ADB Preparing the Secondary Education Sector Development Program in Vietnam

In its efforts to continue education expansion, the Government of Vietnam has made tremendous investment in education over the past two decades at all levels. Even with its recent United Nations’ Millennial Development Goal achievement of universal primary education, Vietnam's goal toward universal secondary education lags far behind. In this context the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute for International Studies in Education (IISE) was selected to head up an Asian Development Bank-funded national education policy reform team that will provide technical assistance to ADB and the Vietnam Ministry of Education and Training (MOET). The technical assistance project focuses on the development of a strategically planned and managed secondary education sector development loan program consisting of US$70 million to be expended by 2015.

The primary outcome of this technical assistance was a mutually agreed design for a secondary education subsector development program comprising a policy reform program and an investment project that aims to deliver equitable and good quality secondary education by 2015. The program addresses the following key policy reforms: (1) a regulatory framework for private secondary education and a new policy framework for financial supports for students including scholarships, student loans, and conditional cash transfer; (2) strengthening the quality assurance through the development of lower secondary education teacher standards and application of the standards for the secondary subsector, reforms in the national examination system, textbook production, and review and revision of the curriculum; and (3) strengthening the accountability framework including development of the human resource management system for teachers, quality of education, and strategic policy on information, communication and technology in education. The 15-member international technical assistance team for this project included four professors from the School of Education: David M. Berman, Donald B. Holsinger, W. James Jacob, and John C. Weidman.