A Points System to Improve Schools: Bogotá's Experience Could Inspire Latin America

There was a time when letters poured into Bogotá's Secretariat of Education for a very specific reason: the whiteboards in classrooms had reached the end of their useful life and had become so worn and shiny that students could no longer see what teachers wrote on them. It wasn't an isolated case. It was a symptom of a much bigger problem: those allocating resources had no clear picture of what each public school actually needed, and principals who needed supplies for their schools had no idea how those decisions were made.

That problem, common to most education systems that manage hundreds of schools, follows an inefficient logic. If a school asks for supplies knowing it won't get everything it requests, it may be tempted to inflate its lists in hopes of a better outcome. If the Secretariat plans centrally without asking the school, it ends up sending things nobody asked for while real needs go unmet. And amid that lack of coordination, the principal who tends to come out ahead isn't the one who needs the most, but the one who insists the most — the one who has the time and proximity to go to the supplies office and wait in line for their school. The principal who is far away, or who simply has no way to make that kind of case, is left behind.

How SIDRE Uses a Points System to Allocate School Resources

To fix this, Bogotá's District Secretariat of Education, in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), designed the Educational Resource Information System (SIDRE): a platform where each district educational institution (IED) can plan ahead for what it needs, instead of improvising when an opportunity comes along.

The logic is simple to understand and easy to put into practice. Each school receives a number of points — the equivalent of its available budget — and every item in the catalog has an assigned score. A pencil, for example, is worth 10 points. The principal or their delegate selects what the school needs, like filling a shopping cart, until the assigned points run out. Requests must also be validated with a document signed by the school's Governing Council, which includes teachers, students, parents, and alumni, so the decision doesn't rest on a single person.

Points aren't handed out at random. They depend on the school's enrollment, its Adequate Supply Index (InAD) — which measures the condition of school furniture on a scale from 0 to 1, and which averaged 0.72 across Bogotá in 2024 — and good management practices. The more worn a school's supplies are, the more points it receives. The system also sets limits by category, so a principal can't spend an entire budget on, say, an interactive screen while leaving the rest of the school's basic needs unresolved.

The principal of the María Montessori District Higher Normal School in Bogotá, Andrés Hortúa Clavijo, and Alejandro Cáceres Monroy, Director of School Supplies at the Bogotá Secretariat of Education, agree on what it was like to request supplies before SIDRE and what changed with the platform. One of them summarizes it this way:

Before, the principal who secured the most resources was not the one who needed them the most, but the one who did the most ‘lobbying’ at the Secretariat. With the points-based system, all principals are on an equal footing, and anyone can check how many points they have and what they can use them for.

They say that this visibility is what gives the process legitimacy: no one can claim that their school received nothing because they lacked the right connections.

Another effect, less obvious but just as important, comes from pooling demand across the whole city. It's no longer a matter of buying ten desks for one school, but more than 22,000 furniture items for the entire system — which makes it possible to negotiate better prices and use the budget more efficiently.

SIDRE’s Results: Participation, Resource Allocation, and Efficiency 

Since 2023, using SIDRE has been mandatory for the more than 400 IED in Bogotá. In 2024, more than 99% of those institutions took part in the request process; fewer than five were left out because they did not submit requests. That same year, the Secretariat allocated 50% of available points to furniture, 25% to computers, and the remaining 25% to other items, as part of a supply strategy with clear priorities.

The IDB report documenting this experience identifies four direct benefits of the system:  

• Adequacy: supplies now respond to real needs rather than to whatever someone decides to send.
• Equity:  resources are directed toward schools with the widest gaps, thanks to the InAD.
• Efficiency: pooling demand allows for more timely and cost-effective procurement.
• Transparency: every request can be traced from registration to delivery.  

There are also less visible but equally important indirect benefits: greater shared responsibility between the Secretariat and schools, stronger school governance thanks to Governing Council validation, and a more analytical approach to how investment in school supplies affects learning conditions.

Why SIDRE Is Considered a Smart Spending Model in Education 

This experience isn't an isolated case within the IDB. It's cited as a model in the publication Smart Spending in Education in Latin America and the Caribbean, which examines how countries in the region can get more value out of every dollar they invest in education. The report points to SIDRE as an example of how to simplify public procurement processes without sacrificing transparency — something many education systems struggle with: out of fear that a purchase might be questioned in an audit, they end up buying what's "safe" instead of what's actually needed.

That same publication proposes a framework of four principles for thinking about education financing, adequacy, equity, efficiency, and transparency, and Bogotá's case touches all four at once: supplies that respond to real needs, points that favor schools with the widest gaps, pooled purchases that lower costs, and a process anyone can trace from start to finish. In that sense, it's a concrete example of smart spending that other cities and countries in the region can look to closely.

Can Other Cities Replicate Bogotá's School Resource Management Model?

Colombia has 32 departments and more than 1,100 municipalities, organized into Certified Territorial Education Entities (ETC). Most face versions of the same problem Bogotá had before SIDRE: requests arriving by email, physical memos, or in-person visits; Excel files that pile up with no order or hierarchy; and purchasing decisions based on what a school authority asked for who may no longer even hold that position.

So far, though, only Bogotá has implemented a system like this. The IDB report notes that replicating it requires certain conditions that not every ETC has in place: budget specifically earmarked for supplies, technical teams capable of managing the platform and validating requests, a catalog of goods with reference prices adapted to each territory, and regulatory backing that gives the process stability beyond changes in administration. 

In Bogotá, in fact, SIDRE's development continued across two different district administrations, reflecting an institutional decision to sustain the system beyond political cycles.

SIDRE's design — a standardized catalog, a points system instead of cash, digital traceability — was built from the outset to be adaptable to other territories and countries. Using points instead of transferring money directly to schools, for instance, avoids the tensions that often come with handling financial resources at the school level and makes it easier to plan from a central level.

In the end, what Bogotá's case shows isn't just a well-built piece of technology, but a fundamental question for any education system: who decides what a school needs, and based on what criteria? When that decision is made without data or clear rules, budgets tend to get divided the politically easiest way — a little for everyone — even if that means losing economies of scale and leaving the most urgent needs unresolved. SIDRE shows that it's possible to plan in a centralized and, at the same time, participatory way, without one coming at the expense of the other.