Assistance to Basic Education – All Children Reading (ABE-ACR)Worldwide, 2014-2019

The purpose of ABE-ACR is to provide technical assistance and services to:

• improve student reading in the primary grades, particularly Grades 1 to 3,
• improve teacher effectiveness,
• strengthen student assessment at different levels of the education system,
• increase the quality, availability and use of reading materials, and
• strengthen classroom and school management, among other reading-related activities.

To meet these objectives ABE-ACR will strengthen host country education systems and other delivery mechanisms to improve instructional approaches, train and support teachers, and provide other services required to improve student reading, such as monitoring and evaluation and applied research.

Under ABE-ACR, technical assistance will target USAID Mission and Bureau objectives in support of Goal One of USAID’s Education Strategy 2011-2015: Improved reading skills for 100 million children in primary grades by 2015. The focus of Goal One – which is to improve education quality as measured by student learning outcomes during the primary grades – is an explicit policy choice made in response to evidence demonstrating that years of investment by governments, USAID and other donors have not succeeded in producing acceptable levels of student learning outcomes. The Strategy notes that “effective reading is a necessary precondition for skill development in all other areas and, as such, is the primary target by which [USAID] will hold [itself] accountable for results in basic education.”

Thus, the goal of ABE-ACR is to assist Missions and Bureaus, in collaboration with governments, civil society, the private sector and other donors, to produce significant and reliably-measured improvements in student reading outcomes for the largest possible number of children attending primary school. In support of the USAID Education Strategy and working within the strategic framework of USAID Missions and Bureaus, the objectives of ABE-ACR are to:

• Provide access to technical expertise and implementation support including design, delivery, and monitoring and evaluation services to improve student learning outcomes
  in primary grade reading

• Allow regional bureaus to provide assistance to USAID programs in countries where there are minimal or no U.S. direct hire staff

• Provide research on ‘what works’ at affordable costs to improve primary grade reading.

To achieve these objectives, the ABE-ACR may produce the following outputs. All technical assistance will be structured with a focus on building national capacity to conduct these activities:

• Long-term in-country coordination and implementation of activities to strengthen systems to improve learning outcomes, especially during the first years of schooling but also throughout the primary grades

• Short-term technical assistance and training for assessment, project design, implementation, data collection, sampling, monitoring and evaluation

• Measurement innovation, test design, psychometric analysis, data and results reporting to support improving learning outcomes

• Applied research related to ‘what works’ to improve learning in different contexts and at affordable costs, including ‘just in time’ action research related to on-going program or project implementation

• Performance monitoring and performance and impact evaluation

• Provision of content for training courseware for development professionals

• Information dissemination and sharing nationally and internationally through internet, seminars, workshops, working papers and/or other media