 about the connection between education and development and the well-being of our people. The title of the session is Creating an Innovative Ecosystem for Education. Implied on it is that we need a different ecosystem. It's not just one thing. And we have a very diverse panel, first here, that I want to introduce in a second. But let me start with two stars of education and stars both with a lot of experience and with a lot of energy. Victoria Colbert, Vicky, founder and executive director of Fundación Escuela Nueva, and then later Andrea Chavarria, Global Shaper, an executive director of Fundación Carlos Ysonia Jaime. She's going to also talk about her own experience. So she'll be fire starters for the session. Basically, they'll both set it up for us in terms of challenges and provocations. Please go on. Vicky, you're welcome. Profono. Well, in this forum, I think most of the panels have a conclusion that without education, nothing, no sustainable development goals can be achieved. It's been a general consensus in this forum. And also, I remember in Zhong Tian at the World Conference of Education that took place many years ago in Thailand. There was a big declaration, very important declaration, saying that education is so important, it cannot be only in the hands of governments. That was a very important out of that declaration. However, changes in education are not occurring as fast as the rest of society. And this is a problem. Education systems are like failed companies, no results, nothing works. And when you compare the health sector with the education sector, I wanted to give a concrete example. If you bring a doctor from 100 years ago into a hospital today, that doctor is lost. Everything has changed. If you bring a teacher from 100 years ago into a classroom today, that teacher is not so lost because education is not changing as fast as the rest of society. So this is a very crucial point because more of the same is not enough. Just expanding current educational systems as they are is not enough. We're wasting our money, putting a lot of money into current education systems that are not having results. Why? This is my work with Escuela Nueva because we need a paradigm shift. We've known the theory of education for 150 years, Montesori, John Dewey, but all these ideas come into the elite schools, not into the poorest of the poor schools. So we really need, in the region, to go from transmission of knowledge to social construction of knowledge. We need to talk about the new role of the teacher for the 21st century. There have been changes in the act of learning act. We're going from teacher-driven to child-centered, nothing new in the philosophy. In the concept of time, not everybody learns the same thing at the same time, so we need more personalized type of strategies. And not only that, but we also need the concept of space. Learning doesn't occur only in schools. So how do we tackle all these issues, the concept of act, time, and space? And also, last but not least, we're talking about 21st century skills, what computers cannot do. All these learning to learn, learning to lead processes, learning to take initiatives, and basically learning to work in teams. And this is what companies are looking for, and this is what education systems are not provided. So this has been my work for more than 30 years with Escuela Nueva. Thank you. Thank you, Vicky. Andrea. Thank you, Vicky. I think that we all agree that education is the most powerful tool to foster social mobility, and that's no discussion. And that happens because a high school graduate earns around $200 a month versus a college graduate can earn $1,000 or more dollars a month. And usually parents that graduate from college send their kids to college. So it is a virtual circle that creates in society. But in Colombia, a country of 46 million people, we are only graduating two out of 10 students that graduate from high school. Only two students out of 10 are graduating from college. This happens because only four are actually going and we have a 50% dropout rate. Why? Because public universities are really good, they're good quality, but they're just a few, so the spots are very competitive. So only the smart students are getting those spots. And the private universities are too expensive for the rest of the masses to afford. And I think this is important. And we have student loans with crazy interest rates between 12 to 23%. They require co-signers with liabilities. So we have basically a sandwich of the middle classes and the low classes. And only in Latin America, only the smart students and the rich students are going to college. And this is something that worries me because access to massive college is important. And even though projects like Scala, my social enterprise, is partnering with private universities and buying future tuition seats at wholesale prices, translating these discounts to low middle income families and allowing low and middle income families to purchase their children's future tuition seats in a small monthly payments and creative ideas are coming up is not enough. And I think the panel should discuss access, massive access to higher education. So I would like to challenge the panel not only to think about this human capital crisis, but also to have fun and to think about like how is the higher education of the future is gonna look like and how are us, the young generation is gonna be involved in this process. Thank you. As I said, the fire starters and they both presented with challenges and but also with optimism. So let me introduce quickly the panel in the order that they will intervene and the ecosystem they represent themselves. So to my left, I have Stephen Bullrich, a young global leader, a good friend, the current minister of education of Argentina and I think a big hope for education not only in Argentina, but in the region. We have, I have following him, we have Sergio Fonseca from Pearson. He has extended experiencing education and education reform and he also represents, of course, a big part of the ecosystem companies, private sector dealing with materials, technology and other aspects of it. Then we have Eduardo Bon Tempo, he's an entrepreneur. He started Geeky in Brazil and he was a Shroud Foundation, such an entrepreneur and he, of course, will chip in with the role of technology in this ecosystem and you know, what are the challenges and the boundaries, et cetera. And then we'll go to Pasi. Pasi Solberg, he's a professor at Harvard Education School. He's an expert in education, he's finished, too. So it's interesting because, not finished, finished. Yeah, just, which is interesting because, of course, we all look up to Finland and what they've achieved and that's actually his expertise and so he'll give us and share with us his learnings and lessons for Latin America and last but not least, we have Gabriela Ramos from OECD but also from Mexico who will focus or give a regional focus to the questions because here we are for the World Economic Forum in Latin America and as a region we might be able, I think we are, we could be able to do more together. So with that intro about the whole panel, let me turn it to Esteban. So, Esteban, from the public sector perspective, you know, what are the challenges? How can we move faster than Bikis? Arturo, I thanks for the interaction and the hope you have on me. But I don't wanna avoid an issue that I think is very important in this arena of the World Economic Forum that is the death of Joe Cox yesterday. She was killed, she's a British MP but she's also, she was and also a young global leader, member of our community and she was killed because of hatred only because of the way she thought about the United Kingdom going into Europe. And I think we have to call them out. We have to call out those that are pushing hatred among the world as leaders because that creates an educational environment where teachers have to teach. The, we get to understand that as leaders we need to promote the education of the example. We are leaders and we need to lead the world to a better place, committed to improving the state of the world. That's the logo of the World Economic Forum and to stand by it we need to lead by example. And I think Joe did that and because of that she was killed and because a lot of leaders are not doing that. And I think we need to call them out and the world needs to think about these crimes of hatred that are coming out because of this bad leadership we have that are taking hate as a flag and as a way of doing politics. So sorry for that but I just wanted to mention it. I thought it was very bad news for us yesterday and I wanted to mention it today. Going to the question I think the basic reason that we have this conversation is that politics gets in the way. Why? Because education is long term and politicians usually cannot think long term because they have urgencies. They have electrolyte urgencies. And I think if we don't put that on the table and talk about that we're not gonna solve the problem. Andrea just said we all agree that education is very important. Sorry Andrea, that's not the case. Unfortunately, but the truth is if you ask a society and I'm gonna talk always about Argentina because I wanna talk about things that I know. In Argentina education comes up seventh in the issues that people think are important for their life. Security, personal security, inflation, economy, unemployment, narcotics or drug addiction, all of them come first. But the truth is education could solve all of them if we work with it. But leaders are not choosing to put education as a solution to those problems. And I think that's the biggest problem we have today. I think we come to these sessions, we hear leaders talking about this, but the truth is when we go back, electrolyte urgencies get in the way. So I think one of the biggest point is here is we have again, and that's why I brought up the issue of leadership, we have to lead a society that needs to understand because it doesn't have the education needed to understand that education can solve the problems of unemployment, of personal security, of narcotics. And I think that is the biggest and most important tool that we have to develop a society. Thank you, Stevan. Sergio. Private sector, but you've been in every angle. So what needs to change? How can we move the system? Thank you very much. To give it a Latin America context perspective, I want to make everybody reflect a bit that many of us in Latin America are an example of what can education do for you. So some of us sitting here have made enormous progress thanks to education. And it's been generation after generation that we have been improving and education has been part of the development of Latin America. That is the importance for me of education. And talking about long term, I do agree with Stevan, it is a long term thing. So what governments are doing today in terms of reforms? There's a difference between reforms that are thought for the longer term and reforms that are thought for the period of the government. The example that I can give is the Mexican one right now has been thought for the long term and that is very important because it is also solving problems that have many, many years happening. So if you think about long term, I do think we have big hopes in Latin America that we can improve this if we think long term. The best example that I can give is the blended generations that we have currently in every school. So we're fighting or struggling with the non-native generation in terms of technology with the technological, digital natives. Right now it is struggling and both private schools and public sector are struggling with this. If we think about it long term, it will get solved because we will continue to train teachers in how to adapt into this new world and the new world will continue to grow into the teacher's population. So we do believe there's hope. Now, in terms of changing the paradigm and answering to Vicky's point, I also think that part of changing the paradigm is to think about the difference between education and learning. Education is the subject. It's the big subject. We, the private companies, work for the educators. So we are about education but we work for educators. So what we should all think about is the learning process and that's why it's part of the 21st century skills. It talks about learning skills and we need to think about the learning process and the methodologies for both teachers and students to learn. So to end up with my comment, I do think we have huge hope but we need to focus both in Latin America on teachers and in students and in companies and the private companies that are willing to help the government under schools. We have both. We have, actually, part of our team. They are teachers. Some are authors. So we're trying to change the paradigm from education to learning in helping the methodologies of learning to make sure we teach on learning and we help students with that. Thank you, Sergio. Eduardo, the difference between the decades ago, since from the time we've known the needed changes, the big difference in the past 10, 15 years has been technology. So you have a very successful startup scaling up quickly. How do you see technology playing out? And as I asked you before the panel, what are the limits too? Yeah, so I think technology addresses most of the points that Vicky raised regarding where the learning happens and the personalization process of learning. And just to give some statistics in Brazil to put everybody on the same level, in Brazil, from every student that enters high school, half, 50% of the students do not finish high school. So we have a 50% dropout rate. And from the ones that finish, only 10 to 15% has the minimum level of math in Portuguese. So all the rest, they are not even close to the minimum level of math in Portuguese. So this is the challenge that we have. And to tackle this challenge by investing in more teachers, it's gonna be so expensive that I truly believe that technology can play a very important role on this. So for instance, what we believe in Vicky, we believe that people are different, people learning different ways, and people are in different moments of their learning process. So to teach everybody the same way doesn't make any sense. So what we do, we use technology to personalize the process of learning of each person according to the difficulty level of each person, according to the media that each person learns best. Some people learn watching videos, some people learn reading text. So what we do, we use technology to personalize the process. And of course data plays a big role on this. So we need to work on scale to make sure that we can really have a strong recommendation engine, a strong intelligence to recommend what really makes sense for each person. And what we saw is that by doing the products with technology, we can reach scale very fast in a very cheap way. So for instance, this year we are doing a project with the federal government in Brazil in which we are preparing students to join the university. So in Brazil it's very similar to here in Colombia, they do a standardized test to join university. So we are preparing all the senior students in Brazil to do this exam. And we currently have three million students that are using the product financed by the government. So it's really huge, it's really scalable. But the challenge is that to really reach the people that needs the most, you have to interact with the government, right? We provide technology for the private sector and it's okay, of course they need, but it increases the gap between the people that can pay and people cannot pay. Then comes the challenge of negotiating with the government. The government doesn't know how to buy technology yet in Brazil. If you have to wait for an auction process that takes like six months or a year to sell your technology as a startup, you're dead. You do not have all this time, right? And we took four years to close this deal with the government and what happens right after we close the deal, it changes the government. And then everybody that comes in says, oh, the other guys were doing everything wrong. So we're gonna shut down everything that was made by the previous government. So what happens is that we have three million people that are benefiting from our product that right now are in a very tough position because we don't know what's gonna happen. And as a startup, to be truly honest, we cannot depend on this. We need to make sure we have predictability, we have sustainability because we don't have resources for this. So this is the challenge, but technology we really believe is the way and it's already making all the results. Thank you very much. So Paso, you come and see us with fresh eyes, Latin America, and you hear about this misalignment, you hear about the hope and yet only lead schools really are implementing things that are needed. And of course Finland, beyond your own expertise but Finland is a showcase of great education. What are the lessons? What can we learn from Finland and of course the rest of your experience? Yeah, first of all, I want to thank the World Economic Forum for organizing this type of panel. I think it's very important to have a conversation about education things. And secondly, when I was thinking about the title of this panel, I would like to provoke a little bit going back to what the fire starters said. I think part of the problem actually that Vicky was stating in the opening, her remarks, is that we have been focusing too much on innovation. You know, I argue as a researcher that most of the ideas, most of the innovations in education to make systems work, systems like Finland or Singapore or Canada, they already exist. And I don't know any other area of human endeavor where we behave like this, that when we kind of create an innovation that doesn't work, we go and create yet another innovation. Just think about business or technology or even health, anything, when things don't work, people try to improve those things, right? They try to change them a little bit and see what works. So when I look at education during the last 25, 30 years, I think this is exactly what we have been doing, that we are not really making the best use, what Vicky was also mentioning, all these ideas during the last 100 years that seems to be working. Now, the good news is that today we know much more than we would have known if this panel was 15 years ago, if we were sitting here 15 years ago, we wouldn't know where in the world are the countries, the education systems that have been able to fix the things and make things work, why they are doing better than the others and how the other systems like here in Latin America could get close to what they do. So 15 years ago, we would be talking about these things in a darkness, but now the good news is that we know much more about those things, we know much more about the high-performing education systems, what they do, where they are and why they are where they are. That's why one of the things for the governments, like Argentina, for example, and some of the others that have been working in Latin America is to, before doing anything else, is to ask your advisors or people in your stuff that what do we know about these things? Where are the good ideas and practices and examples to people who can do these things? 15 years ago, there was no way to do that. Or even if you did that, you often get wrong answers, kind of a bad ideas, and that's why we haven't been able to see the change in the education system because there's so many bad ideas around. So let me say a word about Finland because often people think that Finland is a kind of a silver bullet and kind of a magic island where everything, we have somehow figured out how to make things work, that's not true. Finland is just part of this global package of high-performing education systems, like many of the Canadian provinces, Alberta, Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec, belong to those things, Singapore, Japan, in Asia, some other countries. And the interesting thing now is that from the research point of view or policy point of view, if you put all those high-performing or successful education systems together and ask the question that is there anything that they're doing similarly or in the same ways? They are kind of a set of things that these countries are doing and this is the kind of a new list of lessons or ideas that policymakers and governments should be considering. Transfer is always a bad idea. You kind of transfer anything from Finland or Singapore to Argentina or here in Colombia and say that because it works somewhere else, it should work here. But we can learn a lot. And one of those things, if I just mentioned one or two of those things, one of those things that is common to all high-performing education systems today is that they all function as a system. So they don't fragment or kind of a split their systems in the subsystems of having private schools or public-private partnerships and public schools or teacher preparation systems where part of the teachers are trained in the universities and others come through windows and doors of all sorts of things they have. Sorry, they run their education as a system. Then the other one that we didn't know 15 years ago is that all of these successful education systems have somehow realized that key to improve learning of all students is to focus and invest in equity and equality in the system. In other words, work hard at the level of the policy and resources to make sure that everybody, all children have opportunity to learn. It's very easy to say this. It's very hard to turn this into a policy and then seek funding and resources to do that. And finally, and lastly, I think I wouldn't probably be able to leave my statement here without making a reference about the teachers. The teacher issue is often misunderstood. People think that it's all about teachers that as soon as we find good people to teach in our systems everything will work fine but it doesn't work like this. The teacher system is much more complicated than that. We need to have a system where teaching is seen by young people as something that is attractive and a potential lifelong career. And now this is disappearing in most of the countries within the OECD and in the world actually. The teaching is becoming a kind of a thing that you do for a couple of years and then you do something real, okay? And if you have a system, if you have in your system, if you have seats like this, that's the kind of an invitation of failure. You cannot fix your education system by having a kind of a status of teaching profession something that young people don't really see as a lifelong thing. All of those high performers that I mentioned, they have worked towards this type of thing that the teaching is seen as a potential lifelong career. It's paid well. Teachers are prepared like lawyers and doctors in research universities and it's hard to get in there and it's hard to get graduated but as soon as you do that, then you have a situation that Vicky was calling for when you made your example about health that that's why I think the teachers should be prepared and treat it like we treat our doctors and lawyers as well. Thank you very much. So Gabriela, you are a Latin American of course but you are the counselor to the sector general of the OECD so you see the most developed countries in the world with some Latin American members and so you have like past a bigger perspective but in particular I wanted you to address the potential regional action in these things. What things can we do regional and what things actually must remain national? Well, let me just say I actually, I'm very happy to come after everybody because I was picking up a little bit of everyone. I really think that first of all is very important that we put education higher in the agenda. I think that we pay leave service to education and I would say let's not talk, what the minister said, let's not talk about education in general, let's talk about quality education because we put a lot of money. Latin America put a lot of money and we have increasing the budget, the public expenditure and education and public expenditure and education without really changing the outcomes. So let's focus on quality education, let's gather the evidence. We are the house of the PISA test which measures outcomes in education and what we see for Latin America is that according to the level of development of Latin America, we don't get the outcomes that we should be getting. All the countries of Latin America that participate in the PISA report locate themselves in the bottom 30%. I don't think Latin America deserves that and that means you have almost half of the students performing the test and we're not talking about those that are out as the fire starter set of the system. They cannot resolve very basic equations and actually locate themselves at the top performers in terms of the 80 countries that participate like Asia or Europe or Finland for the matter. You have actually, if you think about the results or the average of Latin America according to PISA who has 500 points average but Asia has 600, Latin America has 400 so we are 100 points below which means that our children at age 15 might be receiving two or three years less of education and this is how we structure the systems as you say because what we do is really put the systems first and not the student. We do not invest really in supporting teachers. We do not invest in having the best and the brightest becoming teachers as Pasi said but actually then we let them alone. They need to perform and we do not accompany them and the quality of the education systems cannot be better than the quality of their teachers and that's a very important point but we can learn from the other countries and Pasi mentioned some of the issues but you know what is key? Latin America has neither break the socioeconomic background impact on the learning outcomes. Children that are from poor families will receive poor education and therefore we're still there. The high performing systems break that link and why? Because they focus on vulnerable children. They put the best teachers in the more difficult schools. Very complicated with our unions and I think Mexico as you mentioned has done well in terms of defining this kind of system where you really focus to help those that are at disadvantage and I think this is something that regionally can be done because this is something that brings together all of our countries. We have really for example another school practice in Latin America you have high repetition rates. Why? Because teachers don't focus on those that are vulnerable. They choose these guys are not gonna make it. They focus to the strong kids. Well that's completely wrong. I think that we really need to turn the system into the school practice that will really focus in those kids that are lagging behind because those that are doing well they will be doing well in any case. And then you add up the question of the kind of skills. My God there is a fly. The kinds of skills that you need. We focus too much on cognitive skills which is important because math, science, reading is very important but now we're seeing that in a very fast-paced world, technological work you really need some other kinds of skills social emotional skills, the ability to work with others the ability to persevere, self confidence, all these things. But now we're talking about global competencies which is the ability to understand others and understand ourselves. The ability to understand the biases and talking about Brexit and all these very increased fundamentalism in Europe. The reality is that tolerance is low and these are the kind of challenges that education systems will need to be addressing going forward. Where would I put the emphasis and one more thing on technology? I'm sorry to say but we did a report on how much use of IT in education has improved school outcomes. Systems that use ITs had actually decreased their performance. So again, it's not the gadget, it's not the technology, it's not the electronic board. It's how do you ensure that teachers receive the training to incorporate technology in the class and how do you ensure that the contents are developed and the technology to introduce the technology. When we got this report we were really scared because I said how am I going to go out because I actually presented the report to say do not invest in technology in the classroom. Well, that's not the point. The point is that if you are going to invest in technology in the classroom, first make sure that the teachers know the technology and it's comfortable with technology that the contents are developed for using that technology and that you're not gonna be creating a lot of stress because nobody knows how to use it and everybody's focusing actually in the IT systems instead of how to use them. Finally, where I will focus and this is also related to the latest research, I will focus on early childcare education. I think that the age from three to five and not only to put children in safe places but also to start building the foundations for strong learning and also a great equalizer in our societies. Thank you very much. So let me go into a second round of questions. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna throw to you some of the things that have been said by others and then we'll open to the floor. It's really, again, we're short in time so I'll ask you to be brief for this time but thanks a lot for time management. So let me start with seven again. So several of you actually talk about the alignment thing and about the political will you mentioned the unions. What if we start thinking different in a different dimension? So for instance, last year in the Summit of the Americas one proposition, concrete proposition from the forum of university presidents was let's start an accreditation body like the Europe has a accreditation body for universities and college degrees across Latin America but that would of course mean seeding some sort of sovereignty in terms of regulation. You're the minister of education of Argentina. What do you think about an idea like that? What do you think Argentina and the political process would allow? Well, let me tell you President Macri has put that in the agenda of both Marco Sur and Unasur, the mobility thing and we have a minister's meeting of the Marco Sur on next Friday and we're pushing forward the idea that we have an accreditation body that allows for the mobility within Marco Sur and hopefully Unasur later. So it's something that we see as very important in the region to really be an integrated region but I don't wanna leave the question at that because the problem today in Latin America is that as Eduardo said, not enough kids are getting to university and I think it has to do a little what we talked about but we need to focus as a region on equality and equal opportunities and I think early childhood education is key. We need to give all kids of three year olds an access to education, early childhood education is key to allow for an improved equality once you get into primary school and then teacher training and teacher mobility within the region. I mean, our teachers are not trained in the same way and I think the level of teaching could improve a lot if we exchange practices and also exchange teachers. We had an experience with Finland sending teachers from Argentina to Finland to Sweden to the US and just the exchange of the teachers just opened their minds and makes them better teachers and I think the region hasn't exploited that much the fact that we speak a common language. It's, well, but I really think that it could allow for a much bigger mobility among teachers and really improve the integration because we're talking about integration and I think through teachers we could achieve that integration and we're not moving far ahead in that. We're also trying to propose that kind of programs within the regional organizations. Excellent, let me jump to you, Pasi. Again, alignment, one of the themes here and alignment in terms of political will, because you mentioned the systems but you didn't mention anything about the politics within those. And so I'm Latin American and I imagine many here were saying, yeah, sure, but you're Finland. So you can do that. What would you say to that? I mean, there are obvious differences but what would you say to that? Yeah, well, first of all, these things will not happen during the one government period or even one decade that changing the culture in terms of the politics and how the politics should be kept away from education takes some time. And we used to have very different situation 30, 40 years ago. So you need to be patient if you have an education reform and that's a kind of a challenge here in this part of the world where the governments change and new things like somebody was saying that everything is bad what the previous governments did. And we are fortunate, actually the whole Scandinavia is fortunate to have the situation and culture where the kind of a previous government's work will continue regardless of who the new government or who the new minister is. But there's no kind of a magic pill for doing this except that kind of a systematically grow and make things happen. Thanks. So, Serhi, your private sector here there are these two, but let me separate the two more established firms in the education space versus startups. So we hear about how the power and of course the resources that the state has. What should be the role of that private sector in this new equality, alignment, regional action? If that's sort of the emergence of a new organizational paradigm for the system, what should be the role of the private sector? How do you see that in the future? Well, it should be very, very active and I think there's a lot of advisory work to do but the key is collaboration. What we find with different governments in Latin America is that when the ministers find that they can get help from the private sector both local and global companies that seriously can help them in designing education systems or education programs for the schools and it's putting together a team. Let me call you just to ask one thing. How easy is to do that today and why would you need to make it easier? I have to accept this easier and easier every time and I'll tell you why. It's maybe sensible but it's based on corruption, on the issue of corruption. The new ministers which are better and better every day, gladly, find that there's a niche that with companies both local and global, they can build a team to do things right while the whole system in a way is still working their ways. There are some projects that can be done through collaboration with the right partners and that's what we are finding more and more in more and more countries in Latin America so it can be done, it's a collaborative system. You can think of it as a niche for those important projects where it's worthwhile to work as a team with these companies. So it's a niche but it works and the most important thing is to focus in what we call in-person efficacy which is the outcomes that you were thinking about. Making sure that school by school and program by program, there is intended outcomes identified and that the plan, the program, the resources are all focused on delivering the outcomes. If the outcome is about progress, then most surely you'll have it versus if you didn't have it. So we focus, for the efficacy process for example, we focus on the access that somebody already called. It's to make sure the students have the access than that we have the success of the program in the results and then that we for sure deliver the progress in the student, that he's at other level. Whether it's because he learned English which is a common agenda in the country of Latin America if it's about learning English or it's about learning science or raising three points in the PISA test but that at the end there was some progress for the student and the community. Thank you. So Eduardo, you heard about technology so you're expecting this of course. No, but it's of course a super good point that I know you're aware of. It's not technology per se. It's really the role you could play in the system. You mentioned something very interesting the first time which is you have both private and public clients. So as a startup and as a technology startup what would you like to see in this ecosystem between the private and public sector? Yeah. I agree that technology is not gonna solve all the problems and as Gabriela said, we truly believe technology is not gonna replace the teacher. Really, the teacher is key in the process and what we learned in the last four years. If the teacher is not committed to using the technology he closes the door of the room and you're out. He's not gonna use it. He's gonna, you know, bat mouth you. He's gonna do everything he wants. So we really see the teacher as the enabler of the process of inserting technology into schools, into systems and at the end of the day reaching students. So for us, the role of the teacher is gonna change. For me today, a teacher spend like two hours a week correcting homework doesn't make any sense because the technology can do this in real time. So why not use this to help teachers? Of course, then you need to train the teacher to develop other skills. He's gonna be, he needs to be prepared to put more context into the subject that he's teaching, be a moderator because the content today is anywhere. You take your mobile phone, the content is there, the student is learning from there, not from him. So I agree, the teacher is key and he's the one that is gonna enable the process for us regarding public and private partnerships. A challenge that I see especially in Brazil, we've been working with foundations and even private companies, but sometimes we feel that everybody wants to be the hero. Everybody wants to be the one that solved the problem of education. And sometimes it's not done in a more collaborative way. So I think it's really a challenge to have an alignment we don't wanna be heroes. We just wanna develop technology that help teachers and help students. And at the same time, in a challenging environment, like right now economically, the money from companies, they disappear. Like a social responsibility, it's gone, right? So what we decided and we asked it why we do private and public schools is because the way we found to be sustainable and be a social impact company, we make money from the private sector. But at the same time, I offer free access to public students. I do projects that are like this one we are doing with the government that we don't make even any money, but we are doing social impact. So we try to balance these in our business model. And of course, we hope that the public and private sector can be more aligned because we truly believe that this is the only way we're gonna reach the ones that need the most. Thank you. Briefly, Gabriella, we've talked about, again, alignment is a word clearly, a keyword here. With an OECD perspective and a global perspective, is there any kind of obvious lesson or idea for Latin America in terms of the organization of the education sector or the education system, ecosystem that you can share with us before opening to the floor? No, well, yeah, I think that we have learned a lot and it has been mentioned by several of the speakers before me. The fact is that you need to build up a system that delivers the right practices at the classroom level. That's the whole point. We think about a lot of how to administer the teacher assignments and how do you assign the budget and how, but we never look at what is exactly the school practice and you need to bring the teachers with you in that sense because the teachers are the ones that are going to be experienced, are the ones that are going to be supported or not in terms of dealing with children that have learning problems and therefore I think that instead of us being discouraged or disappointed at the outcomes, let's take a hard look and document by a technology the good school practices because also the teaching professor is a very alone profession. You're alone in front of the classes. What do you do? How do you connect the good experiences of teachers? And that's what we're doing. We're doing networks of teachers that exchange themselves, the problems that they learn from each other and that can really look at how other teachers around the world have been addressing the issues and I think this is a very powerful. The other point, teacher union and teachers in general are very, very difficult to change or move. How do you turn the mindset to say you are the agent of change but you are the one that is going to be leading the whole process and make them part of the solution? First, by having very clear definition of what you expect from them and then having very good accountability system and evaluation system and reward systems because they always think that evaluation needs to punish them, reward systems, the good teachers. Pasi, you wanted to add something? Yeah, I have just kind of a comment on this global thing. The PISA, OECD PISA was mentioned several times and I know how the situation here in Latin America is in terms of the so-called PISA scores. But one thing I want, just a word of warning for people like the minister here and others is that the PISA test is not everything and that's what's happening now is that some countries kind of believe that this is what the ultimate indicator for improving education systems and it is important and I used to teach math and science myself and I think that math and science are very important things and reading as well but they are not everything and so when the ministers, when you think about benchmarking your systems here to others, those in OECD and the high performing systems, just make sure that you don't destroy and do away all these beautiful, wonderful things that you have here that PISA is doing nothing about like arts and music and literature and human rights and many other things that I believe will be a kind of a sustainable things for the future and I'm saying this only because I'm advising several ministers, your colleagues around the world and I've been sitting down with many of them who say when I asked them that, so what is your vision? Where do you try to aim at as a minister? They tell me that my country will be on the top five in the OECD PISA by 2020 and I say that this is not a vision, this is not a, this is a nonsense. You kind of run your system by that type of thing so kind of a, just we have to be mindful with the misuse and misunderstanding what the OECD PISA is and let me conclude by saying that many of the things that we know about education systems, why they work, we wouldn't know without the OECD PISA data so these are absolutely critical but at the same time we are now seeing the kind of a wave of misunderstanding and misuse of this very important indicator that we have and just it's very important that the people here in Latin America can put the OECD PISA test in a kind of a right place. Absolutely. Stefan, we'll go next and then. Avril, I want to answer. But I think with your perspective, you can go but unless we keep it very brief, we won't have any chance to give up. Very brief, I like the way he finished not to misuse PISA but PISA is not a static. PISA started measuring cognitive skills and now is defining global competencies that has to do with collaboration, with tolerance, with education for peace and with many and very difficult, I agree with you, much more difficult to measure. We have also documented, for example, gender biased and white girls are not getting into STEM. It's, I just invite you to get to know PISA well because it's not only the target, it's not only the number, it's just a full set of knowledge of what works and what does not work in education systems. Thank you. Being a follower of PISA, I know PISA is only an X-ray and it doesn't measure your blood, it's an X-ray. So it's part of the system, not the whole system that I agree with, Pasi, and I think we need to take it that way. It's a very important tool and without the X-ray, we wouldn't know if the bones are safe or not so we need it but I think we need to understand that it's only part of the system and that Latin America has a lot to do with it, with this cultural understanding and growth that needs to be promoted to. The world is going a little to what Andrea was saying about the future. My kids, we have five kids with my wife and they're gonna have seven jobs when they grow up. They're gonna go through seven professions. Five of them do not exist so creativity is very important and it cannot measure creativity for a test. So I think there are values in the future that we need to understand that are important to be promoted in school and that cannot be measured directly and there are other things inside that need to be measured and just a small point on the unions. Unions were left as the only voice in education systems in Latin America because politicians didn't want to talk about education. So we just left them being the only, it's not that they are afraid of change, they don't trust us. They don't trust politicians. So we need to build trust with them and that's what we're trying to do in Argentina at least because we think we gave them the whole responsibility of the system and then we blade them because the system didn't work and I think that's something that has to change if we want to go to a better relation with the teachers. Thank you. So we are very short on time but we can take a couple of questions from the audience. I'll ask you to just ask them and then just together we'll try to chip in with responses from the panel before we wrap it up. Can we? Thank you. Maria Alexandra Vélez from Pearson. You all talk about different pieces of the education ecosystem but I haven't heard anyone talking about parents and we know that parents' engagement in education is as important as the work of the teacher in the classroom. So how are you going to integrate all these actors, all these pieces and parents into that to make education successful? Thank you. Someone else? I work for an organization that is called United World College and we're taking this very strong international baccalaureate academic program and combining it with a residence program and a co-culture program, we're trying to teach our students all those global skills through a social entrepreneurship like main vertebral cord of the whole program and it was super challenging with the teachers, super challenging. We had the best partners and it was great but actually making the teachers be engaged in the program has taken us a lot of time and training them to be, as you said, part of the program. But once they're in, I think they're really good and they can really help to make things happen and to make things roll and we're trying to make these partnerships with public teachers so that they can learn what we have learned and they don't have to go through that really steep curve that we went through. And I just wonder if you have any examples of success where you have teachers from the private sectors in my case are very international teachers. We have teachers from Australia, Japan, New Zealand and inner college and taking it to the public sector just to expand the good practices that you find. Thank you. So we have five minutes left. So you have 40 seconds. No, I'm kidding. You have one minute. No, let's take one minute to reflect on this role of parents, teachers mobility, not necessarily international but private, public or sectors, regions, et cetera. Let's take please one minute because we really need to finish on time. Parents, again, they are very important in the system and we need the commitment from them. But I think it's more a society problem than a parents problem. When I was answering to Andrea about the fact that education is not an issue society-wise is I think we need to understand that there are a lot of parents that do not have the education to be able to commit to their teachers education. We had a president a long time ago in Argentina called Sarmiento, who is kind of the father of the Argentinian education system that's a sexual one, not the current one. And he said the problem with education is that those that do not have it cannot ask for it. So people that have been able enough or lucky enough to get education need to help others to get it. And I think that's the role of solidarity we need to have in our societies to promote education and help parents that want their kids to get an education but do not understand and cannot measure the quality of education their kids are getting. And they realize that when they try to go to university and they fail and that's too late. And to the second point, I think in our system there's movement all the time. So we have private school teachers teaching in public schools all the time. But I do think mobility is very important. I do think that changing countries and exchanging teachers will build a much, much more, much stronger teacher base all over the region. And I think we need to promote that as much as we can. Thank you. Yeah, so I'm gonna focus on the first question regarding the parents. We agree that if the parents, if they are engaged the performance increases. And of course technology can play a role very important on this because today parents lack time. They spend most of the time working. So what we do, we give visibility to the parent in what his kids are doing. So if they succeeded, if they're not going well they receive a report every day on their mobile phone to understand what, you know, how can he help actually the kid for the positive way to say, oh, congratulations, you did well on this. And if he wants to also tell his kid that he wants to study more. So the first step for us is bringing him to the process. He needs to be something very easy. He needs to be mobile. And we see that the engagement of parents in reading these reports and asking for improvements is really, really high. So this is for us the first step to involve parents in the process. Thank you very much. Pasi, would you like to answer? Sure, yeah, about the parents' engagement around the world. If you look at the global picture what has happened is that parents when they are engaged in the school and education they're mostly interested in their own children's education not the other kids. And this has been a big change during the last 25, 30 years because of the school choice and kind of individualized pathways that many people have. I think the key question here is that how do we make parents or citizens or like you said, community interested and engage in other families' kids' education as well because that's what it means to build a system that people, citizens would be concerned about educating everybody, not only their own children. Of course, I have three sons and I'm mostly of course interested in my own kids' education. But I should never forget also the importance of educating my neighbors and fellow citizens' children because if we forget that one, then we lose the community and that's why this is an important point. Absolutely, thank you. I think I'll answer to both with a general statement. I am worried and that we as leaders in education for Latin America need to be more realistic and actually be, from a marketing standpoint, segment exactly what we need because the technology topic is not, it's not general to everything. We have to be very realistic on where we are. In terms of the parents, they are definitely part of the ecosystem but in Latin America, being very practical, they're more worried to send their kids to school and actually they invest a lot of their available income to education and it continues to be the most important after household and food. Continues to be their most important thing. So they're really eager to find the best education for their kids but in our countries, they just take it for granted. They just send them to school, whether it's public and free or whether it's a private, they just take for granted the education program will be the right one. So as education leaders, we need to make sure the education programs are the right ones because parents will send the kids to school and they will do their best effort to do it. And in terms of the teachers, we should also be segmenting what exactly do we need. So it's, in real terms, it's very difficult to do the private public combination but what if there's a program with the governments that some of the teachers could actually be awarded with an assignment in a private school and paid for that and the other way around too to give them cross fertilization experience. Thank you. Very fast. I have to say that the level of education of parents is very important for them to engage in the school systems. I completely agree that the engagement of parents is very important because they are a force in terms of demanding good education. But if you have half of the mothers in Latin America with only finishing secondary school, they don't feel they have the knowledge and they just disengage completely and we have asked them in PISA, why would they not get closer to the school system and they say because I'm not prepared. So it's very important that in Latin America, girls are increasing substantially their level of education. I think that's one of the good news that we have in the region that girls are really now even getting more degrees in university levels and that's gonna help that engagement because they will feel strong to do so. The other point, public and private in Latin America doesn't make any difference. Public as bad, as private are as bad as public. I'm sorry, but in average, I don't think that is value for money in terms of sending kids to the private school. There are some good private school, but in general, on average, no difference whatsoever. So I would say that it's better to understand those schools and we have even very good experiences with even rural schools where you have good principals and good teachers having outcomes that are even beyond what would you expect from them. So I would better do a matching between good performing schools and bad performing school and twinning them because that's what some other school systems are doing and I think it's working very nicely in terms of the principal, the teachers and knowing what works and what doesn't. Thank you. Just as a wrap up, I would like to leave with something and three things I wanna emphasize. One, the learning and not education alone. That's interesting to me because maybe the forum can pick up even the name and send a message with that. Two, regional action and you mentioned very concrete things, teachers, mobility, organization, tech, that scale, you can do research, of course data. And three, the alignment question. I found that fascinating. So what if perhaps we start thinking about organizations within country or regional organizations that don't exist or that exist and act poorly and where you can align better. The Panama Canal in Panama operates independently. It's public, but operates independently and so has a long term perspective and it works nicely. So just as a teaser for future action. Thank you very much to this brilliant panel and thanks everyone for being here. Thank you very much.