Opinion – Michael França: The education of blacks

In Brazil, if white students took almost two years of vacation and then went back to school, they would still be ahead of blacks. This statement represents a way, perhaps more impacting than what we are used to seeing in the media, of describing the result of PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment).

The program represents a way of measuring student performance and allows for several comparisons to be made with the results. With regard to the racial issue, in 2018, the difference in scores reached between white and black Brazilian students corresponded to about two years of schooling.

With the pandemic, this scenario has worsened. While a portion of whites managed to keep their studies at a distance, low-income blacks had almost a kind of forced vacation. Those who were already being left behind were practically abandoned by public authorities in Brazil.

However, there is some good news regarding educational inequality in the country. Although there are considerable disparities in school performance, the gap between the average years of schooling of whites and blacks has narrowed over time. In addition, there have been important advances in the democratization of access to higher education, and several initiatives aimed at reducing racial inequalities in Brazilian education have emerged.

Law 10,639, for example, made it mandatory to study the history of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian culture in primary and secondary education. Intrinsic to the law is the idea that rescuing the culture and contributions of Indians and blacks in the formation of the country can reduce the reproduction of prejudice and, at the same time, improve school performance.

In 2017, a study carried out with data from high schools in the city of San Francisco, USA, provided evidence in this direction. Thomas Dee and Emily Penner found that the introduction of an ethnic studies curriculum increased student attendance by 21 percentage points, grade point average by 1.4 points, and credit scores by 23.

However, in the Brazilian case, law 10,639 represents another one of those that ended up only on paper. It is not considered a priority by many public managers and there is a lack of access to information on the subject. Thus, few schools took any action.

Despite this, we have recently witnessed a series of anti-racist initiatives being implemented in schools and in society as a whole. This is a reflection of the important change in Brazilian society’s awareness of the challenges linked to the racial agenda. However, only good intention is not enough to solve our problems.

A good example comes from sport. In an experiment carried out by Robert Dur, Carlos Gomez-Gonzalez and Cornel Nesseler together with the Norwegian Football Federation, an email was sent to a group of coaches highlighting the importance of football in reducing racism.

Surprisingly, the effect was in the opposite direction to what was expected, that is, the coaches who received the information began to discriminate more.

Thus, this result reinforces the need to carry out more experiments and evaluate existing programs to discover which initiatives are effective in reducing discrimination and educational inequality and, thus, offering greater returns to society.

This text was written jointly with researcher Alysson Portella, a partner in a series of studies that I have carried out within the scope of Insper’s Nucleus of Racial Studies. In addition, the column is a tribute to the song “The Miseducation” by Lauryn Hill.