Escuela Nueva Activa
Mission
The mission of Escuela Nueva is to contribute to improving the quality, efficiency and sustainability of rural and urban basic education primarily in developing countries through the dissemination of the Escuela Nueva model and public-private partnerships.
Profile
Escuela Nueva transforms the conventional school. It is an educational innovation for basic education, designed in Colombia in the mid 1970´s. Challenges such as high repetition rates and student dropout, low teacher morale and isolation from community life are salient characteristics of developing countries’ rural primary schools. There is also great dispersion between teachers, educational programs, administrators and policies.
Rather than ineffectively tackling each problem in isolation, Escuela Nueva ("new school" in Spanish) has been successful precisely because it integrates curricular, community, administrative and teacher training strategies to address educational inequality and strengthen educational processes in low-income rural and urban primary schools. Its flexible promotion mechanism also allows students to advance from one grade or level to another and complete academic units at their own pace.
In 1987, the Escuela Nueva Foundation was founded for the promotion and expansion of Escuela Nueva worldwide, the assurance of its quality and sustainability, and its innovation and adaptation to new contexts and populations. The Foundation has since expanded the model to urban regions, calling it Escuela Nueva Activa™ (Active New School), and adapted the same program to serve displaced migrant populations through Círculos de Aprendizaje™ (Learning Circles).
Results
Escuela Nueva is one of the largest and longest running bottom-up education innovations of the developing world, having been implemented in more than 20,000 rural schools in Colombia alone. The Escuela Nueva experience in Colombia has been studied and visited by more than 35 countries and adopted by 16 countries, benefiting approximately 5 million children and inspiring education reforms worldwide.
Results from numerous research initiatives and evaluations conducted by national and international organizations have confirmed superior academic, personal and civic achievements of Escuela Nueva students, in addition to a reduction in drop out and repetition rates. The World Bank even selected Escuela Nueva as “one of the three most outstanding reforms in developing countries that has effectively gone to national scale and impacted national policy."
The founder and co-author of Escuela Nueva, Vicky Colbert, has also received numerous awards for her work including Outstanding Social Entrepreneur of the Schwab Foundation, Leading Social Entrepreneur and Senior Fellow of Ashoka, World Technology Award in Social Entrepreneurship, the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, and most recently the first ever Clinton Global Citizenship award.
