IDG/Public Policy Lecture Series: Shelly Culbertson - Education of Syrian Refugee Children

About
The International Develoment Group, Education Policy Group, and the Public Policy & Management Program are proud to bring Shelly Culbertson to Heinz College.  Ms. Culbertson will present on her recently co-authorized report, entitled "Education of Syrian Refugees: Managing the Crisis in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan".  The report can be downloaded here. 

With four million Syrian refugees as of September 2015, there is urgent need to develop both short-term and long-term approaches to providing education for the children of this population. This report reviews Syrian refugee education for children in the three neighboring countries with the largest population of refugees — Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan — and analyzes four areas: access, management, society, and quality. Policy implications include prioritizing the urgent need to increase access to education among refugees; transitioning from a short-term humanitarian response to a longer-term development response; investing in both government capacity to provide education and in formal, quality alternatives to the public school systems; improving data in support of decisionmaking; developing a deliberative strategy about how to integrate or separate Syrian and host-country children in schools to promote social cohesion; limiting child labor and enabling education by creating employment policies for adults; and implementing particular steps to improve quality of education for both refugees and citizens.

Lunch will be served for those who RSVP.

About the Speaker
Shelly Culbertson is a policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. Her research focus includes international development, education, innovation policy, and the Middle East. She is currently conducting research about urban services and education for Syrian refugees in Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon. She is also co-leading a multi-year effort to advise the Ministry of Education of the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq on improving its K-12 and vocational education systems. She coordinated RAND's project to design programs for the Qatar National Research Fund, which has supported over $620 million in research grants. Prior to RAND, she worked at the U.S. State Department on the Turkey Desk, and at LMI Government Consulting, conducting analysis about international trade. She has written OpEds for CNN.com, U.S. News and World Report, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and other news outlets. She received a B.S. in mathematics and political science from the University of Pittsburgh and a master's degree from the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.