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through continuous support in order to provide a safe, wholesome, and properly structured
environment.
15.
We recognize that although we have made progress with enrolment in and coverage
of basic education over the past decade, we agree to continue implementing policies to increase
coverage and retention and to prevent scholastic failure. So that the children of the neediest families
can remain in school, we recommend implementing support programs, such as scholarships, transfers
to cover the opportunity costs faced by the very poor, and other social protection policies.
16.
We agree to make the necessary efforts to expand the coverage of secondary and
high-school education, particularly in the technical arena, including the elements necessary for
preparing our young people for life, citizenship, and the workplace, and incorporating into that
learning process broad elements of creativity, innovation, and the development of entrepreneurial
skills, together with an understanding of economic and educational realities, free enterprise, the role
of the state, civil society, and the media, and the development of skills and virtues for their
incorporation into those realities. All this must be accompanied by a system to certify the knowledge
and skills of those students who graduate from these levels of education.
17.
We express our fullest recognition and profound gratitude to teachers, promoters of
community education, literacy instructors, and, in general, all the men and women whose professional
mission in life is to educate and seek knowledge. In addition, we reaffirm our commitment toward
working to maximize the status enjoyed by educators.
18.
We underscore the importance of the forums for debating and exchanging
experiences and proposals created by the nations of the Americas to generate a continuous process of
education, assessment, training, and professional development for teachers, which will serve as a tool
for meeting the challenge of interconnecting education policy with social realities, in order to promote
equity, overcome the educational differences existing between rich and poor, and, with the help of
modern information and communications technologies, devise pedagogical models that will afford
teachers proper professional development.
19.
We urge our educational communities to increase their efforts to channel education
toward achieving committed quality.
20.
We recognize the importance of identifying, organizing, and exchanging best
practices. We support their critical transfer, together with that of consolidated programs, and we urge
the OAS Unit for Social Development and Education to continue with and expand this initiative,
incorporating programs from the largest possible number of member states. We also encourage the
use of the tools the OAS has at hand to support the implementation of this strategy.
21.
We are pleased to have formally established the Inter-American Committee on
Education, the technical and political functions of which must work for and build consensus in favor
of hemispheric and subregional programs and support the pursuit of the mandates of the Summits of
the Americas. We call for permanent participation by organizations and agencies at the international
and other levels in helping to design, execute, and follow up on the CIE’s programs, thereby allowing
closer coordination on projects that address issues common to them.