Brazilian Education in General

I've been writing a bit about education lately for a few reasons:

- It is crucial to Brazil's development. As implied in a few posts a while back, such as the one about Professor Rajan's comments and the Financial Times article about the possible end a Lulismo, at some point the easy gains are going to stop. Where does Brazil look for growth after that? Education is one important response. The Brazilian author of the book A Cabeça do Brasileiro also considers superior education to be Brazil's salvation, all of which merits closer study of what is really going on.
- If and when Brazil really becomes a major energy player, the idea is to use some of the wealth to improve healthcare and education in the country, meaning that things are going to keep getting more interesting.
- Education is bad in Brazil in general and extremely bad (compared to the world overall) where I live, in the interior of Bahia.

I plan to continue writing a great deal about Brazilian education going forward, but before diving in too much, I thought I'd take a step back to see where Brazil is in world education.

Here is an article about Brazilian education from the Economist, from back in December. In it, the author notes that the respected PISA examination tested 65 countries in math, reading and science, and Brazil come in 53rd place. And this is regarded as a serious improvement in a country where only a decade ago, most students didn't finish elementary school and most adults were functionally illiterate. So although the situation is pretty grave, at least it's getting better.

Since the article is concise and the numbers are shocking, I'm just going to post the text directly so readers (if you exist!) can see for themselves more or less the state of Brazilian education:

But the recent progress merely upgrades Brazil’s schools from disastrous to very bad. Two-thirds of 15-year-olds are capable of no more than basic arithmetic. Half cannot draw inferences from what they read, or give any scientific explanation for familiar phenomena. In each of reading, mathematics and science only about one child in 100 ranks as a high-performer; in the OECD 9% do. Even private, fee-paying schools are mediocre. Their pupils come from the best-off homes, but they turn out 15-year-olds who do no better than the average child across the OECD.

One reason the poor learn so little is that a big chunk of school spending is wasted. Since teachers retire on full pay after 25 years for women and 30 for men, up to half of schools’ budgets go on pensions. Except in places such as São Paulo state, which has started to take on the unions, teachers can be absent for 40 of the year’s 200 school-days without having their pay docked. More than a tenth of spending goes on pupils who are repeating grades: an astonishing 15% of those graduating from secondary school are over 25.

More recently, UNESCO ranked Brazil at 88th place in the world in education, behind powerhouses such as Bolivia. The low ranking was covered widely in the press.

In the next weeks (and months and years) I'll be considering further why Brazil ranks so low.