Reading for All Children

“Education is Everyone’s Business”

Reading for All Children is the mission of the Centers of Excellence for Teacher Training (CETT), a visionary child literacy program announced by President Bush at the 2001 Summit of the Americas. The CETT program aims to lay the foundation for lifelong learning and participation in the global workforce by improving reading instruction in the early primary grades. The program provides courses and coaching in best practices in reading education to primary school teachers and provides learning resources and children’s books to participating primary schools. The goal is improve the literacy of over 500,000 children in a 5 year period, giving them and their families new opportunities to transform their lives and future.

The CETT program focuses on classroom impact in first through third grades. New approaches have been established that result in more children being able to read and write by the end of third grade, widely recognized as a critical milestone in education. Primary schools in marginal urban and rural areas have been selected based on their needs, as well as the strength of commitment to improving student achievement in reading and writing.

CETT master teachers are trained through local leading education universities using teaching strategies based on best practices from their own countries or others in the hemisphere. Master teachers work collaboratively with teachers in the participating schools once didactic training is completed to supplement and reinforce skills the teachers have learned by providing ongoing coaching, modeling, and mentoring in the classroom for an extended period. Special attention is also being given to determining how distance-learning methodologies can dramatically increase the number of teachers and children that can be reached in the long term.

The education institutions are staffed by distinguished educators and experts from local universities and school systems in 15 nations: Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Jamaica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Guyana, Grenada, Belize, Trinidad and Tobago, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador.

The Ministries of Education of the participating countries have endorsed this program. They strongly support the goal of improving student achievement in reading and writing and view the voluntary association between the education universities and participating primary schools as a creative way to infuse new thinking and new resources into basic education. Ministries recognize that for many of the teachers, this will be the first time that they have received extensive formal training in reading education.

The program at its most basic level, seeks to inspire teachers, parents, administrators and the community at large to bring about higher student achievement in the most fundamental of learning skills, the ability to read and write for personal and national development.

INMED is developing private sector participation to help sustain the program over the long term. Start-up funds for this project were provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). See pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNADF049.pdf (page 3) for an example of how public-private partnerships have worked in Peru.

For more information, visit www.readingforallchildren.org.