PREAL Advisory Board
The Advisory Board is an independent nongovernmental group composed of distinguished individuals committed to better public education.
Board members provide advice and insights that help guide PREAL activities. They also endorse PREAL’s regional report cards, which give leaders both within and outside the education sector, reliable and independent information on how their schools are doing. These brief, non-technical documents encourage societal actors to become more actively involved in education reform and make specific recommendations for change.
In addition, the Board members work to:
- Facilitate dialogue between diverse sectors of society on the need for fundamental education reform and create new alliances in support of policy improvements;
- Build a broad and active constituency for education reform and involve leaders outside the education sector;
- Bring attention to innovative and modern education policy strategies that emerge in the region and other parts of the world; and
- Regularly monitor education progress in the region and take note of achievements in key policy areas.
Members
- Argentina: Jose Maria Dagnino Pastore
- Brazil: Paulo Renato Souza
- Bolivia: Jorge Quiroga
- Canada: Margaret Catley Carlson
- Chile: Osvaldo Sunkel, Sergio Bitar
- Colombia: Rudolf Hommes
- Ecuador: Roberto Baquerizo
- El Salvador: Roberto Murray-Meza
- Mexico: Juan E. Cintron and Nora Lustig
- Uruguay: Enrique Iglesias
- United States: Nancy Birdsall, David de Ferranti, Peter Hakim, and John Petty
- Venezuela: Jonathan Coles Ward
Central American Task Force on Education Reform
The Task Force convenes leaders from diverse sectors to publicly promote the importance of education and education reform, present new ideas for improving schools, and offer support to education policy makers in their countries.
Established in 1999, the Task Force is dedicated to analyzing the state of education in Central America from a regional perspective, formulating proposals and recommendations to support high quality education for all children, and communicating and disseminating its findings and recommendations among national authorities and educational decision makers. The Task Force has produced two education report cards. The first, published in 2000, looked at the status of education in the region, highlighting recent innovations and principal problems, and proposed several steps to overcome these problems. Entitled Tomorrow is Too Late, it served as a catalyst for informed dialogues on education in Central America. The second report, Time to Act (2003), was a follow-up to the first, evaluating the progress in education in Central America and the Dominican Republic, using a similar format to student report cards. It graded the performance of education systems in the region in key areas (including student learning, equity, decentralization, investment in primary and secondary education, the teaching profession, education standards and evaluation systems) using a scale from excellent to poor and very poor. Furthermore, the Task Force broadens and strengthens the constituency for reform by mobilizing leaders from outside the education sector around the topic of education reform, providing members with information and encouraging participation. It also provides advice and insights that help guide PREAL programming.
Members
- Co-chairs: Humberto Belli (Nicaragua) and Nivia Rossana Castrellón (Panama)
- Costa Rica: Antonio Álvarez Desanti, Carlos Francisco Echeverría, Constantino Urcuyo
- Dominican Republic: George Arzeno Brugal, Rafael Toribio, Rafael Emilio Yunen
- El Salvador: Cecilia Gallardo, Roberto Murria Meza, Salvador Samayoa
- Guatemala: Roberto Moreno, Rodolfo Paiz Andrade, Lionel Toriello Nájera
- Honduras: Javier Argüello Carazo
- Nicaragua: Ernesto Fernández Hollman, Sergio Ramírez
- Panama: Marta Lewis de Cardoze