Colombia: can a management and information system improve education quality?

The Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Trust Fund at the World Bank funded the development of a Management & Information System to monitor the quality of the education system in Colombia. This system builds on existing monitoring tools, which focus on outcome measures such as test scores but do not capture intermediate quality indicators that can shed light on how learning outcomes are achieved. The overarching purpose of this system is to foster improvement in the education system by informing the decision-making and everyday activities of education practitioners and policymakers. This can be achieved by: (i) gathering detailed and relevant information about activities within schools and (ii) managing the information efficiently and making it accessible to users to enable them to analyze, understand, and provide evidence-based recommendations on how to improve education quality. This monitoring system is not intended to be an accountability mechanism for schools but rather a management tool for stakeholders to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the education system and take appropriate action.