- Teaching – going in and out of Haiti – it doesn’t work (drive-by teacher training)
- Empowering teachers to know they are intelligent, and can design their own curriculums, rather than having them feel they need to go out to get more training
- Building leadership capacity for people within their own communities in order to initiate and build from the ground up
…What is the education like in Haiti right now
- 67% of children go to school (33%) don’t go,
- problem – nonqualified teachers, principles don’t have management ability, there is a lack of inputs like textbooks
- methodology doesn’t allow children to question Methods:
- memorization and writing notes does work, even if it isn’t the best methodology
- send people home when they don’t pay, this causes shame
…Teacher training
- from no training at all, many teachers don’t have training, some have only gotten through primary school
- some private operators such as FONHEP do in-service training
- the majority of teachers have no training or very minimal training to be teachers
- teacher training is “fuzzy” in Haiti, State of Haiti has an education school, but its mission is to “form intellectuals” so you’ll find that people are being trained to be professors
- it is a Liberal Arts college, you would go to study content
- ENI – Ecole Normale Instituteurs – but you don’t know what you get in terms of certification
- There are also private universities, but they don’t deliver an adequate number of teachers
- Also, teaching doesn’t pay, so students aren’t interested in learning about it
- Around 30% of schools are in the rural areas where 60-70% of the population is
- Not using Kreyol is a big problem
- Education system in Haiti pretty much resembles the free market economy – people do whatever they want, and the only people that lose out are the children
o Everyone is cashing in on the children
o Don’t hold people accountable to national standards
o Send people to visit to provide the license, they don’t analyze the curriculum or do anything else in terms of quality, may be busy running their own schools
o There are strong teacher professionals that would uphold those standards
o State is supposed to provide the conditions for schools to operate in some manner, but most schools are privately owned, owned by cronies of the government
- 2 things – can the teacher teach to their grade level, including getting certificates; but should also be able to look at individual child, have a dialog, can you design your own lessons such as science experiments
- There is a problem of leadership
…French/Kreyol? and the Bernard Reform
- People need to treat French as a second language because that’s what it is in Haiti
- The reform [Bernard] didn’t go smoothly (French-Kreyol)
o Some schools took new curriculum
o Some schools went on with the old curriculum
o But some progress was made
o MoE? didn’t follow-up on its own system
o FONHEP took the new curriculum and ran with it
o Learning Kreyol from grade 2-5
• These kids communicate
• You can transfer what you learned to a second language
• But that second language isn’t coming
- Students that learn in Kreyol do tend to speak more and be more active
- In Haiti it is not respectful to talk back to adults
o But it’s changing, and there are cultural classes
…Teacher Registration/Certification?
- In Jeremy most of the secondary teachers are consultants
- If you could register teachers and work through teacher training
- The MENFP – MoE? – you can register with them in order to get certification
- The content and curriculum are not a concern to the MoE?, they are more concerned with their own schools and who is where
- Pwof Ansanm goes down for four weeks and we have developed a curriculum on basic programs – asking why, empowering students to ask questions, basic pedagogy,
- Students are trained to be exact replicates of their teachers, and they don’t then have a way to think for themselves
o I struggle with that now, I still talk to my advisor with my head down and it is hard for me to talk to him
– it feels very disrespectful
- We need to teach communication rather than a language
- We are translating books and I would like the government to translate these books
- Teachers were threatened by me bringing philosophy to secondary students
- They thought that philosophy couldn’t be expressed in Kreyol
o I have to prove that
- HSA will be having a meeting on having a sort of Haitian Peace Corps organized
o MoE? official invited
- The school managers don’t have enough support, aren’t consulted, don’t get a possibility to voice their vision
o need to be trained, just as the teachers need training in their own roles and responsibilities
Solutions Offered:
- FONHEP idea – a certification program for teaching basic education, designed and elaborated by Haitians to help teachers to become better teachers, if you are a first grade teacher, you can’t go to higher grades, but you have to
- We can’t rescue everybody, but if we see that we can rescue you, we give you a pre-test, implement training, then do a post-test
- Interactive radio program – takes the lessons based on the curriculum, design the lessons and put them on a tape, and use the unqualified teacher to facilitate the lesson.
- Deliver a quality lesson in the classroom and train the teacher – learning from becoming a facilitator
- Resources
o There are a lot of people that would really like to go to Haiti to help and it would be very helpful if we could work together to get them there
- We should start teacher training on the grassroots level, and advocate for the government to create real change
o The government relies too much on the private education sector
- In our model the teachers have decided that Kreyol is the language the student should learn in, that learning is more important than passing tests in French, that learning how to do effective agriculture and eat every day…but they are looking for a way to pass the tests as well
- There is no lack of models for good schools, and you may be meeting your own goals, but the national government needs to have a vision to work within
- We are in need of a new national vision
DAY 2
Main ideas:
- Haitian government needs to be held accountable
o they seem to have a plan for reform in the works
- the way we provide the results, first to last, and then announce it, last to first!
o (use shame)
- class system is very strong
o after the first exam the best children sit in the front
- the elitist mentality is maintained by the Catholic church
- Methodist schools are very different than the Catholic schools
o (from a participant educated in both) the Catholic schools had a mission from the start to create classes and particularly create an elite
o in Methodist churches it wasn’t so bad
- people will be able to
- the schools want to have an official status – 100% graduation – so only 2-12 kids out of hundreds might make it because the others get kicked out that aren’t doing as well
- obstacles: harvest, not being able to pay for it, beliefs that there are bad spirits in the school until January 6.
- Teachers need things outside the classroom that are fun – if it’s not fun, and if they don’t like each other, the group won’t stay around a long time.
o Science fair – if they convene around their student’s projects, they might start talking and coming up with ideas – things to do like students sharing projects
- Associations of teachers that exist – they come together around projects, but it isn’t heavily supported
– and it doesn’t get so far that they can work together over the long term to become more quality teachers
- Problem – teaching hasn’t become a profession in Haiti – once we create certified teachers that become nationally recognized
- Government in Haiti is good at destroying institutions – stop paying them for 6 months to break the institution – maybe because they don’t like them – unions are systematically destroyed by the government
- Response: there is a movement toward creating a consortium of educational institutions in Haiti, slowly progressing –
- R: mostly school directors – but may work for them but not for the teachers
- R: they can address this certification problem though
- If you build a school you have complete control over the money that comes into it
Educational Conference
- Make sure all stakeholders are invited
- Make sure there is a very structured idea of what everyone is going to do
- Say there are 1,000 people coming, 300 from the US, at about 1,000 each, an you’re talking about a $300,000 conference – it has to be really well organized and people have to be able to get something out of it
- If people are coming they should see the country
o They could
- How are the officials looking at the future – what are the overall responsibilities of their job and the future
- Connection between education and economics is very important
o Needs to be budgeting within the internal government to go toward education
- The reconstruction of a society has to be faster than the destruction of the environment or else we’re going backwards
o Officials need to be held accountable too
- Economy has to be part of the education conference – either increasing funding, lowering the cost of education or both
- There should be a resolution – such as, decide to do a challenge grant – have trustees that have an account that only goes to education – it only goes to the people who graduate
Summary
Group 1:
We explored the possibility of creating a database of human and material resources that can be tapped by many different organizations that have activities in Haiti. There is a need for an information management system to be instituted in Haiti – what is being done, get the reports out to find out what’s happening – a lot of the research being done in Haiti is not being made public. Sometimes it is very hard to get information. It would be good to have a National Conference on Education in Haiti. We would like for all people involved in education to be involved – parents, students, NGOs, policy-makers, MoE?, etc. This idea will be pitched to Minister of Ed. scheduled to arrive in Haiti 3 days from now. The president will be meeting in Washington with Bush, he will be in NYC and in Miami. We would like to figure it how it would be done and not only organized from the top down, but also from the bottom up. We need to showcase best practices – show what works. Student, teachers, etc. We need to explore links about how we can harness the different materials that we’ve worked on. We would like to make this conference on education a top priority and a sort of an emergency action. Because something like this will have a lot of money invested, it will have to be very well organized and seem to pay for itself.
Group 2:
We had developed an action plan and proposed solutions. We thought the best way for this group to support EFA, we should support a consortium for private education, which is in the process of being put together and is gaining legal recognition. It is formed of several entities, association of schools, foundations, etc. FONHEP is one of the major members and a major promoter. We were looking at ways to help promote that. One of the best ways would be to form an education for all consortium here that could support the education for all consortium in Haiti. We have friends in Europe that could start a European consortium in Haiti. The actions to support Haiti with – help organizing the body – creating a website, newsletter, fundraising, sharing, etc. The idea of the consortium is to support quality and equity of education in the private schools and advocate for funding on that basis.