Peru

Oversight of Peruvian education is the responsibility of the Ministry of Education and Culture, which is based in Lima. The Ministry's mission is to provide education through the nation's public schools and to provide oversight to private schools and those under the jurisdiction of other agencies. This mission comprises two major responsibilities: the development of standards and curricula for all schools and the direct administration of those schools under the ministry's jurisdiction. While educational policy created in Lima is in force across the entire country, each of the nation's regions or departments maintains its own budget authority and directs its own administration to provide primary, secondary, and technical education to its students. The Ministry of Education is headed by an appointed minister. Beneath the minister are two vice-ministers. The vice-minister of educational management oversees national directors for initial (preprimary) and primary education, secondary and technical education, teacher training, and adult education and literacy. The vice-minister of institutional management oversees offices of educational quality, administrative support, educational infrastructure, and international cooperation. Universities do not fall under the direct control of the Ministry of Education. Each university and other institution of higher education (excluding the teacher training institutions) retains considerable autonomy within the context of the series of laws controlling higher education. The universities coordinate through but do not yield control to a representative body, the Asemblea Nacional de Rectores (Rectors National Assembly), which is composed of the rectors from all the member universities. This group serves to coordinate university activities, as well as to oversee and facilitate their economic development.

The national constitution dictates that education should receive no less than 20 percent of the overall government budget. National educational expenditures have varied considerably under the various administrations of recent decades. As a percentage of GNP, education expenditures amounted to 3.82 percent in 1970, but had fallen to 2.93 percent in 1980 and 2.21 percent by 1989. In 1997 dollars, total expenditures between 1968 and 1990 ranged from a high of more than $1.5 billion in 1987 to a low of $750 million in 1990, the year in which Alberto Fujimori took office. Under Fujimori's administration, the trend in education budgets was dramatically positive, reaching more than $1.8 billion dollars by the end of the decade—a figure that represented a $255 expenditure per student, an increase in real dollars of 39 percent over the early 1990s. Perhaps more significantly, capital expenditures during the 1990s averaged 12.6 percent of the overall budget, dramatically outstripping the 3 to 5 percent capital outlays of previous decades. Even during budgetary crises during the mid-1990s when the overall budget declined slightly, capital investment continued strongly. Of the 87.4 percent of the budget dedicated to current expenditures, 45 percent went to primary education, 28 percent to secondary, 15 percent to universities, 8 percent to preprimary, and 3 percent to non-university higher education.