Opinion – Marcos Mendes: Quality of education

In the last column I argued that for decades Brazil preferred to subsidize companies rather than invest in people’s education. And, when investment in education grew, it was ineffective, with little capacity to increase learning and work productivity.

The typical challenge to this argument is that public spending on education would still be low. It is common to hear that “Brazil still invests a third of what OECD nations do in their basic education students. That’s around US$3,400 per student compared to around US$10,000 a year.”

This is not a proper comparison. We are poorer than the average for OECD countries. Poor governments spend less than rich ones, whether on education or any other public policy.

The correct comparison is spending per student as a proportion of GDP per capita. In this statistic we spend the same as the OECD average on primary education and 25% more than the world average.

On the OECD website, we can see that, among 44 countries of different income levels, Brazil is the 4th with the highest share of educational expenditure in total public expenditure. For our level of income, we already make a great effort to finance public education.

The answer to these numbers is usually that our GDP per capita is low and, therefore, even a high expenditure in proportion to GDP would not represent a value in reais per student sufficient to provide quality education. Furthermore, children from poor families would have worse conditions for learning, requiring additional investment.

However, there is evidence that poverty has not been an insurmountable barrier to learning in Brazil. Municipal schools in poor localities, with investment per student below the national average, have consistently achieved much higher results than the average.

Ricardo Paes de Barros shows, for example, that Panelas (CE), 256th in the ranking of the Municipal Human Development Index (HDI-M), obtained one of the highest scores in the country in the IDEB in 2017, investing less than R$ 5 thousand / year per student in 2016. It rivaled Águas de São Pedro (SP), 2nd place nationally in the HDI-M, which had spent BRL 8,500/year per student.

This is not an unusual situation. There is great dispersion in the relationship between expenditure per student and the result in proficiency exams. State governments that coordinate and encourage the improvement of municipal education management have many municipalities with positive results, even if they are poor and spend less per student.

Another usual argument is that the increase in investment in education in Brazil is very recent and, therefore, there would not have been time for the learning gains to be reflected in the productivity of workers. But education has been a budgetary priority since the 1990s. In these three decades, many students benefiting from higher spending have already entered the job market.

Furthermore, this argument would make sense if the increase in spending was being accompanied by an improvement in student performance, which would lead us to expect that, at some point, higher school proficiency would turn into higher productivity, as commonly observed in other countries. However, once again using data from Paes de Barros, between 2005 and 2015 public spending per student increased by 15% a year above inflation, but the math proficiency of public school students at the end of high school remained stagnant.

Given that we already make a great financial effort, the priority should be to invest in practices that have already shown that they generate more learning per dollar invested. Its implementation, however, requires that interests and accommodations be broken.

There is resistance to measures such as: periodic evaluations and awards to teachers, managers and municipalities with the best performance; dismissal of the worst teachers; pragmatic teacher training, focusing on teaching methods; depoliticization of the choice of school principals; increase in the effective time of classes; standardized curriculum and teaching materials; and private provision financed by public resources.

Improving education requires political effort to make these guidelines viable.