USAID/Kosovo Basic Education Program Evaluation
Final report
Kosovo has endured volatility and brutality for centuries. During all of these periods of turmoil, education continued but became a pawn in the many governments that ruled, up to the recentralization of the educational system under UN occupation. Many schools were destroyed and school staff and students were killed. The GOK sought to reclaim this history through decentralization and greater school autonomy under the jurisdiction of municipalities. MEST presented the first Kosovo Education Strategic Plan (KESP) 2010–2015. To assist MEST in its reform and decentralization efforts, BEP developed three components that addressed:
- capacity-building concerns in management, devising and delivering training for municipal education directors (MED), school directors (SDs), school boards and parent and student councils;
- formative assessment of student learning to help teachers adopt practices of continuous assessment that fostered critical thinking; and
- teacher professional development (TPD) focusing on teacher improvement and certification, implementation of the new Kosovo Curriculum Framework (KCF) and the introduction of a paradigm shift that would transform the educational system from old, objective-based, teacher-centered practices to new, learning outcomes based, student-centered practices.
Data were gathered through three streams: a desk study of all documents provided to the evaluation team by USAID; a set of mini-surveys carried out by Index Kosova (IK); and a set of qualitative interviews carried out by the team. The results in this report emerge from these data streams.While BEP's outputs and outcomes are both impressive, they are not sufficient to ensure sustainability. In implementing the program, myriad challenges arose. Among these were internal issues related to monitoring, assumptions made about the use of human resources, a shortfall in understanding the legal nexus guiding the entire reform process and the growing ambiguity surrounding the new curriculum, even though BEP training programs were said to have been fashioned around the new KCF. These issues arise throughout this report and the Lessons Learned section revisits them.