By Laura Colket, edited by Jim Luce
Philadelphia, PA. In July of 2010, six months after the 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti that killed an estimated 200,000 - 300,000 people and left two million people homeless, a team from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (PennGSE), headed by Dr. Sharon Ravitch, an expert in international educational development in post-crisis contexts, traveled to Haiti on an exploratory trip to better understand the post-earthquake context, particularly in regards to the education sector in Haiti.
A primary school class at SOPUDEP School in Port-au-Prince. When schools restarted three months after the earthquake, many classes took place outdoors. The SOPUDEP School was significantly damaged in the earthquake, but even for schools that were not damaged, the fear of being indoors meant that many classes happened outside under tarps.
The goal of the trip was to explore the various possibilities for partnership in an effort to assist with the education reconstruction efforts in Haiti. The team, consisting of doctoral and master’s students at PennGSE, including two members of the Haitian Diaspora, was led by Dr. Ravitch, who has worked to develop collaborative models for international applied development work around the world.
After meeting with teachers and school administrators in both urban and rural Haiti, the trip culminated with a meeting with the Minister of Education, M. Joël Desrosiers Jean-Pierre, and two of his top advisors, Dr. Creutzer Mathurin and Dr. Jacky Lumarque. It quickly became apparent that working to help strengthen the capacity of the Haitian government was the most sustainable approach for assisting with post-earthquake educational reconstruction efforts.
Thus, after the initial trip to Haiti in the summer of 2010, PennGSE established a formal partnership with the Ministry of Education in Haiti (MENFP), and Dr. Ravitch was named Senior International Advisor to MENFP for their educational reconstruction plans.
SOPUDEP School is a private school in Haiti offering free education to youth and adults. SOPUDEP is a grassroots organization focused on community development and women's rights.
Haiti has a unique educational landscape in a number of ways. Primarily, the bulk of the schools in Haiti are privately run; in fact, Haiti has the second highest proportion of private school enrollment in the world, and the government runs only 10-20% of the schools in Haiti. About two thirds of the private schools in Haiti are religious schools, and of the remaining schools, most are run by international and local NGOs. Since the earthquake, the government has been working more closely with the private sector in order to improve school quality and access across all schools in Haiti—public and private alike.
University students in an outdoor class at Quisqueya University. The university collapsed in the earthquake and is currently working to rebuild.
Well before the earthquake, issues of access and quality were of paramount concern; nearly half of the primary school aged children were not enrolled in school and 79% of the teachers in Haiti received no training before entering the classroom. The January earthquake exacerbated these long-standing educational challenges by destroying over 4,000 K-12 schools and administrative buildings, including the Ministry of Education, and causing the deaths of 38,000 students, over 1,300 teachers, and nearly 200 education officials and administrators.
The PennGSE team meeting with school teachers and leaders on Ile-a-Vache, an island off Haiti's southern coast.
Since the earthquake, the Ministry of Education (MENFP) has written an Operational Plan for reforming the entire education sector in Haiti. In order to successfully implement the Plan, MENFP will need significant financial and technical support from the international community. However, first and foremost, the reforms need to be Haitian-led, and a systemic reform of the education sector in Haiti must be led by the government.
Thus, in order to create sustainable and systemic changes in the education system, it will be important for international partners to support MENFP in sustainable, capacity-building ways, to support the implementation of the Operational Plan, rather than to engage in separate project-based aid. Haiti is often referred to as the nation of NGOs, and unfortunately, this proliferation of NGOs continues to strip away at the capacity of the government.
Photo taken at the Ministry of Education in Port-au-Prince. From left to right: Sergot Jacobs, David Land, Carole Sassine, Creutzer Mathurin, Sharon Ravitch, Yve-Car Momperousse, Laura Colket.
The PennGSE partnership with MENFP is focused on five broad areas: (1) capacity building and leadership development at the Ministry of Education; (2) creation of Working Groups (including a combination of international and Haitian experts) to oversee the implementation of the Operational Plan; (3) establishment of the Institut National d’Etudes et de Recherche en Education (National Institute of Studies and Educational Research, INERE), which will be a Haitian-led research organization to support the implementation and assessment of the reforms outlined in the Operational Plan; (4) strengthening the university system in Haiti; (5) supporting leadership development at all levels of the Haitian educational system, including the development of a national youth leadership curriculum and associated professional development models for teachers.
The PennGSE team is led by Dr. Ravitch, and includes Talar Kaloustian, a doctoral student at PennGSE; Yve-Car Momperousse, a master’s student at GSE and the former president of Haitian Professionals of Philadelphia (an organization partnering with PennGSE in this work); David B. Land, an external advisor to the PennGSE team who has been working in the development world and engaging in focused support of Haiti for over 40 years; Tim Sheeran, Strategy Analyst for the PennGSE Haiti Team; and myself, Laura Colket, a doctoral candidate at PennGSE.
The author with Sharon Ravitch talking with children on a small island off the southern coast of Haiti, near Ile-a-Vache.
The PennGSE Haiti Team is currently working to establish an international advisory board, exploring potential new partnerships, and developing conceptual designs for accomplishing each of the focus areas mentioned previously. PennGSE is seeking funding to allow its work to move forward as seamlessly as possible so Penn can play the invaluable and pivotal role it has been asked to perform in this historic transformation of Haiti’s national education system over the coming decade.
Content and photos by Laura Colket.
More information here. Contact Dr. Sharon Ravitch here.
Laura Colket is a doctoral candidate in Educational Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (PennGSE) and a founding member of the PennGSE Haiti Education Initiative. Her dissertation research is focused on the experiences of Haitian educational leaders who are working to restructure the Haitian educational system following the January 12th earthquake. Laura received her master’s degree in Intercultural Communication from the University of Pennsylvania and her B.S. from the University of Massachusetts. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies in 2007, Laura ran the Philadelphia office of Jumpstart, a national early childhood literacy organization that focuses on mentoring and school-community partnerships. Laura also has experience teaching, tutoring and working with afterschool programs in Pre-K-12 in the U.S. and abroad.
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Haiti | International Development | Microfinance