In 2011, Harvard’s Center for International Development delivered the results of a study of Dominican public educations as contracted by the administration of Leonel Fernandez.
The report stated, in part, that “the reason for increasing the expenditures on education by itself does not guarantee significant improvements in the quality of the same, and this is because while more will be spent on paying teachers, purchasing books, and building schools), in the literature there have been very few [cases] where increased expenses have had a great effect on student performance, and in many cases they have ended up being insignificant.”
What Harvard was saying was that more money would not help unless serious reforms were put into place.
Today, after 14 years of public education receiving 4% of the yearly budget, a total of over RD$2 trillion or more than US$40 billion, the results are very poor. 60% of the money has gone to improve teacher wages, with no significant improvement in student performance.
According to the report in the Diario Libre newspaper, those who work in education receive an hourly wage comparable to those working in the financial industries (insurance and banking). The article ends with a call for performance-based compensation, and other reforms in all of public education.
On the same topic, N Digital reports on the lag in repairing and equipping already functioning schools. The investments have been mostly in the construction of new schools.
Read more in Spanish:
Diario Libre
N Digital
19 May 2025