Tuesday afternoon we visited the Bellavista Concession School, run by a private for-profit group, CAFAM. It was the second concession school of the day. At this particular concession school, we were greeted with great fanfare, given a student-led tour of the school in English and heard presentations from the organization leaders and school directors. After, we were given a concert by the school children participating in an after-school music program.
General overview of concession schools. Concession schools around Bogota were built in poor and generally insecure peri-urban neighborhoods where demand for basic education was greater than supply. The Secretariat of Education of Bogota, under Cecilia Maria Velez’s term, undertook a campaign to build new, clean and modern facilities in these neighborhoods and, instead of establishing traditional public schools, issued a tender to private entities to manage these schools with public funding allocated per pupil (akin to the charter school system in the USA). A World Bank study of a sample of concession schools found that students in concession schools performed better on average than their peers of similar socioeconomic status living in similar neighborhoods. Furthermore, they found positive spillover effects (i.e. improved educational outcomes) for students in public schools in the neighborhoods around concession schools. In addition to these improved learning outcomes, the presence of these schools - housed in beautiful facilities - is also thought to infuse new pride in the neighborhoods and potentially contribute to community improvements and empowerment. This logic follows from the broken windows theory. Indeed, the Harvard group did notice that the area around this particular concession school seemed cleaner than some of the other neighborhoods through which we traveled.
A number of common themes came up at both concession schools:
1) the pro-social mobility orientation of the concession school model, an innovation and rarity in a developing context. Students are taught to have greater life expectations and work towards particular post-scholastic professional goals. These goals surpass generally what would have been possible given the extremely under-privileged environments in which they have been raised.
2) the quality of teacher training, but also the high attrition rate as teachers move to the public sector. Teacher receive rigorous teacher training and are held to high pedagogical standards. However, teachers left concession schools at high rates to enter the public system where there is greater job security and higher salaries. When asked about the problem of high teacher attrition rates, one concession school director answered that it represented yet another important public service that the schools provided.
3) a community orientation. Schools are meant to address the overall needs of parents and families, though the exact form of parent engagement was not always clear.
In addition to the regular curricular programming, the Bellavista school has instituted an intensive after school program teaching children to play musical instruments. Modeled after Tocar y Luchar, a Venezuelan program, the musical program is conceived to expose children to classical and orchestra musical and contribute to “mending the social fabric” of very poor and violent communities. Children spend 3 hours per day, 5 days a week taking group music lessons. While Bellavista students have only been participating in the program for 6 months, their concert performance already attested to their passion for and dedication to the art.
The day provided plenty of food for thought, and left us with a number of lingering questions:
- whereas there seemed to be an emphasis on holistic approach to children’s education, including working with parents, it was not clear what type of engagement there really was with parents. How effective has parent engagement been and what are the different models of parent engagement in middle-income countries like Colombia that may be of interest?
- how can the teacher training models from concession schools be adopted to train teachers in the public sector?
- how effective are such music after-school programs in achieving the goals of social cohesion that they purport?
Cassandra
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