Family and Communities in Guatemala Participate to Achieve Educational Quality

Abstract

After a 36-year armed conflict, Guatemala finally signed the Peace Accords in December 1996. Because of these agreements, it is the Educational Reform Design (1998) that promotes different axes and areas of transformation, which include, among other topics, the country achieving educational quality with equity. To achieve this, for example, pedagogical aspects, educational policies, financial topics, and community and family involvement in the education of their children were proposed. Drawing on Educational Reform Design, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, USAID/Guatemala begins to develop projects to improve bilingual education and the processes of assessment of the education system, as well as to have expected learning goals to achieve a better education. But it is up to USAID/Education Reform in the Classroom Project (2009–2014), implemented by the firm Juarez & Associates, Inc., to take up the challenge of involving in the educational quality, with an emphasis on reading to municipalities, communities, and families, many of them Mayas, in conditions of poverty, with low rates of scholarship. This approach was called “early reading socialization mechanism,” which used communication for development to design and implement strategies that reach their objectives at different local levels. In 2009, engaging these local actors, under these social and economic contexts in quality education focused on reading, was a little known and explored in Guatemala.