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Editor's Note: Octavio Pescador is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
(CNN Spanish) - The international community outlined at the end of the 20th century, within the framework of the United Nations Organization, the development objectives that have guided the economic support of rich nations for almost two decades. A simple equation defines the eight Millennium Development Goals (2000-2015) and the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (2015-2030): generate greater well-being and reduce poverty without destroying the planet. As in any home, the world leadership aspires that all members of its family, the homo sapiens family, eat, enjoy good health, educate themselves and provide sustenance for their children.
In the education sector, the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) priority focused on universalizing primary education, seeking that by 2015 all girls and boys in the world complete the basic education cycle. The effort paid off and enrollment in primary education in developing countries grew from 83% to 91% from 2000 to 2015. In that same period, illiteracy among young people and adults decreased as did the educational gap between women and men However, at the end of the MDG deadline, more than 50 million children did not attend school - mainly those living in marginalized and remote areas - and the quantitative expansion of educational systems was not accompanied by a qualitative improvement in the Most cases
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The formulation of the Sustainable Development Goals integrated the perspectives of civil society, that of scientists, academics and private initiative within the framework of a global consultation defining goals and focusing on the development of people and not only on economic growth. Taking into account the results obtained until 2015, in the education sector, the aim is to guarantee an inclusive, equitable and quality education that promotes lifelong learning opportunities for all. That is, the international community seeks that education systems include marginalized, minority or special abilities groups, that offer the same learning opportunities to all people, and that generate training options for young people and adults.
The effectiveness and efficiency of international development programs define which plans are funded by governments and multilateral organizations. You have to invest in the good, beautiful and cheap and it is not always obvious what should be done and how. Those who contribute strategies to indicate the way forward, facilitate and validate the investment options in development of rich countries and multilateral organizations. That is why the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to a trio of academics, Abjijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Michael Kremer, of Harvard, who have conducted experiments since the late 1990s to identify projects that serve to bring down global poverty. Among other things, his work has allowed increasing rates of childhood vaccination and improving school achievement in India and other regions.
And it is precisely the ability (statistics) to measure the impact of social programs (in populations with special characteristics) that earned the University of Chicago professor James Heckman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2000. Applying his methodology , Heckman has shown that the best investment in the education sector that a society can make is in early childhood since it yields a yield of 13%. In the case of the United States, their investigations conclude that for every dollar that is destined to offer high quality education programs to children aged 0 to 5, the nation can obtain benefits equivalent to US $ 6.30 after one generation. Thus, based on the logic of effectiveness, in delineating the SDGs, global leadership included access to early childhood care and development services and preschool education for all children as one of their priority goals.
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The results of the Heckman cost-benefit model are based on a fundamental characteristic of the pedagogical activity: that it be of high quality. And the heart of quality in early childhood education are ties, closeness, interaction between adults and children. For Heckman, the two most important variables that determine quality are: that those who educate children are genuinely interested in their well-being and that parents receive support so that the kind of high quality interaction with children that occurs in the classroom Continue and deepen the home.
The data that Heckman used to define the rate of return and the essential factors of high-quality programs was obtained by analyzing programs where the annual cost of caring for a child is US $ 18,500. With that price, the universalization of such programs seems difficult in any country - developed or not. To put it in perspective, the average GDP per capita in Latin America is US $ 9,023. Even assuming that some educational system in the region has the resources to cover the cost of providing high quality services, it will be very difficult to allocate them to early childhood since the interest groups of basic and secondary education have much greater weight on the wills of politicians thirsty for votes.
With the SDGs, the first step was taken to systematically integrate the attention of children into international development programs. The task of offering high quality services to all seems complicated but that is the task to be done for the sake of the global family.
Education