2007 Activities2007 Activities
The Education Support Program (ESP) made significant progress in advancing educational justice in 2007 by working to reduce global education disparities and promoting access to education for marginalized children. The program began to expand beyond postsocialist countries in the Caucasus, Central Asia, Europe, and Mongolia, and into Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Turkey.
A core activity in 2007 was supporting initiatives and research to improve the chances of children with special education needs—those who suffer from disabilities, learning difficulties, or are socially disadvantaged. In Mongolia, for example, the Education Support Program and other international partners launched a project to provide educational opportunities for deaf and hard-of-hearing children, teenagers, and adults. In Europe, the program released reports on equal access to quality education for Roma populations in the eight Decade of Roma Inclusion countries, warning that most Roma children continue to face disadvantages in every aspect of their education.
In Serbia, the Education Support Program concluded a two-year program focusing on children with disabilities that established an education network, published an inclusive education practices guide for teachers, and launched a follow-up multicultural education project. In Western Europe, it launched a new initiative to examine the educational disadvantages faced by migrant and minority groups.
A grant to the Global Campaign for Education allowed the group to prepare three years of research on schools in 178 countries for publication as an advocacy tool. As part of a new three-year project examining education inclusion and quality in eight countries in South Eastern Europe, the program will conduct research to help determine disparities across the region and formulate initiatives to address them. Working with the Network of Education Policy Centers, the program conducted research and monitoring on school dropouts in Albania, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Mongolia, Slovakia, and Tajikistan; published a study examining how private tutoring has affected education in nine postsocialist countries with high-stakes testing systems; and launched a project investigating the impact and transparency of financial donations from parents to public schools in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Moldova, Slovakia, and Tajikistan.
The program’s Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking project supported training for 60 primary and secondary school teachers and 25 higher education teachers, expanding its activities in Africa, Central Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Turkey, and Ukraine. The Mongolian Education Alliance, an NGO established with OSI funding, received World Bank financing to provide training to 3,300 teachers in rural schools and increase access to reading materials for 104,000 primary school students.
A project implemented by the Education Support Program and the International Renaissance Foundation (Ukraine) received a $5 million grant from the U.S. government to expand its work in making the country’s higher education exams fair and transparent. In Pakistan, the program supported a two-year study to disseminate and publicize best practice examples from the country’s education system.
