Education too important to be left in government hands

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Education too important to be left in government hands


BY ANDRES OPPENHEIMER - MIAMIHERALD

When I asked Harvard University's international education expert Fernando Reimers in which Latin American country does he see the most progress in improving education standards, he responded without hesitation: ``Brazil.''

``Brazil?'' I asked, surprised by his answer. I found it hard to believe that Reimers, the head of Harvard's International Education Policy Program, would find Brazil to be a model on the education front.

While Brazil invests twice what most other Latin American countries spend on science and technology -- nearly 1.5 percent of its gross national product annually, according to the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) -- and Brazilian universities produce a Latin American record of 30,000 graduates with master's degrees and 10,000 with doctorate degrees every year, Brazil's overall education statistics are generally poor even by regional standards.

According to official figures, 10 percent of Brazil's population is still illiterate, only 44 percent of youngsters age 19 finish high school, and only 12 percent of youths go to college. What's more, Brazilian students rank 53rd among those of 57 countries in the standardized PISA tests in sciences and math, and there was no Brazilian university in the 2009 ranking of the world's best 200 Universities of the United Kingdom-based Times Higher Education Supplement.

``What's so impressive about Brazil on the education front?'' I asked Reimers. ``Brazil is the country with the biggest innovation potential in education over the next 10 years. In Brazil, they have created a partnership called Todos Pela Educacao , or All for Education, which is a major novelty in Latin America. It's a coalition led by business people, which has decided that education is something too important to be left exclusively in the hands of the government,'' he responded.

Indeed, Brazilian business leaders have concluded that the answer to the region's education problems is not likely to come from governments -- or from politicians -- but from civil society.

Governments don't make long-term investments in improving the quality of education because they need short-term results, which can be shown in time for the next elections. So governments tend to invest in brick-and-mortar things such as school buildings, roads and bridges, which can be ready in two or three years, rather than in training for teachers and principals, which are investments that often render concrete results in the classroom in as long as a decade.

Digging deeper into the Brazilian pro-education movement, I found that Brazil's civil society has been more pro-active than that of other countries in the region. Contrary to what happens in most other countries, where the biggest industrialists each have their own education foundations that rarely interact with one another, Brazil's biggest business tycoons got together in 2007 and formed a coalition with a set of common goals.

The new group, All for Education, was founded among others by the presidents of the DPaschoal car parts chain, the Gerdau Group and major banks Itaú, Bradesco and Santander. With the help of top Brazilian and U.S. education experts, it came up with five concrete goals to be achieved by 2022, the bicentennial of Brazil's independence, and with ways to monitor progress on each of those goals annually.

Once it had defined its five goals -- including that all Brazilian children remain in school until age 17 -- the group recruited the owners of Brazil's biggest media chains, leading journalists, academics and artists to launch a campaign to convince parents of the need to give their children a better education. The campaign was aimed both at raising consciousness among parents, and pressing the government to meet the group's five goals.

Luis Norberto Pascoal, president of DPaschoal, told me that All for Education has enlisted the country's major television networks and about 5,000 radio stations, which regularly air glitzy All for Education ads that often include well-known Brazilian singers and other artists.

``One of our first challenges was to convince the media,'' Pascoal said. ``I met with several newspaper and TV network editors and at first they were skeptical. But we convinced them that education is the only way to make our country grow. . . . After a while, they all ended up supporting us. I can't think of any of Brazil's mass media that is not collaborating with us.''

He added, ``Education has become a priority: You can see it everywhere, in the newspapers, on television, in what politicians talk about.''

And judging from the results, the campaign worked. A poll by CNO/IBOPE in late 2009 showed that the quality of education had become the second biggest concern of Brazilians, after crime. Earlier in the decade, education had scored below seventh place among Brazilians' biggest concerns on most years.

Not surprisingly, the government reacted to the public pressure, and quickly adopted the All for Education's five-point mission statement. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva presented a virtually identical program as his government's own creation, and set a date of 2021 -- one year ahead of All for Education's -- for Brazil to complete it.

``These civil society movements are a positive thing,'' Education Minister Fernando Haddad told me, stressing the importance of All for Education's media campaign to raise consciousness about education among parents. ``Studies show that parents account for 70 percent of the success of teaching, so raising social consciousness about the importance of education is critical.''

While completing a book on the most interesting innovations in education, science and technology around the world over the past five years, I found a similar pro-education civil society movement in Israel, called Hakol Hinuch , or It's All About Education. Its founder, retired textile tycoon Dov Lautman, told me that while Israel is the country that invests the most in research and development, and has some of the world's best universities, the country's elementary and high school education levels are plummeting.

Like its Brazilian counterpart, the Israeli nongovernment group has set five concrete goals to improve education standards, and has enlisted business people, well-known artists and soccer players to help spread its message.

``We take advantage of our members' celebrity status to be constantly in the media,'' Lautman said. ``We have set very concrete goals, with clearly defined deadlines, and we are constantly in the media putting pressure on the government to meet them. And when the government doesn't, we unleash our entire media artillery on the government.''

Judging from what's happening in countries as diverse as Brazil and Israel, business leaders, journalists and academics are concluding that unless they form coalitions to press their governments to make long-term investments in teacher training and other reforms to raise their countries' education standards, nothing will happen.

Increasingly, people are realizing that education is the key to their personal, family and national future. As we're seeing in Brazil and Israel, they should begin to do something about it.

Latin America in denial about the quality of its schools

Latin America in denial about the quality of its schools

BY ANDRES OPPENHEIMER - MIAMIHERALD

When I asked Bill Gates in an interview what he thought about Latin Americans' widespread belief that the region has some of the best universities and scientific research centers in the world, the founder of Microsoft looked at me bewildered. Do they seriously believe that?, he asked.

If Latin Americans are satisfied with their public education systems -- as a hemisphere-wide 2008 Gallup/Inter-American Development Bank poll shows -- the region has a problem. The key secret for countries' development is to be humble, and to worry about ones' shortcomings, as China and India are currently doing, he said.

``The way to start is by feeling bad. With humility,'' Gates said. ``The best thing that happened to the United States was that we thought that Japan was going to kill us. It was stupid, it was wrong, it was nonsense, but in the 1980s, the humility that we had as a country helped us work harder and get our act together.''

Judging from Gates' words, Latin America would benefit from a dose of humility about its education, science, technology and innovation systems. According to the Gallup/Inter-American Bank poll, Latin Americans are much more satisfied with their education systems than people in the United States, Germany, or Japan, even if Latin American countries rank near the bottom in international student test scores.

While 85 percent of Costa Ricans, 84 percent of Venezuelans, 80 percent of Nicaraguans, and more than 72 percent of Colombians, Bolivians, Uruguayans, Paraguayans, Salvadorans and Hondurans are happy with their countries' public education systems, the same is only true for 66 percent of the people in Germany, and 67 percent in the United States, the survey says.

Meantime, despite great progress in literacy rates and school attendance in recent decades, the quality of education in the region is poor. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's world-wide PISA test measuring the proficiency of 15-year-old youths in math, language and sciences, Latin American students get much lower scores than their counterparts almost everywhere else.

TELLTALE NUMBERS

In the math test, while students averaged 550 points in Hong Kong, China, 542 in South Korea and 483 in the United States, students from Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Peru scored around 400 points, and those of several other Latin American countries in the 300s.

At the higher education, research and development level, the region's performance is often even worse. Consider the following facts:

• There is not one single Latin American university among the world's best-ranked 100 higher education institutions, according to the 2009-2010 Times Higher Education Supplement's World University Rankings. Likewise, a similar ranking by China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University does not place any Latin American university among the world's best 100.

Both rankings include several universities from Singapore, China, India, South Korea, Malaysia, Israel, and New Zealand among the world's best. If one takes into account that Brazil and Mexico are among the world's 12 largest economies, they should long have placed at least some of their universities among the world's 100 best.

• Of all the funds invested in research and development worldwide, less than 2 percent is spent in Latin America, according to Ibero-American Science and Technology Observatory (RICYT). Comparatively, nearly 30 percent of the world pool of R & D funds are being spent in Asian countries, it says.

CHINA VS. BRAZIL

While China invests 1.4 percent of its Gross Domestic Product in research and development -- much of which comes from private sector firms -- Brazil invests only 0.9 percent, Argentina 0.6 percent, Mexico 0.4 percent and Colombia and Peru 0.1 percent, respectively.

• While Asian universities are producing tens of thousands of patents that generate a huge income in royalties for themselves and for their countries, Latin America's universities are barely producing any patents. Mexico's UNAM, one of the region's universities with the most international patents, registered only four patents in the United States, while Argentina's UBA registered none.

This helps explain why a relatively small Asian country such as South Korea, which only 50 years ago was much poorer than most Latin American countries, registers 80,000 patents a year internationally, compared with fewer than 600 patents registered by Brazil, about 300 from Mexico, and 80 from Argentina, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization.

• Only 27 percent of college-age Latin American youth are enrolled in higher education institutions, compared with 69 percent of their peers in industrialized countries, according to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) figures.

• Of those Latin Americans who are in college, most study social sciences. While the global economy demands growing numbers of engineers, scientists and technicians, 57 percent of Latin American college students are pursuing degrees in social sciences, while only 16 percent are studying engineering or technology, according to the Madrid, Spain-based Ibero-American States Organization.

At Argentina's state-run University of Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina's largest, there are 29,000 psychology students, and 8,000 engineering students -- which means the country is preparing the equivalent of three psychologists to take care of the mental problems of each engineer. At the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico's largest state-run university, there are three times more students pursuing degrees in history than in computer sciences.

REASONS FOR HOPE

Chinese universities accept 1.2 million engineering students a year, compared with 16,000 history students.

Is Latin America's education situation hopeless? Not at all. During my research over the past five years, I have found several bright spots, which could help some countries achieve high educational standards sooner than many expect.

Chile is beginning to use a recently created $6 billion fund from copper exports to grant 6,500 post-graduate scholarships abroad, which will allow Chilean college graduates to pursue their masters' and doctoral degrees -- mostly in sciences and engineering -- in the best U.S., Canadian, and European universities.

Brazil's universities are awarding 10,000 Ph.D.s annually, dwarfing the number of doctoral graduates in other Latin American countries, and the government has announced it will increase its investments in science, technology and innovation to 1.5 percent of the country's GDP. Brazil is already making inroads worldwide in some high-tech industries, with companies such as the aircraft manufacturer Embraer.

Uruguay recently became the world's first country to give one laptop per child to all students in public schools. With most of these Internet-connected computers in place, even in the most remote places of the country, Uruguay is creating a new generation of digitally savvy children who are significantly increasing their skills.

The list of exciting things that are happening on Latin America's education front is much wider. In addition, judging from what we have seen in the rags to riches stories of countries such as Singapore and South Korea, we now know that countries can improve their education systems and create highly skilled professional classes in relatively short periods of time.

But the first step, as Gates said, should be accepting the sobering reality that the region is being increasingly left behind in the world-wide race for high education standards and competitive work forces. Then, as I found in my reporting trips to several Asian countries, there are many practical things that Latin American families could do -- and American families, too -- to help improve the quality of education in their countries, and in their homes.

Humbleness and a greater family focus on the quality of their children's learning process would help put education at the center of countries' political agendas. That would make the region more competitive in the global economy, and help it to dramatically reduce poverty.

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