional advancement.

"Students don't have problems finding internships, students have problems getting internships," Eric Normington, the company's chief marketing officer, said by telephone from Hong Kong where he was overseeing the local program. "We can secure those exclusive positions."

Employers say the middlemen save them time and hassle. "They make the search process a lot easier," said Sarah Cirkiel, the chief executive of Pitch Control Public Relations, a small New York firm that started four years ago and has taken in 20 summer interns all from the University of Dreams. "I feel like they hand-select their interns for the specific agencies to make sure it's the right fit. They just show up at our doorstep, ready to go."

But many educators and students argue that while the programs bridge one gulf -- between those who have degrees from prestigious colleges or family connections and those who do not -- only to create a new one, between the students who have parents willing and able to buy their children better job prospects and those who do not.

"You're going to increase that divide early, on families that understand that investment process and will pay and the families that don't," said Anthony Antonio, a professor of education at Stanford University. "This is just ratcheting it up another notch, which is quite frightening."

Julia McDonald, the career services director at Florida State University, questioned the need for these programs. "The economy has had an impact, but there are more than enough internship opportunities out there still," she said. "That's like buying a luxury car."

Other college advisers cautioned that while the desire to help is understandable, parents who pay for an internship program are depriving their children of the chance to develop job-seeking skills or to taste rejection before they have to fend for themselves.

The industry dismisses the criticism.

"Universities forget that they themselves are, in essence, businesses," said C. Mason Gates, the president of Internships.com, an online placement service. "Just because they're doing it in a nonprofit fashion doesn't mean that those of us doing it for profit are doing it incorrectly."

The University of Dreams has several smaller competitors. One is the Washington Center, which places students at institutions like Amnesty International and the Canadian Embassy in Washington. The center is a nonprofit but charges summer participants a $5,195 program fee on top of a $60 application fee. If students choose to pay $3,395 for 10 weeks of prearranged housing -- and more than 90 percent do, the center said -- the total comes to $8,650.

Online start-ups that match students with internships have joined in, too, as have auction services that have sold internships worth thousands of dollars.

Francois Goffinet entered the University of Dreams program in 2007 as a student at William and Mary College, he said, because he wanted an internship at a top bank but those banks did not recruit at colleges like his. The University of Dreams advisers polished Francois's résumé. They coached him on interviews and then helped him secure an internship at UBS, which he then converted into a job offer.

"We wanted the biggest and the best," Francois's mother, Lynn Andrews, recalled. "No one had the direct route."

Gerry Shih is a summer intern at The Times. He is paid.

--
Gregory Elacqua
Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación
Instituto de Políticas Públicas Expansiva-UDP
Universidad Diego Portales
56-2-676-8535
56-09-6-206-5993
gregory.elacqua@udp.cl
www.cpce.cl