Over the past two decades, the education system in Brazil has had its ups and downs. Overall and again, the policies are doing everything wrong. But there are exceptions: A small town in one of the poorest regions of the country achieves education levels comparable to those of rich nations.

The rise and fall of education in Brazil

Back in 2009, The Economist said Brazil was “no longer bottom of the class,” an allusion to the country’s educational progress as measured by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Tested in reading, math and science, the 15-year-old Brazilian students performed much better than in previous years. The improvement was enough to impress the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which chose Brazil as its case study – an emerging success.

However, the next decade would dampen enthusiasm, as the results of PISA 2019 class Brazil 53rd out of 65 nations. According to world Bank, at the current rate, Brazil “will not reach the average score of countries rich in mathematics before 75 years. In reading, it will take more than 260 years. What happened to education in Brazil? Why has its quality stagnated? What can policy makers do to get it back on track?

When (almost) everything goes wrong

Evaluating Brazil’s education system, one could say that the country is doing (almost) everything wrong, including, but not exclusively, focusing too much on education spending, prioritizing quantity (over quality) and investing too much. little in teachers – precisely what matters most.

For starters, more money is often presented as a solution to a plethora of problems. It happens that Brazil is spending about 6 percent of its gross domestic product goes to education each year, more than its neighbors – Colombia (4.7 percent), Chile (4.8 percent) and Argentina (5.3 percent ) – and even the (rich) OECD countries (5.5 percent on average).

Such additional spending on education has not translated into more learning; it actually produced inefficiency. Surprisingly, Brazil is reported spend 62% more than necessary to achieve the same results and could improve its performance (in terms of pass rate and student success) by 40% with the same level of spending.

The problem may be how the money is invested. Over the past two decades, Brazil increased considerably the number of students in the school; the share of 18-24 year olds in University has also doubled to 43%, which is good for students in the poorest half of the population, which has gone from 16% to 25% of the total. However, quality has not caught up with the increase in registrations, and quantity alone is misleading. As Lant Pritchett says, “Keeping children ‘at school’ is just one means at most fundamental Goals to create skills and learning outcomes.

In fact, not only in Brazil but in other developing countries, if in the past access to education was the problem, now the learning deficit becomes the big challenge – “to reach education for all (rather than learn for all) will be an important but hollow achievement. Why is that? Researchers have shown that improving income, productivity and well-being strongly associated with learning, but only moderately associated with years of schooling.

That investment and access to education is not the explanation, then the poor results can be explained by the quality of teachers. Indeed, studies indicate that human resources rather than school materials and physical structure are the most important part of the learning equation, suggesting that teachers are a key determinant of the quality of the school.

This is worrying because the education system in Brazil is characterized by the low quality of its teachers. However, the low pupil-teacher ratios, i.e. a greater number of pupils per teacher, another characteristic of the Brazilian system, are known to lead to low level of education. Thus, before throwing all the blame on teachers, “structural barriers, such as strong teacher unions, low teaching standards, poor national coordination and a significant split between public and private education” must also be taken into account.

And then it is about politics. Over the years, Brazil has enacted laws that make student failure almost impossible. Even though students did not learn enough to move up to the next level, legislative reforms that implemented the so-called “continuous progression”Will ensure that they move on and end up finishing their studies, even if they haven’t learned anything at all. In the eyes of statistics, this means academic success. The problem is that abilities, skills and test scores are insensitive to degrees. Unsurprisingly, even though more than half of Brazilian adolescents complete high school, functional illiteracy still rages above 70 percent.

Brazil that works

Despite the gloomy picture, all is not lost. Ceará, one of the poorest states in Brazil, has improved its education much faster than the rest of the country. How to come? First, more school hours – by extending the daily class hours from four (standard in Latin America) to seven. Next, invest in teachers.

Randomized control experience carried out in the state has shown that teachers can improve their performance when observed and then receive feedback from expert coaches. This has led to encouraging increases in student test scores – a standard deviation of 0.13 to 0.23 in a single year of the program. And what is better, as the support was provided by Skype, the cost per student was kept at $ 2.40, making the intervention very cost effective compared to other teacher training programs adopted in the developing countries, and a promising strategy for the whole school’s efforts to improve the quality of teachers.

Even more remarkable is Sobral’s case. Now everyone wants to know how this tiny town in Ceará, in just over a decade, has done with the quality of its education. skyrockets, moving from the lowest-ranked cities to the richest cities, reaching levels comparable to those of world-class education systems. Recently, before COVID-19 hit the country, the municipality was visited by a World Bank delegation, who tried to figure out what’s going on there.

Well, there is no quick fix, the “mysterious case of Sobral” confirms that this is an effective use of student assessment – fair but demanding written and oral assessments; a program with a clear learning sequence, emphasizing fundamental skills; prepared and motivated teachers; autonomous and responsible school directors, appointed by technical selection (not politically). It doesn’t sound that difficult, does it? In the real world, it’s …

There is still hope for education in Brazil, but policymakers – not only in Ceará and Sobral, but across the country – must start doing the right thing.