Teacher Tests in Peru

What if teacher applicants had to take a national test? How many would pass? If this were Peru that would be less than 1 percent. Way less. NPR ran a quick story last week on the Peruvian Ministry of Education's attempts to get a handle on poor teacher performance, covered in more detail here (thx to Abdul for the heads-up). As reported, Peru does a relatively good job getting its kids through school--most graduate from its high school equivalent--but the quality of learning is low. Peru was the worst performer of 43 countries on reading, math and science on the 2000 PISA test. So to improve teacher quality, the ministry of education established a test and required all public school teacher applicants to take it. Test takers needed to score at least 14 out of 20 points to pass. Only 151 of over 180,000 teachers in Peru managed to pass the test.

That's one hundred and fifty one teacher applicants out of 180,000 that passed. That’s an astoundingly low number. So I emailed a friend of mine who lives in Lima. She’s not a teacher but she works with kids in an arts program and I figured she might have an interesting take on what’s happening down there. Here’s what she said:

The whole thing seems way out of hand. Was the exam exceptionally difficult? I don’t know- maybe it was. But from what I’ve heard, it was basic. I think the people we’ve got preparing to teach are just really underqualified to teach children. This is a major problem in the long term but even right now it’s a big mess. Last year it was crazy. They declared a huelga indefinida [indefinite strike] because they wouldn’t accept that they might have to take a test. School started but there were still local strikes and teachers didn't show up. So my kids were hanging around a lot, doing nothing. But Macio [teacher friend] is pissed because he’s insistent that this isn’t really even about the testing. They want more money for the whole education system here and more training and support. So my kids are in school now again but it’s still a big mess and there’s a lot of hostility.

The strike last summer was reportedly pretty violent and brought the school system to a standstill. An agreement was reached after 15 days but it didn't end the controversy over how best to improve teacher quality in Peru. In all, it seems pretty clear that the pressure is building on both the labor side and the school management side. This isn't surprising given that we’re talking about a major labor problem if the majority of teachers and teacher applicants lack the knowledge and skills they need to teach kids well. The teachers and the union, are going to have to do more than strike if they hope to improve their profession and the education of Peruvian children. But it cuts both ways and the ministry of education is going to have to acknowledge that testing the teachers may help to diagnose the gravity of the problem but it’s not going to solve it. And they’re going to have to deal with the fact that improving teaching will not happen over night (on the bright side, we see some efforts underway here and with help from outside Peru here and here).