Failing Grade
Failing Grade
How well are Latin American students performing compared to their peers in other countries and regions? We really don't know, writes Jeffrey M. Puryear in the Fall 2010 issue of Americas Quarterly.
For decades, presidents and ministers of education have proudly announced they were spending more money, building more schools, hiring more teachers, and enrolling more students, to the applause of poor parents delighted to have their children spend more time in school. But education has improved too slowly in Latin America. Part of the reason is that leaders and the public focus exclusively on a single measure of success: enrollment.
What has gotten lost in the region-wide rush to expand enrollment is that getting kids into school is not enough. The goal of education is to promote learning. Sitting in classrooms is a weak proxy for knowing how to read, do math, and apply science. Latin America needs to worry less about schooling and more about learning.
Common sense—and recent research—suggest that schooling is important only if children learn.
Several studies show a close link between the cognitive skills of a country’s population and its rate of economic growth. Countries that do better on international math and science tests tend to grow faster. High-quality education is also crucial to exercising citizenship in democracies and helps people get ahead even if they were born poor.
Unfortunately, too many Latin American children learn too little. On the most recent Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam, which is administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), all participating Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay) ranked in the bottom third of the 57 countries that participated globally. Roughly half their students scored at or below the lowest proficiency levels in math and science (see Figure 1 for math scores). By contrast, less than 10 percent of students in Finland and around 20 percent of children in other OECD countries scored that low. Even relatively well-off Latin American students generally scored below the OECD mean.
Nor are these results limited to global comparisons. Latin American regional tests, such as the Second Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (SERCE) and other national tests also show low levels of learning across subject areas and grade levels. Far too many Latin American children are clearly not acquiring the skills they need to do well in today’s world.
Access the full article at americasquarterly.org.
Jeffrey M. Puryear is vice president for social policy at the Inter-American Dialogue. He codirects the Dialogue’s education program, the Partnership for Educational Revitalization in the Americas (PREAL).
Tamara Ortega Goodspeed is a senior associate at the Inter-American Dialogue where she manages the national and regional report card efforts for PREAL.
