Newly appointed Education Minister Angel Hernandez spoke of his efforts to reform the public education system at the Virtual Educa Gran Caribe 2022 Regional Forum held on 23 August 2022. He said he wants to depoliticize the Ministry of Education “if I am allowed to do so.”
As reported in Diario Libre, the newly appointed Angel Hernandez has many plans to shake up the Ministry of Education. The Ministry of Education had been under the highly politicized Roberto Furcal, a public school educator who served as campaign manager for President Luis Abinader. Furcal was removed after headline making accusations of major corruption in procurement, regulations and law violations at the Ministry for the two years he was in charge of the Ministry of Education. The Ministry of Education is the ministry with the highest budget allotment in the Dominican Republic.
Education Minister Angel Hernandez outlined his action plan during the forum and said that the governance of the system in the Ministry of Education needs to be renewed, as it is very politicized. “And here comes what many people do not like. We must renew the governance of the system, the Ministry of Education is very political, it is very politicized and then one of the things that I will try to do, if they allow me, is to depoliticize the system and we will ensure that at all levels of the system everyone who is there has the proper skills,” Hernandez said.
He mentioned that a quality assurance system will be implemented to eliminate what he described as a collective “dis-responsibilization” in the learning results of school directors, teachers, district and regional directors and the Ministry of Education. He said this ends up in the authorities not realizing whether children learn or do not learn.
“So we have to go back to basics, we have to try to make sure that everyone, the whole bureaucracy of the Ministry, from the minister to the classroom teacher, are all oriented and resources oriented so that children learn properly in those first grades which are the fundamental ones and the ones that determine success or failure at the school level,” Hernandez said.
All this will be implemented in order to guarantee learning in schools based on a renewed educational system, where classrooms become spaces where children can learn with the highest quality standards.
The Minister of Education also proposes to reform the educational curriculum to eliminate what is unnecessary. He is a believer of concentrating the learning effort on those competencies useful for life in the society in which we live, forming responsible citizens with a high sense of criticality, creative innovators, respectful of others, peaceful and respectful of the values of national identity.
Read more in Spanish:
Diario Libre
24 August 2022