by Timothy Cheston ’08

The Woodrow Wilson School has long valued an understanding of the social and political realities that shape and are shaped by public policy. Over this past fall break, 12 students from a Woodrow Wilson School task force had a unique opportunity to understand the realities of an educational system first hand, moving the classroom from the walls of Robertson Hall to the beautiful vistas of Costa Rica—selected as the site country due to its century-long history of free and compulsory education.

From October 28 to November 4, 2007, participants in the WWS 401b task force, “Inclusive Education in Developing Countries,” traveled there for a course-related study tour. The purpose of the trip was to familiarize students with school education in a developing country, and to allow participants to examine the feasibility of policy options for improving education quality and inclusiveness in light of on-the-ground experience.

The task force was led by Dr. Marlaine Lockheed, who is a lecturer of public and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School. She also is a visiting fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C., and formerly served as interim director for education at the World Bank and was a principal research scientist at Educational Testing Services in Princeton, N.J. The team included senior commissioners Hilary Billings and Tim Cheston, and WWS junior task force students Jacob Candelaria, Adrienne Clermont, Alexandra Cristea, Angie D’Sa, Alice Easton, Laurie Frey, Deepa Iyer, Katie Ko, and Lynn Yang. The study tour visited three private and six public schools in the capital, San Jose, and Cobano—the major town in the rural southern Nicoya Peninsula—and its surrounding areas. Students had the opportunity to speak with school directors, teachers, students, a regional supervisor of education for the Cobano region, and the head of a prominent, educational, non-governmental organization (NGO). Students were quick to view its successes in the first two schools they visited: The Lincoln School, a private, American school in San Jose; and the Liceo Experimental Bilingue, reputed to be the best public high school in the country. Both schools had all students pass the national high school graduation exams and emphasized fluency in English for all students.

Traveling away from San Jose, the concerns of educators for improvements in educational quality and performance quickly became apparent. After visiting some of the country’s poorest schools, the content of student conversation changed dramatically as they attempted to understand the underlying causes for the variation in the education system. Students grappled with many of the issues they discussed in the classroom— decentralization, teacher incentives, peer effects—with a new context, understanding how larger concepts are treated and implemented in reality.

After returning to Princeton, each junior in the task force prepared a report for “Save the Children”— the leading independent organization creating lasting change in the lives of children in need in the United States and around the world—with recommendations for improved performance in their educational programs. In classroom discussions and within the content of those reports, it became clear that not only did students bring with them their own knowledge to their Costa Rican experience, but also brought away with them experiences that could be shared in both the classroom and their task force reports. Students contextualized scholarly evidence with personal anecdotes, balancing aggregate statistics with locally defined needs. Ultimately, students left with a greater understanding of the concerns of those educators and students that not only will improve the quality of their academic work this semester, but also undoubtedly influence the policy perspectives they take on into their future career work.