At the end of the 1990’s, the Partnership for Educational Revitalization in the Americas (PREAL) convened two international Task Forces – one for Latin America and one for Central America – to discuss grave deficiencies in the education being offered to children throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. The Commission’s reports – The Future at Stake and Tomorrow is Too Late – outlined the principal challenges and proposed four steps to make schools better.
As a follow-up to these recommendations, PREAL works with national partners to publish periodic reports on educational progress – “education report cards” – so that leaders both inside and outside the education sector have independent, reliable information on how their schools are doing compared to other regions or countries and their own past performance. To date, PREAL’s report card program has produced over 30 reports on education progress at the regional, Central American, national, and departmental level – including the 2012 Report Card on Education in Jamaica produced in collaboration with the Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CaPRI), based at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Jamaica. (Published report cards are available online at www.preal.org).
