TOWARD INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION IN EDUCATION

Synthesis

The Problem—Failing Schools

Important gains have been made in education in the Americas during the past 50 years. Overall, on every measure of quantity and quality of inputs, schools today are better than they were half a century ago. Teachers have received more training, classes are smaller, more students have textbooks and they are of better quality, curriculum have been revised in accord with developments in cognitive psychology and advances in science. Literacy rates have declined notably and the average level of education in the population has grown steadily.
Despite this growth, every sector of society in the Americas complains about public education. Schools and universities are criticized for inefficiency in use of resources, low levels of achievement of their students, poor preparation for employment, high dropout rates, and a generally inadequate intellectual, civic and moral formation.ⁱⁱⁱ Education's gains have not been sufficient to resolve longstanding social and economic problems. Schools leave us ill prepared to meet future challenges and exploit future opportunities. The system efficient in selecting leaders of relatively stable political, economic, social and religious organizations is today a curious antique living beyond its time of usefulness.
Failures North and South
Even after high levels of spending and decades of reform, the performance of schools in the United States trails that of other industrialized nations. One consequence has been a serious erosion of confidence in public education, and a rupture of the national consensus about how best to educate children. In desperation, politicians and educators that once championed community control of schools now urge either privatization or centralization.
In Latin America and the Caribbean schools’ performances resembles that of a malnourished person barely able to function, bereft of the energy required to escape from starvation, easily distracted, with diminished memory and reasoning ability. Systems of education are underfinanced in both absolute and relative terms. Not only poor, the region’s systems are inefficient in use of funds they have. Expensive investments in infrastructure, for example management information systems, go to waste because funds are not allocated for their staffing and maintenance. Inefficiency and insufficient resources draw a vicious circle that contributes to increased criticism of public education, evaporating the political courage required for breakthrough solutions.
Low levels of spending on public education go hand in hand with the largest proportion of students in private schools in the world. Many children spend years in schools so poor in quality that they have little lasting effect. Use of public funds to subsidize private education results in at best minor improvements in quality and tends to worsen the already unequal distribution of access to schooling.^iv
Finally, the dominant technology of instruction in schools is inadequate to the challenges of the 21^st century. This technology defines teachers as the primary source of knowledge for students, and places them in relatively isolated work sites that raise the cost of on-the-job training, professional meetings and workshops. Participation in the world economy, meanwhile, has distorted salaries and drawn qualified people away from teaching. Improvement of the quality of the teaching force will require significant increases in teacher salaries, increasing the unit cost of education. The resulting cost burden makes simultaneous expansion of access and improvement of quality difficult if not impossible.

The problems of education arise in governments' decisions about finance, operation, and content. But governments do not stand alone. Within each country they reflect the ambitions and beliefs of some mix of stakeholders. In addition, other countries and international agencies influence national policies, in what is called international cooperation. The next section describes briefly two major forms of cooperation and their consequences for education.

Can International Cooperation Help?
Profound problems continue even after years of international cooperation among the countries of the Americas. This cooperation has taken two major forms, aid (sometimes called development assistance), and collaboration.
Aid is characterized by a one-way flow of resources, information, ideas, personnel, from one country (or international organization) to a receiving country. Collaboration, on the other hand, requires that countries exchange resources, ideas, information and personnel to reach a shared objective. The objective of aid is to change the receiving country; the objective of collaboration is to change all participants.
Over the past 40 years aid has come to obscure collaboration, and particular varieties of aid have had pronounced effects on national education policies.

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  At best, aid as international cooperation has made insignificant contributions to the improvement (as distinct from expansion) of education.
  
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  At worst, the forms and content of international cooperation to date have contributed to the intractability of the problems of education in Latin America and the Caribbean, and have failed to benefit aid-givers.
  

In addition, some forms of aid have levied high opportunity costs. The continued reliance of many countries in the region on external assistance represents a failure to develop endogenous capacity for the improvement of education.

A Solution

This paper argues for increased emphasis on collaboration as the preferred form of international cooperation. Aid-giving in itself is not undesirable but its modes and methods should be changed. No country in modern times has developed on its own and all countries have benefited from relationships with others. But cooperation is neither a simple, nor an unchanging concept. Countries are made up of a variety of social actors acting in time and space. Cooperation between countries occurs not just in relationships between governments, but also involves non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and international organizations. Over time and especially in recent years not only have new actors appeared on the stage of international cooperation, but also older actors have changed their roles and goals. New forms of aid can support collaborative projects.

AID AS A FORM OF INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION

There are two basic perspectives on aid. In the first, or deficit perspective, aid is offered because the other party is seen as lacking resources the giver can provide. The receiver may be deficient in capital, technologies, institutional capacity, or personnel.

A second perspective on aid argues that otherwise sufficient resources are not being used properly. The objective of aid is then to change internal processes and structures in a country. Aid can, it is claimed, support presumed forces of "modernization," and can compel shifts in policies. This is known as the decision approach to aid. In last 50 years there has been a gradual shift from the deficit to the decision model for justifying assistance.

During the 1980s global aid to education was about 9 per cent of all bilateral and multilateral aid. Primary education received only 5 per cent of this total. One-third of aid for primary education came from bilateral donors. The World Bank contributed (worldwide) 27 percent and IDB 9 per cent. About 30 percent of aid to primary education went to budgetary assistance, 23 per cent to construction, and 13 per cent to food.^v

Over time European countries have increased the proportion of their GDP that is spent on aid. In recent years both the United States and Japan have decreased their contributions to aid, but Japan remains the largest single donor. Among the OECD countries the United States spends the lowest proportion of its GDP on aid. Despite the promises made at the World Conference on Education for All, total aid for education is less after the Conference than before, for all regions of the world except Latin America.

Consequence of Aid—Uniformization

The long-term effect of aid has been a reduction of differences, in structures, policies, beliefs and customs.^vi This process of uniformization in education has a long history, linked directly with colonialism in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, more recently with the emergence of supranational organizations. Over time, all the education systems of the world have come to look much like one another, in terms of curriculum content, pedagogical process, and management and governance.

Reduction of variety reduces the capacity of the Americas, as a region, to respond to the challenges and opportunities of globalization. No country can anticipate what kind of education will be required in the future; making all our systems the same now reduces the chances of discovering those new forms of education that will be most effective in the future.

Aid or Assistance from Bilateral and Multilateral Organizations

Criticism of the aid process is long-standing but there has been little systematic study of the impact of aid on receiving countries and their education systems.^vii There are, however, detailed and systematic evaluations of aid in general.^viii Aid sometimes "works" and sometimes does not; what "works" varies from country to country, and according to the particular definition of effectiveness that is used. Sometimes aid has negative consequences for the receiving country.^ix

In addition, aid has a high direct cost and contributes to developing country debt. The provision of the assistance can have a high opportunity cost; it may inhibit the development of indigenous capacity to solve problems.

Aid and Assistance from NGOs

Non-governmental organizations of all types were active in international cooperation long before the bilateral and multilateral agencies were created. Catholic and Protestant organizations in Europe and the Americas began to provide various forms of aid before Independence and continue to be active today.^x In most cases governments in their home countries encouraged these organizations. Governments in Europe often provided subsidies to their NGOs, while the U.S. government did not. In both cases, however, their governments saw the NGOs as carriers of national values and culture and, in some cases, the reports of their workers in the field helped to inform economic and military decisions by the government.
Collusion of interests between the government and NGOs is less in Canada, and in Europe than it is in the United States. Even for those NGOs that receive public funds, government restrictions are less, and governments make less explicit use of the organizations to achieve state political objectives. At the same time, proportionately more of the private-sector organizations in Canada and Europe have explicit political objectives, and more from time to time formally criticize their governments' policies and practices with regard to other countries. As a consequence these NGOs are more likely to cooperate with non-governmental (and even anti-government) educational institutions in the aid receiving countries.

Aid by Philanthropic Foundations

The U. S. foundations no longer are large contributors to education in other countries. There have been at least three major studies of how this form of international cooperation affected the development of social science in the receiving countries but these were written in the late 1970s.^xi They are useful in terms of cautions for the future rather than diagnoses of the present.

The most constructive observations argue that the application of knowledge is always conditioned by context, varying by time and space. Contact between knowledge producers in North and South is of great importance for the diffusion of methodologies that can be applied in varying contexts, and hence it is important to support joint ventures governed by reciprocal and symmetrical relationships. The success of these efforts will depend on the existence of multiple channels of funding for knowledge production, to insure the survival of diversity in knowledge as much as in nature.^xii

Aid from Transnational Corporations

The strong criticisms of education in all the countries of the Americas have been accompanied by increased efforts by private corporations to influence educational policy and practice. In many countries, business-education alliances are on the upswing. This aid is most often given to private institutions or individual public institutions. For example, in Mexico domestic and foreign corporations participate in decision-making for public technical-vocational schools.

Most "cooperation" by corporations is between and within corporations rather than with public education institutions. A critical and yet unresolved issue is whether corporate involvement will have a uniformizing effect on education, or whether it will contribute to diversity in content and methodology.

Aid Mediated through Educational Institutions

In higher education, cooperation occurs primarily between institutions. The Fulbright Program of the United States, for example, is funded by the U. S. government but most decisions about exchanges are made by faculty members from universities. The Latin American Scholarship Program of American Universities combines grants from the U. S. government with contributions by universities, and operates without government intervention.

Programs of this kind are less likely to have the uniformizing effects attributed to the programs promoted earlier by U. S. foundations. The diversity in what is gained through cooperation is greater when aid comes from or is controlled directly by educational institutions rather than by agents of governments or philanthropic foundations. This is more likely to be true for universities that enjoy a high degree of autonomy.

INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION IN THE FORM OF COLLABORATION

Some institutions enter into what is called horizontal cooperation to distinguish it from the vertical, one-direction-of-influence relationships often associated with bilateral and multilateral assistance agencies. Some types of horizontal cooperation can also be called collaboration, because participants labor together in pursuit of a shared objective.

Many of the horizontal cooperation or collaborative efforts in education in the Americas were initiated through aid from bilateral or multilateral agencies or NGOs.
Collaborative projects not involving aid agencies occur but are rare and difficult to document. Collaboration often continues once external funding dries up because institutions and individuals find great benefit in working together.

Examples of Collaboration in Higher Education

The Columbus Project is an initiative of the association of European universities (CRE) with support from the European Community and UNESCO. The project includes exchange of students in Europe in the Erasmus program, funding of meetings with rectors of Latin American universities, field trips of European and Latin American rectors to each others' institutions, training workshops, policy papers, and other activities. Universities in Spain have developed a series of collaborative programs with Latin America institutions called MUTIS (Movilidad Universitaria de Tercer Ciclo para Iberoamerica). The International Cooperation Agency of Spain (AECI) maintains a web-page in Mexico (aeci.org.mx/mutis) that advertises joint research projects, scholarships for study in Spain, links with corporations, and Latin American and Spanish universities. Each of these projects has spun off other kinds of collaboration.

Rectors and presidents of universities in Canada, Mexico and the United States began meeting during the discussions leading up to the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. The meeting were initially funded through an American foundation with support from the United States Information Agency. The objective of the meetings was to establish grounds for the universities to cooperate, rather than compete, once NAFTA was signed. Several meetings have been held since that time, with the objective of establishing course and diploma equivalencies. Out of these meetings have come agreements for joint projects between sub-sets of institutions.

Obstacles to Collaboration

Joint efforts require a certain level of stability in participating institutions. Participating institutions must have a fairly sophisticated management capacity. The main objective of collaboration is to share unique capacities, but differences generate tensions. Participants have to simultaneously accept the legitimacy of differences and work together to build new structures and procedures that transcend them.

The development of international cooperation among the universities of the European Union required three major steps:

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  A long period of dialogue finally resulting in consensus as to the importance of linking universities through supranational institutions;
  
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  Clear differences in economic, social and cultural as well as educational qualities, defined as potential for complementarities; and
  
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  Recognition by political, corporate and social leaders of the central contribution to be made by universities in the development of Europe.
  
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Contributing to this process were efforts in improvement of institutional management, resulting in gradual raising of the quality of programs, and greater effort to disseminate the knowledge produced in universities.

Collaboration in Dissemination of Research on Education

A major obstacle to the development of knowledge about other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean has been access to research about their education systems. A number of efforts have been made to develop networks that link researchers together through conferences, newsletters, bulletins and occasional monographs describing research activities and findings. Each of these efforts has contributed to the development of research in the region, but none of them has survived for a long period. All the failed networks were dependent on a central organization to fund research and maintain the dissemination device.^xiii

The activities that grew into the Latin American Network of Education Research Centers (REDUC) began in the early 1970s as a national effort by one center. REDUC collects and publishes abstracts of published and unpublished documents on education in Latin America. Aid from various bilateral and multilateral agencies enabled inclusion of other research centers; today REDUC includes 26 public and private research centers in 15 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. At present the collection includes almost 30,000 documents available on microfiche and interactive CD-ROM.^xiv
The critical elements in the survival and success of REDUC as an example of international cooperation appear to have been its:

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  decision to not filter the documents entered into its collection, that is, to validate the efforts of colleagues in other centers and countries;
  
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  constant efforts to forge connections, to expand the network to include education research centers in many countries;
  
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  concern for utilization of the product of REDUC by a diverse audience but especially policy makers.
  

Other Instances of Collaboration

Collaboration also takes place at the level of national government agencies. For example, the ministers of education of the Americas meet annually to discuss common problems and solutions. In recent years these meetings have ended with agreements to share their experiences and to engage in joint actions.^xv Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay have made, as part of MERCOSUR, agreements affecting curriculum and degree equivalency in their educational institutions. Librarians in Mexico and the United States have been cooperating on literacy programs and expansion of their collections.

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