School Monitor: an effective Management and Information System for Education Quality in Colombia

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Results Based Financing – Theory and practice of linking financing to results in education administrative management

Proposal

Colombia has a decentralized education system, where departments are responsible for the
implementation of the vast majority of programs and policies. They manage school funding, teacher distribution and promotions, and are responsible for the implementation of most ministry programs. The 'School Monitor' program is an intervention which seeks to support the implementation of a results-based monitoring system in Bogotá. The system is designed to provide a six-dimension diagnosis of education quality, collecting information from several stakeholders (principal, teachers, parents and students) and transforming the information into a user-friendly format. The system is aimed to allow staff at the Secretariat of Education and the School level to make informed based decisions and improve their planning and monitoring processes, making it a powerful management tool for local governments.

The intervention presented here sets up the mechanism for the use of results-based financing in the near future. School financing in Colombia is very considered rigid, determined by law and with little autonomy (schools get financing mostly through line items in their budget, not as a block grant). With this regulatory system, financing for results is difficult to implement systematically and nationally. However, local governments have some autonomy over the allocation of own resources to schools, which opens up the room for results-based financing at the local level. Bogota has shown interest in trying out a formula that rewards schools for performance, but the use of standardised tests for this purpose is resented by schools and communities, in large part because they see it as an overly simplified measure of quality and because they do not see it entirely under their control.
The proposed intervention would provide the basis for funding schools based on results that are correlated with learning, that provide a more comprehensive definition of quality, and that schools feel are under their control.

After piloting the program in Bogota, psychometric and econometric analysis on the schools' self-evaluation processes was used to examine: 1) associations between the system measurements and learning achievement, 2) associations between different school practices, 3) association of school practices with learning, 4) association of school practices and school management, 5) association with teaching and learning practices.

The team identified a favourable perception from teachers and school directors, showing a good attitude and collaboration. With a validated instrument and lessons learned from implementation, the team is supporting the scale up of the information system, as well as developing new strategies to use this system to improve management and incentivise quality improvements through Results Based Financing. This system is also an ideal basis to develop Results Based Financing mechanism, and the team intends to pilot and evaluate this approach in Colombia.

Author

• Francisco Zavala Garcia